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Halloween Questions!

SamuraiFrog answered these questions, so I figured I would, too…although, Halloween is the one holiday that I always think that I should get into more than I actually do. I’m not sure why that is…maybe it’s because I’m too busy grooving on how happy I am that it’s fall and my favorite month to really indulge my enjoyment of scary stuff. Not sure…but anyway, the questions!

(1) What’s your favorite Halloween costume ever?

In all honesty, I only remember a single Halloween costume…but it was pretty awesome. My favorite superhero as a small child was Captain Marvel (SHAZAM!!!), so my mother hand-made me a Captain Marvel suit. It was amazing…and I think she might still have it stashed someplace at the Original Casa Jaquandor. I wore it in Kindergarten and in 1st grade, which was the last time I ever trick-or-treated. (In second grade I think the town we lived in discouraged the practice, in third and fourth grade I decided it was more fun to just hand out candy, and after that, we moved to a place that wasn’t really in a ‘neighborhood’, per se.)

The Daughter has had a bunch of nifty ones, such as Swiftheart Rabbit (one of the non-bear Care Bears, and as a vampire queen, both hand-made by The Wife).

(2) What’s your favorite Halloween candy (or other treat)?

I know so few people who love candy corn, and yet it’s everywhere in October…and I love it! So there! And malted milk balls are great…but every year I’d forget the difference between them and Milk Duds, which are EVIL. Popcorn balls were nifty — still are, I suppose. And Almond Joy, huzzah!

(3) Name the scariest book you’ve ever read?

Steven King’s IT was pretty disturbing. But for giving me the heebie-jeebies as I read it, nothing’s ever matched my first reading of John Bellairs’s The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring. I was eleven or twelve, and there are some very creepy scenes in that book. Now, it’s a Young Adult book and by today’s standards it’s pretty tame stuff. But I’ve never since read anything that had me wanting quite as bad to sleep with all the lights on.

(4) Who’s the best movie vampire ever:
(a) Bela Lugosi
(b) George Hamilton
(c) Tom Cruise
(d) Robert Pattinson

I’ve got to agree with SamuraiFrog on this — the fact that Pattinson is on the list (they’re not even vampires, folks!) instead of Christopher Lee is pretty dispiriting. And I liked Gary Oldman, too.

(5) Who’d win in a fist fight? Sookie or Bella?

OK, this is dumb. I don’t even know who Sookie is.

(6) Are you superstitious? How?

Nope.

(7) Frankenberry, Count Chocula, or Boo Berry?

Here’s something you didn’t know: I’ve never had any of these. I’m just not that into the sugary cereals. If I want a sweet cereal, I’ll go for Golden Grahams every time. (I’ve been in the mood to revisit Honeycomb for the first time in 30 years, though, and compare notes with my memory….)

(8) Will you dress up this year? If so, as what?

Highly unlikely that I will. The Store encourages dressing up on the Saturday before Halloween, but I don’t work Saturdays. Nor do I get invited to dress-up Halloween parties (and that’s not a complaint!), so I don’t have a whole lot of opportunities. I’ll spend it like always: in overalls. (Which, funnily enough, end up being a component of a lot of costumes for others!)

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Zoom! Bang!

A couple of science fiction booknotes! Zap! Pow!

:: I’ve seen some mention of a book over the last year or so on various SF blogs called Ready Player One, by a writer named Ernest Cline. Aside from those mentions, I knew nothing about the book until I picked it up on a lark when I saw it at the library. Boy, am I glad I did – what a fun book!

Thirty years from now, the world is a corporate dystopia, and the prime form of escapism is a virtual reality ‘game’, created by two men who grew up in the latter decades of the 20th century, which is so massive that it incorporates entire enormous worlds within it. One of the creators, a fabulously wealthy techno-genius who is also eccentric and reclusive (think Steve Jobs and Howard Hughes, blended into one guy) dies, and bequeaths his entire fortune, a truly staggering sum of money, to the first person who can successfully complete a ‘quest’ that he has created within the virtual world that he has created.

This is all, well, not terribly original. A few decades out, the world is a dystopia where everything is run by a few corporations? Yeah, we’ve seen that before. And the ‘reclusive oddball creates a quest for riches’ thing? Yup, that’s been done too. Basically this book is It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World meets Demolition Man. But you know, sometimes originality isn’t about creating something totally new; originality can be found in mashups that no one would ever think to do.

But what really makes this book something else isn’t the mashup, it’s the way all the details are ripped straight from the entire grand, weird, oddball geek culture of the last thirty years, with key focus on the 1980s. If you grew up watching Star Trek and arguing with friends over the Ewoks and listening to Duran Duran and planning your afterschool activities on the basis of which of your friends had an Atari console and so on and so forth, then there is stuff in this book that will thrill you to the core. It’s as if Cline has packed his book with easter eggs, hundreds of them, for people from that period to get. Luckily, I grew up in that very era, so I think I got them all. For the most part.

Ultimately, Ready Player One is geek-porn of the highest order. My only complaint was the nature of the modern dystopia, which is mainly because I’m just generically tired of dystopias. This book is really fun, though. It’s paced beautifully, there’s payoffs galore between the compelling characters and the great stuff they do, there are villains of the ‘boo-hiss!’ variety, and basically, the book would be a slickly entertaining piece of SF-quest fiction even if it didn’t have all the various references to 80s-and-since geek culture. I recommend this book highly!

:: A few months ago I positively reviewed a SF novel called Across the Universe by Beth Revis, which is the first book in a trilogy. I have now read the second book, A Million Suns, and I recommend that one equally.

I don’t want to say too much about it, since it’s the second book in a trilogy and thus discussing its plot will require somewhat spoiling the first one, but the story from that first book (of the ‘generation ship’ that’s not what it seems, and the teenage boy and girl who plumb its secrets) continues in interesting and effective ways. We learn more about the ship and the nature of its mission, and the villain from the first book turns out to have left clues behind about something that he discovered before things went awry for him. It’s a very good read that left me waiting enthusiastically for the third one, which is due in January. (And I have a few guesses as to what revelations will come in that last book that I’m excited to see either confirmed or disproved!)

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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Of the teevee shows you watch these days, how many of them do you actually watch on the teevee in their actual timeslot on whatever network carries them, as opposed to DVRing or Hulu-ing or On Demanding or downloading?

UPDATE: Speaking of teevee…as this post went live, the first Presidential debate was starting up. If you’re looking for alternate viewing, go to the next post down (or just scroll to it, if you’re on the main page) and watch me getting hit with pies, if you haven’t watched the latest one yet. It’s good! Trust me! At least it’s gotta be more fun than watching Romney talk.

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The receiving end

I’m in the midst of a vacation from work which started last Thursday and ends this Thursday morning. We took our annual trip to Ithaca for the Apple Harvest Festival, I’ve spent a lot of quality time with The Book, and in general, I’ve relaxed. Huzzah for relaxing! (Although, the joke’s on me as far as sleeping a little later than 5:50 am goes…The Daughter has to get up for school at 6:00 anyway. So I’m pretty much up at the same time that I’m up anyway.)

Yup, it’s been a nice vacation…and today we took care of another item on the list: my quasi-annual pies in the face.

As usual, I made a video of the event, and here it is. It’s quite a bit longer than usual, mainly because I didn’t have the heart to edit Mozart, so I padded it out to the full length of the piano concerto movement.


A pie in the face is a wonderful thing!

My oh my, the tie-dyed guy is pied!

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Yes, but….

Roger e-mailed me a link to this advice column:

I’m 25, living in a city I love, working a job I love, and writing. Writing has been my dream more than my passion for most of my life, but I’m good at it and I’ve finally gotten the discipline to put my butt in the chair every day and bang out a few words. Unfortunately, I’m good at my job, too.

[snip]

Writing is what I love, it’s what keeps me going. I can’t write and manage this cafe. I don’t know how to broach this with the owners, who are clearly set on grooming me to take on some of the day-to-day managerial duties from them. Help!

And the reasonable reply from our advice person?

You say you cannot write and manage this cafe. That is not true. You can write and manage this cafe. What is required is a routine. You have to create the time and place to do your writing.

You can do it. I would suggest you start now. Get out a calendar. Look at your work hours. Look at the time that is left where you are not working. Sketch in some hours to write. Try out various hours. See what works.

More, but that’s about it. All very sage and reasonable and right…and I really do kinda feel for this person, because I’ve been there. Carving out writing time isn’t the easiest thing in the world when your mental image of writing is of long hours spent cranking out words on a word processor, producing thousands of words a day. Now, many writers manage to do this, but I suspect it’s because they got through the earlier part of the struggle — the part where you’re spending 40+ hours a week making money doing something that’s not writing — and producing a lot less output until they got there, with ‘there’ being, a place where they could support themselves on their writing and thus have time to really write.

So writing is a good, in fact nearly perfect, example for the old adage that the reward for doing good work is the opportunity to do more work. However, when I say above that those writers balanced their jobs until they could really write, I don’t mean to say that by really writing, they’re producing their best work. For them, every word written is the best they can do, and if they get better after they manage to go full-time, great! But that doesn’t imply that they’r phoning it in.

When I am working on something new, I’ve set a daily quota for myself of 500 words a day. This is a small number that’s doable, and it produces over time a nice-sized chunk of story. It took me less than a year to write the first draft of Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) at that pace (although there were quite a few days when I rolled off a lot more than 500 words). Goal-setting is essential if you want to write. But you have to be careful with the goals: they have to be tough enough to reach that you’re working for them, but easy enough to reach that you don’t feel like you’re never getting anywhere. If you read about how Stephen King produces 2000 words a day, don’t hold yourself to that standard until you can. Even he indicates that sometimes the 2000 words are a struggle that he hasn’t reached until dinnertime.

I approach writing now like a job, even if I’m not getting paid for it yet. That’s the only way it’s going to work. If I wait for ‘the muse’, or for when I’m just in that perfect state of energy after my shift at The Store, well…if I did that, I’d still be occasionally flailing around less than halfway through Princesses, instead of doing what I’m doing now: writing this post as a break from editing together the second draft.

So set a goal and be hard-nosed about it. Treat writing like any other job you’ve got to punch the clock to do. Figure out when your every day writing time is, and write then. It’s the only way.

For a more cranky version of these thoughts, check out this John Scalzi post, to which I return frequently when I need a mental kick in the arse.

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.

If your answer is “yes,” then the question is simply when and how you find the time to do it. If you spend your free time after work watching TV, turn off the TV and write. If you prefer to spend time with your family when you get home, write a bit after the kids are in bed and before you turn in yourself. If your work makes you too tired to think straight when you get home, wake up early and write a little in the morning before you head off. If you can’t do that (I’m not a morning person myself) then you have your weekend — weekends being what I used when I wrote Agent to the Stars.

And if you can’t manage that, then what you’re saying is that you were lying when you said your answer is “yes.” Because if you really wanted to write, you would find a way to make the time, and you would find a way to actually write. Cory Doctorow says that no matter what, he tries for 250 words a day (that’s a third of what I’ve written in this entry to this point), and if you write just 250 words a day — the equivalent to a single, double-spaced page of text — then in a year you have 90,000 words. That’s the length of a novel. Off of 250 words a day. Which you could do. On the goddamned bus. If you really wanted.

Ultimately, I doubt very much that there is a single writer alive, successful or unsuccessful, genre or literary, fiction or nonfiction, who didn’t struggle with the ‘writing in the off hours’ thing for a while. I’m willing to bet that many of them, if not most of them, still struggle with it. There’s a reason for that. So stop complaining about the struggle, and embrace it. It’ll make you a better writer. Or, at the very least, it’ll make you a writer who wrote something.

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Clearing House o’ Linkage

Here’s some stuff I’ve been meaning to link but…haven’t. Enjoy!

:: SamuraiFrog, always a fine writer, has been on something of a tear of late. I’ll highlight two recent movie reviews of his: Blade Runner and Red Dawn. I don’t totally agree with his assessment of Blade Runner, a movie which I have to assume, at this point in my life, just isn’t ever going to cross over from ‘movie I admire but feel little emotional connection with’ to ‘wow, I love this’. But he brings quite a few good insights into the movie.

As for Red Dawn, I’m in total agreement. That movie is crap on toast and always has been; I’ve never understood why it’s a quasi-classic for a lot of people. Aside from the fact that it’s basically right-wing action pron, that is.

:: In keeping with my long-professed fascination with photos of American Presidents in moments that aren’t the most Presidential, here’s Gerald Ford with soccer star Pele.

(via)

:: I am generally able to be forgiving of media from decades past, in their reflection of prevailing views of their day toward matters like race and women, but I have my limits. Witness Retrospace’s exploration of men spanking women in comic books from yesteryear. Ye Gods, this is stunningly creepy stuff.

:: It’s odd how, in some cases, “Hey, it’s been X years since Y happened!” can make me feel old, and in some other cases, it just makes me say, “Huh. Been a while, eh?” The fact that Cheers first aired thirty years ago? Not sure how that makes me feel. But really: wow. Anyway, Ken Levine reflects on that first night.

:: Joe Biden: smartass VP. (Hmmm…some of these quotes don’t seem real. Like, all of them.)

:: Wow, why do I mess around with that stupid egg separator?


:: From time to time, Sheila O’Malley posts commentary on her iPod ‘shuffle’ results. It always amazes me how she manages to say something insightful about every song she hears therein.

:: John Scalzi on Mitt Romney as a person. I tend to agree, although my feelings are a bit more negative. (Not ‘OMG I find this guy to be a loathsome turd’ negative, but…if Romney was my Mayor, or maybe something else like that, I’d probably be OK with it. In fact, given my general lack of good feeling for the current Mayor of Buffalo….)

:: Lynn links a piece of music by a modern composer with whom I am unfamiliar. Go and give it a listen — it’s interesting and good!

:: Finally, he’s me with the sun shining over my shoulder. Just like the John Denver song!

Sunshine on my shoulder, la la la la....

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Answers the Seventh!

I’m cranking out this post because I’d like to be able say that I got all of the questions for Ask Me Anything! August 2012 done before…October. Wow, maybe I should have not run the game during the same month I was trying to crank on a writing project. Anyway, I think that this post should wrap things up…but if I missed your query, let me know! It’s been known to happen. I’m as fallible as…well, something that’s really fallible. Mitt Romney, there we go! He’s pretty fallible!

(The person responsible for the immediately preceding political comment would be sacked, but as he’s the owner of this blog, he won’t be. But he will feel a bit of remorse.)

Lynn asked: If Firefly had been allowed to keep running for several seasons, as it should have, do you think they might have brought back Jubal Early (one of my favorite villains ever) for another episode? We didn’t see him actually die so I’ve always wondered about that. What if you were hired to write the Return of Jubal Early episode? How would you do it?

Yeah…the Jubal Early episode is a particularly saddening one for the series to end on, because that’s when the crew finally figured out how to accept River Tam for who she was. In that episode she became part of the crew…and then the show stopped. Yes, the Serenity movie dealt with that somewhat, but you really started to get a feel for the show’s direction when it got dumped. All together, now: Curse you, FOX!!!

But anyway: I’m of mixed mind on Jubal Early. He’s a great character, the best of villains: someone with a clear ethos. He’s a bounty hunter with the same attitude as Mal Reynolds, with regard to getting the job done. He does the job, he gets paid. He tries to avoid sentiment; all there is, is the job. Plus he was played with nice, calm, businesslike malice by Richard Brooks, which is always a good thing.

Problem is, as Lynn notes, how do you bring him back. See, after infiltrating the Serenity and nearly getting away with River, Early is making his way back to his ship (meaning a spacewalk) when Mal gets the drop on him, and kicks him off into space. Early is last scene just tumbling through space in his spacesuit. Would he have returned? And how? Space is awfully big, and even in a heavily-traveled part of the ‘Verse, I can’t believe that something so small as a person in a spacesuit would be noticed by anyone in a ship, unless they had a scanner that was actively sweeping for really tiny bits of space flotsam and jetsam.

Unless, of course, Early has some kind of emergency transponder in his suit, which he could activate as some kind of emergency, last-ditch, probably-won’t-work-but-you-never-know kind of thing. In itself, that might not be a bad idea; I imagine that in any spacefaring society, a spacesuited person becoming separated from their ship would be a deeply feared thing. (OK, now I’m drawing a blank, because I know that I read a SF novel in the last few years that featured just that as the society’s most feared means of dying. Gonna bug me until I remember.)

And then, any writer of such could just punt the whole deal and have Jubal Early turn up again, very much alive, very much still on River Tam’s trail, and just never explain at all how he managed to not float through space until he died. That, in itself, could lend him some kind of mythological status in the underworld of the ‘Verse; in the words of another Firefly baddie, it could make his reputation ‘solid’. Maybe the “Return of Jubal Early” episode could end with Mal asking, “How did you not just float away into space forever?” and Early just shrugging.

By the way, I just looked up Jubal Early to find out who played him, and apparently Joss Whedon himself indicated that Early was not going to just float around until he ran a tad low on oxygen. So, I wonder how Whedon planned to do it?

(OHHH! The novel I remembered above is Michael Flynn’s The Wreck of the RIVER OF STARS. I’ve still got it, baby!)

OK, moving on. Richard asks: When do you plan to visit Vancouver, Canada? I notice you’ve visited Toronto on many an occasion…but Toronto is not the only nice city in our fair country!

No, Toronto’s not the only nice city in Canada, but it is the only one within a very close driving range to Casa Jaquandor. Unfortunately, the types of trips that require (a) flying and (b) spending at least a week off tend to be out of our price range at this point. But you never know what the future holds. Maybe the book tour for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) will include a Vancouver stop! (Wow, talk about getting ahead of myself….)

Seriously, though, I would love dearly to get to Vancouver. It always — always — looks like a staggeringly beautiful city. (A favorite movie of mine, Cousins, was filmed there, in a way that made it look really beautiful, and not like a dank stand-in for every other dank place in the United States for four seasons of The X-Files.) Frankly, the only thing that really stops me from wanting to live in the Pacific Northwest is the fact that everything is so far from everything else. I’m spoiled by the idea of living within a day’s drive of half the country. But I do miss it out there, even having not been back to the Northwest since 1981.

Christopher asks: I know you have a great love of music, I wish I did, but never have. If you had to choose between them, and one was to be gone forever. Written words or music?

Hmmmm. A couple of different ways to take this question. Do I lose the sense of sight or hearing? If that’s what’s being asked, I’d lose sight, every time. I can figure out a way to get stories into my head and out of it without seeing, but losing music? Ugh! That would be truly awful.

But keeping the ability to hear music and understand it, but somehow be rendered unable to read while keeping sight? So I wouldn’t be able to process stories at all? That’s…horrifying. And there’s an interesting story there, I think…hmmmm….!

Kal asks: I would like to send you a Luckie Loonie coin for all the support you give my blog. Can I have your snail mail addy to do that?

Kal, let me know if this offer still stands! Meantime, folks, if you’re looking for a blog chock full of geeky goodness, you could do far worse than to wander through the archives of Cal’s Canadian Cave of Coolness for a while. I don’t get everything that he posts — I’m not sure yet about Selena Gomez, for example — but I’m sure there’s stuff he doesn’t get about me either. If you haven’t look, go!

Two anonymous queries (not anonymous to me, but they request to be so to you): DO you have a Super Bowl prediction?

Ummm…no, I don’t. This NFL season is off to an insane start, even by NFL season standards. Seriously, this could be one of those weird years where the two best records in each conference are 11-5, and where some 9-7 wildcard team gets blown out 49-3 late in the season, and then gets hot and goes all the way to the Super Bowl. I got nothin’, in terms of predictions. Weird year thus far!

(I’ll say this for the Bills: I think that this year is the referendum on Ryan Fitzpatrick as a starting quarterback in the NFL. If he doesn’t play well — and I mean, really well — I think the Bills have to make next year the “new franchise guy” year in the draft. The good news there is that by building the team around Fitzpatrick, the Bills have guaranteed that a rookie quarterback stepping in next year won’t be doing so for a crappy team. We’re not going to be seeing the second coming of David Carr, who might have been good if he hadn’t been sacked something like 287 times in his first couple of seasons.)

You haven’t been pied in a while. What gives?

Yeesh, it’s not like that happens on a daily or weekly basis. I’m a writer and a handyman, not a vaudeville performer or a clown! It only happens to me once, maybe twice a year. More than that and it might get routine, you know?

(But…watch this space. Pies may fly in my face’s direction sooner than later!)

And finally, I give the last word to Andy: Were you more of a Dukes of Hazard guy or more of a Knight Rider man????

Knight Rider. All the way. Yeah, I watched Dukes for a few years as a kid, and it was entertaining an all, but I grew out of it fairly quickly, and that one year when John Schneider and Tom Wopat were replaced by…two other guys, playing the Duke cousins or something, pretty much did in my interest in that show. Besides, well…it just wasn’t that interesting after that long. There’s only so many times you can watch the boys elude Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane, so many times the General Lee can jump over something, so many dirt road chases, et cetera that you can watch before it all looks the same. And to be honest, the show’s popularity was a bit early for me to grok the whole notion of Daisy Duke in those Shorts +4 of Ultimate Shortness.

I always wondered about all those dirt roads, too…was Hazzard County’s annual infrastructure budget all of $1.67? Surely they could afford some road grading and paving, if they could afford to buy the Sheriff a new ride every week.

But Knight Rider? That appealed to me a lot more. There was the James Bond-ish kind of thing going on, with Michael Knight ending up someplace else and in some other adventure each week, and of course, as teevee cars go, KITT trumps the General Lee, every day of the week and multiple times upon the Sabbath. Knight Rider was more my speed, and it was so for a lot longer, than The Dukes of Hazzard. Oh, and by the time I realized that women were Teh Awesome, Knight Rider had Rebecca Holden. Whoa nellie!

And that, I believe, should do it for Ask Me Anything! August 2012. Hopefully my answers in February will be more quickly forthcoming! Thanks for the fine queries, folks. As ever, everything was thought provoking and fun to write about!

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Something for Thursday

From the John Willaims score to Superman, here is “Leaving Home”. The eerie music at the beginning comes just after Pa Kent’s funeral, when young Clark Kent finds the remnants of his ship from Krypton hidden in the barn cellar; this is followed by some of the most gorgeous Americana Williams ever wrote as Clark bids farewell to Ma Kent before heading north. Williams’s gift for melody in this phase of his career was so prolific that the wonderful theme that dominates the second half of this cue is heard in this one scene, and this one scene only.

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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