dramatic thoughts

Re-watching some season two Sandbaggers tonight, I figured out Yet Another Reason why drama more often floats my boat than comedy does.

(The first set of reasons, btw, involved me figuring out which kinds of humour I do and do not find funny — the latter category mapping with unfortunate closeness to the kinds of humour generally seen in modern American comedies.)

I really like watching characters do the thing they do well. I like competence. Whether it’s Burnside planning a mission or House diagnosing an illness or whatever, I can be happy just watching the clockwork go. Some of my favorite X-Files episodes were the ones where Mulder — who, after all, came out of the Behavioral Science Unit — dusted off his profiling skills to figure out what the bad guy was doing. Massive character drama is good, too, of course, but competence can be fun to watch.

And TV is a particularly good venue for it, since the episodic structure allows for repeated demonstrations of competence, instead of just the one big sequence a movie might have. But this, as I said, gives me another reason I don’t like sitcoms: they’re more likely to focus on the characters’ incompetence. I can find that fun, too, but only as a flavoring, not a main dish.

Should read about Mesoamerica tonight. Wanna watch more Sandbaggers. Whine whine whine.

there’s a bad joke to be made here

There’s something appallingly Orwellian about the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and the abuses it is used to cover. But if you’ve ever wondered how our intelligence agencies can get useful information out of detainees without torturing them, here’s how.

Critics of J.K. Rowling may be tempted to joke that the Harry Potter books are torture, but the real point is down in that last block quote. All it takes to “break” some people is kindness. And the intelligence you get in return is more reliable, not less — while also creating allies instead of enemies, bettering your national image, and generally behaving like a moral human being.

***

As long as I’m talking politics, I might as well also link to this set of asinine arguments against early voting. Seriously, most of this boils down to: 1) it’s better to be seen voting by your fellow citizens, 2) you might make an impulsive decision based on personal preference, 3) omg what if in the last week it turns out the guy you voted for kicks puppies but you’ve already cast your vote, 4) early-voting polls might influence people who vote later, and 5) if you can’t take some time on Election Day to go vote, screw you.

Cause, y’know, all those people working three jobs to make ends meet ought to be able to spare a couple of hours to stand in line.

The closest he comes to a legitimate argument is when he talks about the possibilities of voter fraud and non-secret ballots. But voter fraud is far from the imminent danger threatening to devour our sacred democracy that some make it out to be, and there are ways of handling those problems. Oregon votes 100% by mail-in ballot, and I haven’t noticed that state collapsing in a wave of corruption. Early voting, whether by mail or at polling places, increases voter turnout; I have trouble seeing that as a bad thing.

I know my problem.

I keep throwing out every opening I write for this thing because what the story really wants to do is open with the protagonist waking up from a dream.

But unfortunately for me and the story, that is a cardinal sin I don’t think I’m allowed to commit. It doesn’t matter if I produce the most brilliantly effective waking-up-from-a-dream opening that’s been seen these last ten years; too many editors will roll their eyes and chuck the manuscript without reading onward. And then readers, if I make it past an editor. Starting with a dream or the protagonist waking up is an unforgiveable cliche.

Dammit.

G. R. A. R. G. H.

Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick. I have managed to give myself enough of a mental hernia trying to leap a particular hurdle that I can’t even write this LJ post without stopping, starting, revising, deleting paragraphs, and generally replicating the exact problem I’m having with the aforementioned hurdle.

It’s like when you start paying attention to how you speak — whether you swear a lot or speak in sentence fragments or use “like” six times a second — and next thing you know, you can barely open your mouth for self-consciousness over what’s going to come out.

I am thinking too much about how first-person narration works, which is why I’ve managed to hamstring even my LJ-posting capabilities, let alone fiction. The usual remedy, which is to stop over-thinking it and just do it already, does not work in this case, because while the first-person narration I have is perfectly serviceable, I’m trying to kick it up another notch, and find this character’s distinctive voice. This is rendered difficult by the fact that the story in question is the Sekrit Revision Projekt, which has been around for a very long time. Convincing my brain the sentences need to go differently is like punching fog.

I’ve spent half this afternoon digging out every short story and novel in my library that uses first-person narration, in the hopes that beating my head against them will produce a breakthrough. So far, it’s produced nothing more than bruised brain-meats. It doesn’t help that the voice issue is tied up in how the story begins; I’ve more or less fixed the plot problems, but I still need a better beginning, and part of the bettering needs to be on the level of voice. But this isn’t the kind of first-person story where the narrator is self-consciously addressing the reader (or another character in the story), nor do I want it to be the kind of the tale where the beginning is framed in terms of hindsight — “When so-and-so first showed up, I didn’t know he’d be trouble,” or “The day my life changed forever, I was too busy playing with my cat to notice,” etc. It feels like a cheap and easy way to get the story in motion, and then you drop the hindsight effect after the first page or so. Lots of authors do that. I don’t want to. But I’m floundering around trying to figure out what I do want to do.

I recognize that, once I figure that out, and the voice, I will have dramatically improved this story, and probably my writing as a whole. This does not make flinging myself at the hurdle any more fun.

And we’ve reached a point where my brain is literally trying to stick squirrels into the opening paragraphs, as if they will somehow improve anything. Yes, details like squirrels are something this story needs, but they aren’t the key to the problem, O Subconscious. The squirrels can wait.

<beats head some more>

more linkage

I’m on a cleaning-up roll around here, which means, among other things, closing down some browser tabs.

Fans of Jane Austen will either die laughing, or maybe just die from aneurysms.

If you review books on your site, Diana Pharaoh Francis has teamed up with the folks at Grasping for the Wind to put together a book reviewers database. Head over there for details; the gist is, they’re trying to collate sf/f/h review sites, the better to connect reviewers with publishers and authors, and vice versa.

Interesting thoughts from Boston.com on how cities affect our brains. I’m sure the data’s being presented in a light designed to support the conclusions, but I still think there’s interesting info there, about stimulation and the effect of greenery on our mental states.

Sunset on Mars. I looked at it, thought “meh,” then realized I was judging it against sunset photos, with all their colorful glory. This isn’t about colorful glory; it’s about SUNSET on MARS. omgawesome. I never knew that Martian sunsets were blue.

Also, Flycon. Still in the planning stages, but the idea is that it’ll be an online convention, with panel discussions and so on. An interesting experiment, and I’m planning to participate.

I think that’s it for now.

Brits do TV right.

Whoever it was on my flist that mentioned enjoying the first episode of Jekyll: THANK YOU.

Okay, yeah, I wrote a novel called Doppelganger; I’m predisposed to like stories in this vein. But still. The British mini-series Jekyll is kind of awesome.

Some of it is standard-issue awesome, if that makes sense: good bits of dialogue, nicely twisty plot, and so on. But there’s also special-order awesome, like the lesbian PI couple, and the general sense that the female characters carry roughly half of the weight of the show, instead of being a couple of tokens running around for variety. I didn’t like Claire at first, and she fell down again a little bit toward the end, but she had a nice stretch in the middle there where she went from plot-fodder wife to an active agent in the plot. And that was very pleasing.

(The other thing that was awesome? I didn’t have to leave my house to make the magic moving pictures come to me. Netflix’s streaming option, via XBox Live, is da bomb.)

So, for those not aware, this is essentially a sequel to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, featuring a modern-day guy named Tom Jackman who’s got more than just your average case of split personality. He’s recently estranged from his wife and children (owing to his fear that his other side might, well, kill and eat them), and he’s being chased around by an evil organization that wants to do god knows what kind of experimentation on him, but there are enough wrenches thrown into that run-of-the-mill setup to keep it quite interesting. If I have one substantive complaint, it’s that I would have liked more than six episodes; I wholeheartedly agree that it’s better off as a mini-series than an ongoing thing, but another two or four episodes would have allowed for more exploration of the very interesting side characters. In particular, the way the opening scene plays made me expect Miss Reimer to have more central of a role, and I was mildly disappointed that she stayed pretty resolutely secondary.

James Nesbitt pulls off the major requirement of a role like this, which is to play a convincing difference between the two personalities. He’s helped along by minor prosthetics — altering his hairline, ears, chin, and eye color, since Hyde is not supposed to look exactly like Jackman — but the important thing is the behavior. David Boreanaz never did it well enough for my taste; Angelus, for me, mostly existed in the dialogue written for him, which Angel would never have spoken. Hyde’s got the dialogue, but he’s also got the change in pitch and tone and especially body language. Hyde moves differently than Jackman does. (He also goes through a pretty wide range of accents, for various reasons.) So props to him.

If you’ve seen this, please flag any spoilers in your comments, since I imagine a lot of people haven’t come across it yet.

There’s a box on my desk.

I have a box on my desk now, a box whose lid is sculpted into the shape of a pile of pens, and it has a Hemingway quote on the side that I disagree with, and I have put pens into it. It’s taking the place of the plastic Staples desk organizer my pens used to live in. Only that isn’t true; the organizer holds several other things (like rulers and pads of paper and my mini-stapler) that don’t fit into the Pen Box, not to mention more pens than the Pen Box can actually fit. So the plastic thing isn’t going away; it’s just moving onto the shelves behind me, where I don’t see it when I’m sitting at my computer, and in the meantime my Favored Pens get to live in the Pen Box on the desk, which makes me feel much more elegant and writerly because it’s not made of plastic.

This has no bearing on anything I actually do, but it feeds the ego and the self-image. As if I have upgraded my Writer Equipment, and by doing so, somehow upgraded a tiny piece of myself.

I figure, as long as I don’t forget how irrelevant this actually is — i.e. don’t fall into the consumerism trap — I’ll enjoy the illusion.

What do I have to lose?

I wasn’t going to do this because my odds of ending up on the Hugo list are vanishingly small, but what the heck. If you’re eligible to nominate for the Hugos, here’s what I’ve published in 2008 that you might consider:

Novel
Midnight Never Come

Short stories
“Lost Soul” — Intergalactic Medicine Show #7, January 2008
“Kiss of Life” — Beneath the Surface, ed. Tim Deal, 2008
“The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe” — Paradox #12, April 2008
“Beggar’s Blessing” — Shroud Magazine #2, 2008
“A Mask of Flesh” — Clockwork Phoenix, ed. Mike Allen, July 2008
“Kingspeaker” — Beneath Ceaseless Skies #3, November 2008
“A Heretic by Degrees” — Intergalactic Medicine Show #10, November 2008

Relevant links for all of the above can be found here.

OTC Medicine Anonymous

Today is sucking a little bit, because I’ve stopped taking medication. It’s a little masochistic, but a confluence of things over the last two months or so has had me downing a wide array of over-the-counter drugs, and I’m not real happy with that. So, time to detox. I’m moderately stuffed up and headachy and so on, but it’s subsided to a level I can live with, in trade for not pummeling my system with chemicals.

(Please note that I would not be doing this if I had in fact been diagnosed with strep; I would be taking my mold pills like a good little girl, because I am all about killing bacterial infections D-E-D, and in a manner which does not promote antibiotic resistance. But this appears to be a viral infection, so if I can live without clockwork doses of Advil, I will. I’m not feverish, just a bit achy.)

So. Lots of liquids is the order of the day.

I’m rather annoyed to have more or less lost my week to this business. I haven’t been completely unproductive, but the balance has swung much further toward that end of the spectrum than I’d like. Fortunately, my copy-edit for Ashes isn’t slated to arrive until early February, so I’ll have a chance to finish the things I wanted to do in January.

Oh! Speaking of which! I don’t think I’m on the website yet, but I will be at VeriCon at the end of the month. If you’re in the Boston area, come by Harvard for the fun.

three links for my fandom friends

Okay, so the truth is I just stole these wholesale from toft_froggy. But I know I’ve got people on my flist who think thinky thoughts about fanfic, and I suspect these links will provoke much thinky thoughtness for them.

What Started It All: thingswithwings posting about Merlin fandom and the ways in which fandom migrations occur. (Can I just say I love the phrase “fandom migrations”? The mental images are great.)

In Which the Comments Blew Up: various people pick apart reasons for participating in a fandom and what it means to say it’s “just for fun/pleasure.” (Okay, I didn’t read the whole thread, because there’s a bit where it explodes and I didn’t feel like following it. But I read the stuff I didn’t have to hit “expand” for.)

A Typological (Not Typical) Response: miriam_heddy sorts out patterns in the comments to the previous post — so you don’t have to! (Haven’t read the comments here, though. I only have so much time in my life.)

My take? I think there is a degree of social responsibility in choosing one’s fandom, because if giant flocks of ficcers descend upon a show, then it’s a form of positive feedback to the people who write and produce that show. And if they can attract massive fan interest despite being racist and sexist and what-have-you, then I do think it encourages more writing in that vein. (Or at the very least, it doesn’t encourage them to improve.) So I sympathize with thingswithwings‘s reaction, in the vein of, dude, what if we poured all this love and creative effort into stuff that doesn’t have those flaws? And I do not — sorry, folks — sympathize much with the “but life is hard and I watch this stuff for brainless fun” response, because if your brainless fun involves consuming intellectual poison (“women with power are eeeevil!,” frex), then yes, I’m going to judge you for that. Things can be fun and good. What a novel idea!

Huh. I must be getting over the Respiratory Bug of Suck Unidentified Viral Infection, if I have the energy to engage with this.

Edited to add: An excellent comment by cryptoxin, which very tidily (though with heavy use of academispeak) sums up the aspect I latched onto in the original post. Rather than making tempests in teacups about whether thingswithwings is just upset that everybody’s leaving her fandom for a new one, I wish more people would engage with this part of the question.

interesting linkies

For gollumgollum and all you others in the health-care field: an article on unlaundered scrubs and the transmission of bacteria. What I liked? Seeing Monroe Hospital in Bloomington held up as an example of how to prevent this problem.

For, well, anybody with a weird sense of humour and/or an appreciation for Edward Gorey: The Recently Deflowered Girl. (Some pages are funnier than others.)

For anybody pissed off at M. Night Shyamalan’s casting of lily-white actors for the live-action Avatar movie: addresses to complain at. The usefulness of complaining is, of course, very uncertain; but at least you can try.

For completing the schizophrenia of this link post: Change.org‘s ideas competition. Again, the usefulness is uncertain, but this is more than just a random web poll, and there are some very interesting ideas there. Also some that really don’t strike me as major priorities (do we really need to be worrying about dog breed-specific laws when there’s the Patriot Act going on?), and a bit of redundancy (spot how many candidate ideas have to do with the environment or marijuana!), but I got pointed at the competition because of the “End corporate personhood” idea, which is one of those random things that gets me all frothy at the mouth. So vote if you want to — you need to make a profile, but that’s quickly done — and while you’re there, if you want to click on the thingy for ending corporate personhood, know that it’ll put a smile on my face.

happy bookday to Jim Hines!

If I hadn’t been struck down yesterday by the Respiratory Bug of Suck, I would totally have gone to a bookstore today to buy Jim Hines’ new novel The Stepsister Scheme. Curse you, cold!

No, really. I enjoyed Jim’s goblin books, but this time he’s gotten away from those icky little blue guys and gone on to princesses! NINJA PRINCESSES! Which are, as everyone knows, the best kind.

Okay, so, yeah, this time he’s written a book so far up my alley it would be in my house if only I had the energy to go buy it. But if ninja princesses aren’t a big enough selling point on their own (what’s wrong with you people?), then I can also vouch for the author’s sense of humour and ability to play interestingly within the rules of the story-paradigm he’s exploring. Last time that was D&D-style fantasy; this time, it’s fairy tales, with Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella going all Charlie’s Angels on their problems. I do not know yet if there are any villains as awesome as Maleficent, but if not — hey! jimhines! Get on that!

I’m tempted to just let Amazon deliver it to my door, thus saving me a trip to the bookstore, but that would be going against my own advice, so I’ll have to wait a bit longer before I can read this one. But those of you who aren’t ill? You have no excuse.

Dude, this thing is HUGE.

I know that by the standards of modern monitor-dom, what’s sitting in front of me is kind of old-fashioned and poky. But there’s a 19-inch LCD on my desk now, and man, it’s going to take a while to get used to it.

Many thanks to kurayami_hime, who couriered it from Dallas, and to my parents, who donated it to the cause of bringing their daughter’s computer setup into the 21st century.

I can see, like, an entire page in Wordperfect now. Seeing as how I write in 12-point Times New Roman instead of standard manuscript format largely because it allows me to see more of the text at once, this is a non-trivial benefit. Also, there’s no longer a monitor stand taking up a chunk of desk — this one sits high enough on its own — and while I’ll miss the middle-shelf space the stand provided, it’s probably a good thing, given my propensity for losing things into the dusty back reaches of that shelf. Hey, now I’ve got space to put a book on the desk in front of me! Such luxury we have here at Castle N, Home Office Edition.

The cleaning of the Augean office got about four-fifths done and then stalled; I do need to finish it. But not tonight, nor tomorrow neither — not with the stupid respiratory bug that has camped out in my sinuses. My energy is reserved for getting some revision done tonight.

Mush!

I am shamelessly stealling Mrissa’s phrasing for this meme.

I have seen this elsewhere, but phrased in terms of force, and you are all, I feel sure, too inherently polite and too cognizant of your own bodily safety to ever want to force me to do anything. So I will ask it more politely:

If you could urge, persuade, or ask me to write any particular thing, what would it be?

London, after the apocalypse

Words cannot express the weirdness of this photo set.

Some of the places in it, I’ve never been. Others I’ve passed through — like Oxford Circus — but they’re not very familiar to me. But New Bridge Street? Fleet Street? I can point out the corner bookshop, tell you where the post office is, and how many blocks it is to Wasabi, where they have really cheap yakisoba. Which I traditionally eat on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral. I’ve gotten lunch in the crypt of this church, and walked through this underpass more times than I can count. This is the London I know — but not.

Words cannot express how bizarre it is to see those places utterly devoid of people. I’ve been there on a Sunday morning, when the City is mostly closed for business and so very few people are in sight, but “very few” and “none” are not the same thing. It’s as if the apocalypse happened, and this is London in the moments before nature begins to reclaim it.

I’d love to see similar photos of Boston, New York, other heavily populated areas — but I’m not sure you could ever catch them quite that deserted, even on a Christmas morning.

Consider.

A person with sangfroid.

A cold-blooded person.

Same denotation — but the connotations are so very, very different.

give me pulp adventure!

I have a yen right now for good pulp adventure fantasy. Things in the vein of Indiana Jones (the good films) or The Mummy. Things with ancient ruins and ancienter curses, heroic heroes and heroicer heroines, exotic settings, whip-cracking action, and the like. Books, movies, graphic novels — I don’t much mind what form it comes in. Slight preference for modern renditions of the genre, since I like actual characterization and female characters who aren’t just there to scream and get into trouble.

Recommend to me!

what I have done so far in 2009

Spent time at a party with some new friends and some people I hope might become friends.

Slept in.

Made plans for dinner with old friends.

Ate macaroni and cheese, my favorite comfort food.

Come up with some ideas for ANHoD.

Watched the end of season one of House with kniedzw.

Taken a hot bath.

Done research on Mesoamerica for “Chrysalis.”

Revised part of the Sekrit Revision Projekt.

They say you should begin as you mean to go on; I’m pretty happy with how it’s gone so far.

Hi, 2009. I’m looking forward to getting to know you.

Things I am eagerly anticipating in 2009:

1) President Barack Hussein Obama.

2) The release of In Ashes Lie.

Other stuff too, but those stick out particularly.

I don’t generally make resolutions, and I’m not going to make any right now, though you could argue that there’s only a semantic difference between that and what I am about to do, which is to talk more generally about a goal.

I’d like to get my discipline back.

Dear Friends Who Think I Am Ridiculously Disciplined Already: Thanks. I appreciate it. But I see all too clearly the ways in which I am not, some of which used to not be true. If there’s something I need to do — particularly something overdue — that I don’t feel like facing, then I avoid it like an avoidant thing, which does not in fact make the problem go away. If I don’t have a contract or deadline holding me on course, I flit from project to project, to the clear detriment of my productivity. And since I go to work at the end of my day instead of the beginning, it’s very easy for me to put off my start time — after all, I can just stay up later, and then sleep in tomorrow morning. The work gets done, but not in a sensible fashion.

I want my discipline back.

There’s no point in trying to set a year-long goal for that; the markers are too subjective. Let me say instead that I’d like to get three things done in January:

1) Revise the Sekrit Revision Projekt
2) Write “Chrysalis”
3) Work on ANHoD.

Leaving that third one vague because ANHoD is an unfinished spec project from two years ago that I’m only playing with while I wait for my marching orders on the novel front. My brain handed me some ideas for it this afternoon, though, so I might as well let it be my play project for now. If I don’t commit to that, I’ll flit around not committing to anything until the marching orders arrive, and the intervening time will be wasted.

So. A short story, a revision, and some fun.

I can do that.

last one!

Obviously I didn’t make it to twelve recommendations this year, but I realized today that I hadn’t gotten around to my annual Diana Wynne Jones rec. So this time it’s Archer’s Goon, which, while not in my first tier of favorites, is in about the first-and-a-halfth tier.