Courtesy Bad Science Jokes:
A guy goes to a psychiatrist.
“Doc, I keep having these alternating, recurring dreams. First I’m a teepee; then I’m a wigwam; then I’m a teepee; then I’m a wigwam. It’s driving me crazy. What’s wrong with me?“
The doctor replies:
“It’s very simple. You’re two tents.”
My reactions to the Republican National Convention have been pretty evenly divided between these two videos:
And just think — if trends continue, and they don’t somehow win with this shitshow this year, in 2020 they’ll come back even crazier.
UPDATE: I wrote this post before I read the leaked text of Trump’s acceptance speech, and jee-sus, that is some messed up shit. That speech may be the single most twisted thing I’ve ever read, full of half-truths, twisted facts, and outright lies all used in service of maintaining the notion that white Americans should be cowering beneath their beds in the face of the dystopic hellscape this country has become.
I thought Atlas Shrugged was the most twisted thing I’d ever read, but whoever wrote this speech has topped it. My prayer now is that this election represents the death-throes of a particularly ugly strain of thinking on the American right, and after this they’ll start swinging back toward rationality and reality again. A country cannot prosper when so many of its people think like this.
I was looking for some music to post on Facebook for SamuraiFrog’s fortieth birthday (go say hello to him!), and I found this quite by accident. And what a happy accident it is! Here is the United States Marine Band performing selections from John Williams’s score to The Force Awakens. It’s a five-selection playlist, so make sure the whole thing plays. I’ve had trouble posting embedded playlists from time to time.
Sometimes real life hands you stories, almost fully-formed, and all you have to do is write them down. It’s like taking dictation. This happens, but it doesn’t happen very often, at least not for me. That’s kind of par for the course, when your genres are space opera and fantasy. Real life can’t give me too many stories about space wars or lost princesses. At least not yet, anyway.
But real life does give me a lot of storybits. What are storybits? They’re simply that: bits that can either be the basis for stories, or can serve as parts of stories. You never know where you might end up using a storybit, which is why you, as a writer, simply MUST make it part of your daily routine to recognize storybits and file them away for future reference. You don’t have to use all of your storybits, but the more you have, the easier it will be to do cool stuff in your stories!
Here are some times when I’ve used storybits.
ONE: Years ago, I worked in restaurant management, and one place I worked was a Bob Evans in Jamestown, NY. We had a regular customer named Karl, who was an older gentleman, probably in his late 60s or early 70s. (This was in 1998 or so.) Karl drove a nicely used pickup truck, but he was always very well-dressed when he came in to eat, always by himself. He had a handsome smile, but he was always quiet and always showed up, read the paper while he waited and while he ate, and then he would quietly leave, paying his bill and bidding us all goodbye with a genial nod of his head.
Then one day one of my servers informed me of the headcanon that she and the other servers had cooked up for Karl. I asked what his story was, and if anyone knew anything about him. No one did, so they had all concluded that Karl was one of the Nazi genius scientists that we brought over to the United States after World War II and gave a new identity in exchange for his research on nuclear power or rocketry or whatever.
Karl went on to feature as the creepy antiques dealer in my story “In Longhand” (available on Wattpad!). It’s one of very few times I ever put someone I knew from real life directly into a story, but even there it wasn’t much of a roman a clef. I didn’t know Karl at all other than his visits to Bob Evans, and I never even learned his last name. But he lives in a little in that story.
TWO: This happened in the last year! I thought I took photos, but I can’t find them, so I’m not sure when exactly it happened. My day job is in a large grocery store in a Buffalo suburb, and the Store is located on a heavily-traveled street. Near the front corner of our building, by the street, there is a large steel grate, through which water runs into the storm drainage system for the town. I never thought much about this grate (it’s big, about three feet square), until one day when I saw a bunch of cops standing around it. There were three or four squad cars all in our parking lot, clustered right by that corner near the grate, and then a big police van pulled up on the street, with two other squad cars pulling up in front and behind, to block off the right lane. I naturally wondered what was going on, but I couldn’t get close enough to see. However, I have access to my building’s roof, so up I went!
Looking down on this scene, I was able to clearly see that the cops had lifted the grate, exposing the drop into the sewer system below. I couldn’t see from that vantage point how far down it went, but there was a cop in a wet suit standing nearby, and they were lowering a ladder into the drain. Soon, the wet-suit cop went down. I didn’t stick around for him coming back up, but he soon did, and the cops put the grate back in place and then they dispersed.
I later learned that some people had called the police from the neighborhood of The Store, reporting voices in the sewers. The idea was that some kids had got in there, and were making their way through the sewers of the town. Thus search-and-rescue was deployed. I don’t know if anything ever turned up (well, I do know that they didn’t find bodies or anything so horrible), but that stuck in my mind. This incident has just this week found its way into the second John Lazarus novel.
THREE: Storybits don’t even have to be pieces of story. They can be the tiny details you notice as you go through life. It’s details like these that can make your story seem especially real.
One day, I was out driving, running errands. It was a summer day, and there was a sudden thunderstorm that fired up quickly, dumped its rain, and then moved on just as quickly as it had come. When it was gone, the sun came out again, just as bright and brilliant as before, but now everything was wet, including the road.
That was when I noticed that the car in front of me was kicking up spray from its back tires, and the sunlight was making tiny rainbows in the spray. I had never seen that before, and I’ve never seen it since. I think it’s really one of those “right place at the right time” sorts of phenomena that probably happens a lot but no one notices, and it doesn’t happen often to each individual one of us because while there’s always someone out driving in the post-storm sunshine, how often is it us, and how often are we looking down at the tires of the car in front of us, and how often are we driving at the right angle to the sun to see those tiny spray-bows?
Storybits are everywhere. Look for them!
I recently read a fascinating book about the Star Wars phenomenon, titled How STAR WARS Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise. Written by journalist Chris Taylor, the book traces the history of Star Wars, not as purely a “making of” story, but as a cultural phenomenon. It’s a terrific book that I reviewed on Goodreads, but I wanted to revise and extend those remarks a bit.
This book is one of the most even-handed accounts of Star Wars and the work of George Lucas that I have read. There isn’t much axe-grinding here, which I greatly appreciate. Taylor is interested in just how this thing called Star Wars came to be one of the dominant pop-culture forces today, tracing the influences that led a young George Lucas to think more and more obsessively about his “little space movie”, and then tracing its own influences on those who came after and showing some of the many and surprising ways that Star Wars has enhanced and influenced the lives of several generations of fans, geeks, and whatever else has come afterwards.
Star Wars started as one movie that wasn’t even supposed to be 20th Century Fox’s big picture for 1977, but it became an enormous force, as everyone knows. It is certainly, along with Star Trek, likely the single biggest influence on my creative life, and it’s inspired an astonishing amount of activity over the years, from comics to music to books to fan films to cosplayers, some of whom have organized into the largest amateur costuming group in the world after the Society for Creative Anachronism. All that, from the imagination of a filmmaker from Modesto, California who only became driven to succeed after he nearly died in a car crash in his youth.
From my perspective, the best parts of the book are those that home in on George Lucas’s creative process. A lot of ink and a lot of pixels have been deployed over the years in discussing Lucas, many times in derision. What emerges in this book – and in others I’ve read, such as Rinzler’s wonderful Making of… books for each of the original Star Wars films – is a man with a deeply non-linear creative process. Lucas’s approach seems to be to generate ideas by the dozen, and then mix-and-match them in various ways until something coherent begins to emerge. Sometimes his earliest ideas are set aside only to return many years later, and sometimes his early ideas stick around through most iterations of story.
The genesis of Star Wars, as it went from being an enormous and ungainly thing bogged down in dozens of names and jargon terms, was a very messy process, and it’s always amazing to me to see the long litany of notions that came and went. There are ideas that Lucas entertained in 1975 that would not show up on film until thirty years later (such as the planet Utapau, present in the earliest drafts of Star Wars, when it was called The Star Wars, and which would not actually show up on film until Revenge of the Sith). In this way, Lucas reminds me of some favorite artists of mine, like composer Hector Berlioz, who would think nothing of using a melody in an early work and then using it again many years later, if he felt that he still had use for it.
The messiness of Lucas’s storytelling process stands at odds with things he says later about his own process, which is something that a lot of people have used as a source of criticism. Lucas is often thought to have promised a nine-episode Star Wars saga back in the days of the Original Trilogy, but his actual statements were that he had written an enormous story and then cut it in half, resulting in the Original Trilogy being the second half; the seventh, eighth, and ninth episodes were only conceptual in nature. This seems to be partly true, but Lucas didn’t so much cut an original story in half as he kept reducing his focus. The “Star with Episode IV” approach seems to be more emergent than intentional, which is not a bad thing.
Here, from the book, is just such an example of one of Lucas’s old ideas resurfacing much later on:
The moment Lucas decided to add a kind of rational, scientific component to Jedi knowledge of the Force, in Episode I – the infamous “midi-chlorians,” microscopic organisms that are supposed to help the Force bind to living beings – long-time fans revolted. It didn’t matter that, as Lucasfilm protested, the midi-chlorians are not supposed to be what the Force is actually made of – just a biological indication of its presence. If you dig deep enough into the Lucasfilm archives, you’ll find Lucas talking about midi-chlorians as early as August 1977. “It is said that certain creatures are born with a higher awareness of the Force than others,” he said during a role-playing exercise designed to help him flesh out Star Wars concepts after the original movie. “Their brains are different; they have more midi-chlorians in their cells.” This didn’t matter either. What fans actually want, it seems, is as little detail as possible. They want twenty-eight words, and nothing more.”
The twenty-eight words Taylor refers to is the simple description of the Force given by Ben Kenobi in A New Hope, and nothing more. Without rehashing the whole midi-chlorian thing, it’s certainly interesting that Star Wars fans seem to want to leave things open and mystical and unexplained in a lot of cases. They certainly stand in contrast to, say, fans of JRR Tolkien, who want as much detail as humanly possible, to the point of learning to speak fictional languages and developing their grammars beyond what Tolkien created. (I still maintain that the midi-chlorians are not a category error but a storytelling one. Their existence adds exactly nothing, story-wise, to the Star Wars saga.)
This book also provides some evidence in favor of an oft-cited notion, that Lucas functions best when he has a strong voice to tell him “No.” By the time of the production of the Prequels, Taylor describes Lucas as so revered that literally no one goes against him in any way at all. I’ve never been totally convinced of this, and I’m still not. Producer Rick McCallum doesn’t come off terribly well, being shown as mainly a yes-man, but still: Lucas brought in script help for all three Prequels, in acknowledgment of his own weaknesses in the writing department. (Which are, in my view, a bit overblown.) Taylor’s own negative opinion of the Prequels stands, but to his credit, he does give voice to some pro-Prequel voices, and he acknowledges that they are not the irredeemable films that many have deemed them. (I’d rather he hadn’t even mentioned that awful Red Letter Media guy at all, though.)
Taylor seems fairly bemused, in the closing chapters, by the fact that Star Wars fandom has only strengthened over time, even in the face of three Prequel films that are, shall we say, less than beloved. As the book closes, Lucas has sold it all to Disney, but even then he was starting to knock around ideas for Episodes VII through IX, the ones he had previously said he’d never do. One ends up wishing that George Lucas would simply come out and admit that Star Wars has been his life. That wouldn’t be so bad a thing, would it?
Ultimately, Taylor’s book does a wonderful job of tracing the growth of Star Wars in our cultural life, and he also shows how it came to utterly dominate the life of its creator, a complex man whose own skills, great as they are, were not always a match for what was in his head. I’m grateful for the book’s portrayal of a George Lucas who is flawed genius, instead of a hack who just happened to get lucky a couple of times. I hope Taylor gets to revise the book in five or six years, once the Saga again stands complete. Unless, of course, Disney decides to fire up production on Episode X in due course….
Sorry for missing last week, but here we are again. Tchaikovsky’s third symphony, the Symphony No. 3 in D Major, is an interesting work, almost experimental in its form. The symphony is in five movements instead of four, and in it Tchaikovsky makes use of Polish dance rhythms, which led to the work initially being dubbed the “Polish” Symphony.
The symphony is kind of an odd work. It has a sense of optimism that seems, frankly, a little out of place for the famously brooding Tchaikovsky; this is the only one of his symphonies to be written in a major key.
Here is the Symphony No. 3 in D major. Next week, the Fourth, which is a work I’ve struggled with over the years.
In honor of the upcoming Olympics: I used to have a fear of hurdles, but I got over it.
I heard a performance of this on the radio the other day, and since this is one of those “Hear it once and hum it for days and days” pieces, I just have to share it. It’s one of the most famous overtures of all time, even if the opera it opens isn’t performed very often. The overture is in four sections, and the third and fourth comprise two of the most famous passages of classical music ever, with the slow section often used to accompany pastoral imagery in film and teevee, and the final section…well, everybody knows what association eventually resulted there, don’t we?
Here is Rossini’s Overture to William Tell.
So we’ve been watching a show called Scorpion lately. It just wrapped up its second season; we’re four or five episodes into the second year.
Scorpion is a techno-thriller show about a team of supergenius misfits who are all brilliant at something but who all lack social skills to one degree or another (and they’re led by Walter O’Brien, the guy among them who boasts both the highest IQ and the least amount of social acumen, and who is apparently based in part on a real guy), and their Homeland Security handler who manages their caseload and the local waitress from a diner who ends up helping the team to interact with people who are not supergeniuses. Together, this team – called “Scorpion”, hence the name of the show – addresses problems.
I’ve always liked this kind of story, the team-of-skilled-folk who put their skills together to accomplish amazing stuff and solve problems. I guess it goes back to The A-Team for me, although this style of story certainly goes back much farther than that; The Guns of Navarone is one such story, I suppose. Maybe Mission: Impossible! is as well. But this show’s most recent ancestor seems to be the wonderful Robert Redford-led ensemble caper flick Sneakers. The formula is always the same: each person in the team has a different skill set, and they are called upon in various ways to help out in the missions. You have the leader, the supergenius hacker; the supergenius psychiatrist; the math genius who is afraid of his own shadow; and the mechanical wizard who can do anything with a set of tools and whose main means of expression is harsh bluntness.
Scorpion is basically our current source of light, fun action entertainment. It’s not a great show, although I do sometimes get the impression that it could be, if it ever really homes in on its tone. The first season never quite got there, and my general impression was that the writers really needed to just let go an embrace the full-on potential their show and its characters have for some really gonzo geeky storytelling. Happily, they seem to be trending in that direction in the second season. There’s been some really gonzo stuff happen already, and hey, the second season gave us a slow-motion shot of Katherine McPhee in a wet t-shirt. (What can I say.)
So Scorpion’s not a great show, but it’s a fun show with some potential. I think it needs to delve even more into its wit and potential for comedy, and avoid the pitfall of getting too “dark and serious”, outside of maybe an episode or two, here and there, just to change things up. Scorpion is at its best when it uses humor along its way, and I hope the writers sharpen the wit as the show moves forward. They’ve already discovered the fact that with stories like these, once you establish what each character can do it’s cool to stick them in situations where one has to call on skills that another member of the team has.
Some other things Scorpion does well? For one thing, the cast is terrific. These aren’t great actors, by any means, but there’s a lot of chemistry here, which is important in a show about a team. You really do get the sense that these people all like and care about each other, even their gruff Homeland Security handler agent (played by Robert Patrick, the T-1000 himself).
For another, I like that Scorpion’s challenges are varied. Sometimes they have to do straight-up espionage, such as an episode in which they have to break into Cuba’s central bank; other times they have to help find a group of lost hikers in an area where wildfires are starting to sweep through. Each episode manages to come up with a different bunch of challenges, so thus far there’s not a real sense of formula yet.
Additionally, while there are serial elements to the show (and I do think that Scorpion is leaning too heavily on romance amongst the team members in this regard), so far there is not some big overarching mytharc story behind it all. I love that. There’s no “Who killed so-and-so’s parents” or any other slowly-unfolding larger story to Scorpion. There’s no “big bad villain” to be sought after over the show’s run, with BIG DRAMATIC DEVELOPMENTS in the major storyline coming in sweeps-month two-parters. We have a few budding romances, and an ongoing story involving hero Walter O’Brien’s dying sister. (As of this point in our viewing, she hasn’t died yet, but I know that she does go, soon.) In a time when every show seemingly has some continuing story behind its individual episodes, and in a time when those continuing stories often get drawn out to the point of nobody caring anymore (I’m looking at you, Mentalist, with your chase of Red John going on way past the point of giving a crap), it’s refreshing to see a show that really downplays its serial aspect.
Scorpion is mainly exactly what it sounds like: a fun, likable show that isn’t trying terribly hard to be more than that. And you know what? That is just fine.
And besides….
I know. I’m the worst.
People often talk about “finding” time to write, as if there’s a few minutes to be found under the couch, or “making” time to write, as if by sheer force of will we can make the next hour contain 69 minutes instead of the usual 60. I don’t much care for either notion. There is no more time for you than there is for me, and unless you’re incredibly fortunate, there are likely roughly as many demands on my time as there are on yours.
So no, you don’t “find” or “make” time to write. All you can do is use the time you’ve already got. I wish I had more time to write, but then, so do all who live to see such times. All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us. (Seems I’ve heard someone say something very like that before…hmmmm….)
John Scalzi put it all very bluntly a few years back, and I tend to agree strongly with him here:
So: Do you want to write or don’t you? If your answer is “yes, but,” then here’s a small editing tip: what you’re doing is using six letters and two words to say “no.” And that’s fine. Just don’t kid yourself as to what “yes, but” means.
Yes.
But still, lectures like that aren’t always the answer. Specific examples might be helpful, if you’re struggling to somehow pack more writing into your day. All of this involves tradeoffs. It involves concluding that some existing time-sinks in your life need to be adjusted, in terms of their priority, in order to squeeze something else in. In some cases, it might even involve making some painful decisions regarding things that you really like doing, so ultimately it all comes down to the question of just how much you like writing in the first place, and the only person who can answer that is you. These are the things that I did when I decided that it was time to shift from “I wanna write sometime” to “I’m gonna write NOW.” Some of it is about using time for writing; others are about maximizing the quality of my writing time.
1. Get up earlier. Unless you’re a morning person by temperament – and I am not – this one sucks. But I had to do it. I used to get up at 6:00 am to get ready for work (my shift starts at 7:30 most days, and I have a roughly 15-minute commute). I started getting up at 5:30, thus gaining an extra thirty minutes of writing time before work. Does it suck? Yeah, sometimes. I am not, as I note, a morning person. But the time’s gotta come from somewhere, and there are fewer demands on my time early in the day than later, so that’s when I’ve decided that I have to get some of the work done.
2. Write during lunch. In fact, that’s what I’m doing now! As I write this, it’s my lunch period. Now don’t worry, I’m not giving up eating. But what I’ve done is utilize the down time I get at work differently. My job allows me a 15-minute break and a 30-minute lunch period each day. I used to take the break in the morning sometime, and then lunch around 1:00. Now I take the break around noon, during which I eat (because quite frankly, it doesn’t take more than 15 minutes to eat), and I take the lunch period around 2:00 or 2:30, during which I exclusively write.
It helps that I have my own small work area with my own door, so I can get privacy, and it also helps that I have never much liked the atmosphere of “break rooms”, no matter what job I had. Am I missing out on some social time with coworkers? Maybe, but I get plenty of that anyway.
3. The crockpot is your friend. It really, truly is. Now, you don’t want to overdo it, but several nights a week it falls to me to cook, and sometimes it’s nice to have a meal option that doesn’t involve losing an hour or two to prepping and working over the stove. You can do wonderful things with a slow cooker, and it can really free up some good writing time. (This is also why God invented rotisserie chickens and frozen pizzas.)
4. Set a daily quota. I have been a firm believer in quotas for years, and I plan to go right on being a fan of quotas. Setting real, measurable goals and breaking them down into meaningful chunks is important to me, and it helps me feel like I’m actually making progress when I have those days when, as Stephen King puts it, I only feel like I’m “shoveling shit from a sitting position”. Make your quota high enough to be a challenge (it shouldn’t be easy), but low enough to be attainable.
This is where you have to know yourself and your level of likely useful productivity. Currently I’m enforcing a quota of 1200 words a day, because that’s what I feel I can reasonably achieve in a day while still leaving room for family, meals, showers, dog walks, reading, and other stuff. If you can write more than that with the time you’ve carved out for yourself, great! If less, then that’s fine, too. If you set a quota and find that you’re hitting it every day with ease, raise it. If you’re never hitting it, then lower it. A quota is a goal you set for yourself, and more than that, it’s a tool to help you be productive. A quota is not a stick to beat yourself with.
5. Know which days are good and which aren’t, and feel free to adjust quotas accordingly. Just because you have quotas doesn’t mean that they have to be the same every day. In my own life, with the routine we currently have, it turns out that Tuesdays are really bad for writing. More specifically, Tuesday nights are never good for writing, so if I want to hit quota on Tuesdays, I have to get out of bed and make it happen early. On the flip side I have Saturdays, which are almost always awesome writing days, so I allow myself a quota of 2000 words on Saturdays. Every day is not created equal!
6. When you hit quota, STOP. This is another thing I believe. There are days when it’s grossly tempting to plow past my quota and keep going until I double it, triple it, whatever it. I don’t think that’s a great idea, because I think it can lead me to raising my expectations for each day out, thus magnifying the shittiness of the shitty days, and it can make it easier to blow off a day when I’ve blasted quota to bits the day before. Along with my strong belief in daily quotas is an equally-strong belief in steady, consistent production. Binge-writing, in my experience, leads to days when I write nothing at all, and those days are poison to my writing-loving heart.
There’s an old adage in storytelling: “Always leave ‘em wanting more.” Well, I think it applies to writers, too: Always leave yourself wanting more!
7. Leave a note for the next session. This is something I started doing after I read Rachel Aron’s book 2k to 10k. It’s not so much “outlining”, but when I end a session “in the groove”, I always have a good idea of what’s to immediately follow. Since sometimes twenty-four hours can pass before the next session, I find it hard to jump back in with the same enthusiasm with which I finished the day before. I do some hemming and hawing as I try to recapture a thought process that ended a day before, and in this way I lose valuable time.
So when a session ends, I try to leave myself a note – two or three sentences is enough – telling me where I’m going next. It makes hitting the ground running the next day a lot easier, and when time is of the essence, hitting the ground running is pretty important.
Let’s see, what else? Some folks swear by apps that disable their Internet access or other such efforts to make their work distraction-free. I do not do this. I can get distracted by the Internet as much as anyone, but I’m pretty good at cranking away without needing distractions when I get myself going, and my whole writing practice is designed to make it as easy as possible to get into that zone. About the only thing I like to do in terms of reducing distractions is using Scrivener’s fullscreen writing environment, and even that sometimes I eschew, since I like to keep two panes open, one with the manuscript and one with my character notes or some other info file.
So that’s how I maximize the time I have in order to get the most work done. How about you all? Let me know your tricks for getting productive!
