Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

The Doom of Men

Author: jsomers June 2, 2010

That's Mr. Merlin to You

It is The Doom of Men That They Forget.Ah, there is much that the movie Excalibur can teach us, isn’t there? Perhaps you have not seen the movie, in which case I don’t understand you, but that’s beside the point—I don’t understand most people, and spend my life terrified and suspicious. Don’t judge me; you bastards prove me right so often it’s ridiculous.

Anyway, I am not here to bemoan the way you all frighten me with your slang, musky odors, and political beliefs—lord knows I’ve written that article before, several times, and will write it again. No, I’m here to tell you about the time I went to see Batman. No, not the new Batman. The first Batman movie that changed entertainment as we know it, the one starring Michael fucking Keaton (twenty goddamn years later and I still can’t believe it) and Jack Nicholson.

So, it’s 1989. I’m between high school and my first year of college, my liver is still normal-sized and I still know several dozen folks I haven’t spoken to since 1989, and I don’t know several people I know now. Which makes no sense, but let it drift. Batman was the big movie that summer; I think every kid I knew was at the theater that night. The place was a madhouse. People had brought beach balls, which were tossed around the theater. Half of us were drunk, which is of course a scandal—that it was only half (I am personally committed to endrunkening the world, as I am convinced this will lead to world peace, the singularity, and my own independent wealthiness). There was a buzz of energy in the air, like we were all expecting to be sucked up into the air, like the rapture was about to happen.

There is a peculiar moment in life when you’re seventeen, eighteen years old and you actually believe that the swill the entertainment industry is serving you means something aside from extracting a few dollars from your pocket and even more for their craptacular snacks. You think it’s an event that will resonate throughout time, or at least throughout your own existence. Decades later, you imagine you’ll be stopped in the street by reporters who want to know where you were when Batman came out.

Ah, youth.

Anyway, it was a party. The movie started and we cheered and afterwards the consensus was that this was the greatest movie evah.

Looking back on the movie 20 years, you gotta ask if part of that reaction was hype, was feeling like you’d just taken part in a shared chunk of awesomeness. The answer: Absolutely. I saw the 1989 Batman again recently, and that is one fucking awful movie.

Even taking into consideration my expanded movie lexicon, maturity, and the fact that I now have a gleeful Heath Ledger in my brain, the Batman ’89 is a mess, ruined by Tim Burton’s hyper-artificial set design, Jack Nicholson’s fey over-acting, and Kim Basinger’s gravity well of talentlessness. I may be in the minority here, but if I could travel back in time and change one thing, I think I’d skip this movie.

Maybe kill Hitler. But most likely skip Batman ’89.

NOTHING LASTS

It’s funny how time erodes everything down to its core. If the core is good, it’ll survive. If the core sucks, it’s history, or grist for a remake or “reboot”. Nothing lasts. The shelf life of a movie these days is about 10 years, which is roughly the time it takes for the next generation of snot-nosed kids to age into ticket-buying, at which point anything that predates their own existence is considered lame until they turn about 35, when suddenly some of them will discover otherwise. And since Hollywood ran out of new ideas the day Star Wars was released, the only thing that matters now is whether they can convince you to pay $10 for the ticket. A movie you’ve seen fifteen times, own on DVD, or consider a lame relic from your parents’ day? Probably not gonna happen. A remake starring Angie Jolie’s tits and a soundtrack by Trent Reznor? Giddy-up.

Science-Fiction movies are all the rage on the ‘reboot” merry-go-round these days, possibly because for decades Sci-Fi movies were treated like something Hollywood stepped in and couldn’t scrape off its shoe, leaving us with dozens and dozens of movies with great ideas and terrible low-budget excuses for sets and costumes. These kinds of films are easy enough to remake, and there’s added value in it for people, too, because they get to see the story done “properly”, with effects and A-list actors and all that. Add to that the possibility of drawing in older fans who don’t go to movies much but who might recall the originals with nostalgia, and it’s a workable formula. Workable because the collective memory of the movie-going public wipes itself every 10 years.

As a result, whatever movie you just saw that rocked your world, forget it. You will. Eventually it will be remade with younger, fresher actors who have just been born and a revamped script, more recent pop-culture references and era-appropriate technological devices as props. You’ll be sucked into attending a screening because of a relentless marketing campaign that reminds you of how great you think the original was, as your memories are vague, and before you know it the only version of Casablanca you can remember is the 2017 version starring Macaulay Culkin in his big comeback. Because it is the doom of men that they forget.

REBOOT HELL

Of course, what happens to a culture when it stops creating new material and just rehashes existing plots, characters, and tropes? What happens when we stop creating Star Trek, The Original Series and settle for Star Trek by That Guy Who Created Lost? Which was a fine movie, I think – though ask me again in 20 years. One could argue that we’ve all been remaking the same plots for thousands of years anyway, with the same basic characters, and all that’s ever changed are the names, the props, and the settings, and possibly some of the mechanics as technology and culture change. In one sense, sure—everything’s either a story about murder, theft, unrequited love, requited love, war, god, or zombies. Mostly zombies.

I think the safety net here is the tendency for folks to create their own counter-programming. Big Entertainment has to keep churning out the goods to keep fannies in the seats, but there will always be a disaffected group of folks who can’t swallow it and who therefore create their own media to entertain themselves. And thank god for them, because they’re laying the foundation for the future reboots of the world. Damn kids.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Never Show the Monster

Author: jsomers May 24, 2010

What will I write about now that Lost is over and done? Especially since I think Lost may have scared me off of episodic TV with overarching mythologies forever. The Prisoner didn’t do it, Twin Peaks didn’t do it, The X Files didn’t do it. But I think Lost will be the show that convinced me to never waste my time on any sort of entertainment that has longevity as a goal. In short, if the creators have a stake in making as many episodes as possible, I think I’ll wait for the DVD set. If the consensus is that it was handled well from beginning to end, I’ll take a chance.

Because, frankly, the finale of Lost almost ate my will to live.

I won’t go into gory details about how I despised that ending. Some of you might have enjoyed it, but really, for me it was terrible. Despite the dangling plot points and unanswered mysteries everyone is complaining about (which now pretty clearly were simply cool plot twists they threw in without any idea of how to resolve them), I don’t think the problem with the final season was too little explanation. It was too much explanation. They gave us two supernatural, godlike beings: Jacob and Smokey. Immortal. They each have distinct abilities and oppose each other. Despite the fact that both seem to lack a certain value for human life, one is painted as more or less ‘good’, whereas Smokey is painted a evil evil evil, with it plainly stated that if he got off the island he would destroy the world at large.

And that’s where the explanation should have stopped. Every detail we got about these two beyond that set up was a mistake.

It’s like a bad horror movie: You’re vaguely intrigued and possibly scared as long as the monster stays off-screen. Horrific details and people screaming for mercy while their entrails splatter the screen is all you need to get into the mood of the movie. Then they give you a nice lingering shot of the monster, and it’s a guy in a rubber suit with chocolate syrup all over him, and you can never take the movie seriously again. If they’d kept Jacob and Smokey vague, elemental-type characters – good and evil, one trying to escape to the world, the other trying to prevent him, with the castaways simultaneously providing Smokey with a way off and Jacob with new acolytes – the story would have been stronger, and there would have been a lot more time to explore the other aspects of the mystery. And I’ll guarantee the climax would have been tighter and made more sense.

When they tried to clarify Jacob and Smokey, things got silly. A golden light. A donkey wheel. Two squabbling brothers. Meh. In the back of my mind their back story was pretty awesome and badass, which it would have remained if it had been allowed to stay in the back of my mind, instead of replaced by the insipid, cheaply dressed scenes they gave us. I mean, they’d established the basics very early on: Jacob, Smokey, the Others – all they had to do was have Richard, the other immortal character, explain that Smokey was trying to escape and needed, somehow, to trick the castaways into helping him, and the rest of the story is a thrilling one about people choosing sides, making deals, double-crossing each other, and finally having a kickass confrontation to settle everything. Instead, we got bogged down by a golden light, a stone cork, and an alternate universe that was just Jack’s purgatory or dying hallucination or similar such bullshit.

And all, I am convinced, because they made the terrible decision to show the monsters.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Writing: Necessary Laziness

Author: jsomers May 13, 2010

Folks, I am a lazy, lazy man. Unless it involves booze, I don’t like to put much effort into things. Take grooming, for instance: Haircuts, shaving, dry cleaning your clothes, all generally too much effort for Your Humble Author here. If I could find a way to combine booze with those activities – booze for me, mind you; I don’t need some drunk bastard cutting my hair – I’d be a happy man. And probably rich once I sell the franchise rights.

About the only thing I’m usually not too lazy about is writing, but this is because writing has always been fun and easy for me, pretty much in the same category as drinking – hey, if only I could combine those two NO NO NO that way lies madness. Sometimes when writing, though, you have to be lazy, kind of on purpose, you know? LEt’s face it, real life is a pretty huge dataset. The number of details that go into just one person’s every day experience while wandering this globe searching for free drinks and tasty sandwiches is staggering, and if you actually tried to capture all of those details in a story, even a story that takes exactly one minute of time to unfold, your story would like be about twenty-seven volumes long.

Thus, laziness. A great example is the popular-with-the-kids-these-days Zombie Apocalypse story, which almost always focusses on the whole thing about killing zombies and rebuilding civilization while calmly ignoring the fact that you’d probably starve to death long, long before the zombies broke down your door. Zombie stories are lazy about the food issue because it’s the only reaction that makes sense – no one wants story about the urgent need to find a can opener, say, or the moral quandry of murdering your dog in order to eat him. So, Zombie Apocalypse stories usually have abandoned supermarkets filled with foodstuffs for our survivors to gorge on, when in reality every time it rains more than two inches here in Hoboken the local supermarket is an empty, ransacked shell. I mean, seriously, if the news started reporting a zombie fucking apocalypse the supermarket would be completely devoid of edibles within about twenty seconds. Or, the story will have the survivors hunting and farming like in the good old days, which makes a lot more sense, except for the lazy convenience of having your survivors – almost always in a major metropolitan area – know how in fuck to hunt, skin, and butcher animals or farm anything. Not a terrible stretch, but I for one would be found dead with two cans of tuna in my hands and bloody fingernails before I figured out how to grow something in my backyard.

Or, take Lost for example (no spoilers here, don’t worry). The most recent episode, which gave us the extended backstory of Jacob and Smokey, was set in some undefined past, and the characters were all dressed in a sort of rustic ancient style by way of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars Episode IV. The costumes are cheesy and vague, and evoke exactly no culture or historical period ever in the history of ever. They are the laziest costumes I’ve ever seen in my entire life (the whole episode annoyed and disappointed me, but that rant is for later, after the series ends and I have a better perspective). But, I can see why, maybe, that decision was made: Because a) the story is maybe meant to be a parable and not taken literally, or b) because they don’t want to distract us with questions about whether, say, ancient Romans or Egyptians would do something. Keeping it vague gives them latitude to do whatever they want. Thus, the lazy costumes are necessary.

Or, maybe just lazy. Figuring out what’s a necessary laziness and what’s just lazy is not easy, even when you’re writing. I’ve had plenty of moments where an editor hands back a manuscript and tells me I need to spend more time and energy on a sequence, and when I lok back on it I can see pretty clearly that I was impatient to get past that spot and glossed over everything too quickly. It’s easy to be lazy when you can see everything clearly in your own head, and forget that people can’t read you mind and see all the details as clearly as you do.

Now, all this talk of booze has made me hungry. The food not so much. To paraphrase Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, food just makes me sick.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing, Writing

Gamer, or Why Do They Hate Us

Author: jsomers May 11, 2010

Continuing in my apparently ongoing series of posts wherein Jeff Watches Lame Recent Sci-Fi Movies and Complains About the Writing, I watched the truly, awesomely terrible movie Gamer starring Gerard Butler, who talks like he’s got golfballs in his mouth and obviously needs a new agent. Not many folks bothered to catch this one in the theaters, which speaks well of humanity as a whole, but I was mildly intrigued. This was definitely one of those movies that I knew would not be good but hoped to find some intriguing kernel of delicious smarts somewhere under the bloated Hollywood bullshit. I was sadly disappointed.

Well, okay, there was one moment of demented genius, but we’ll get to that.

The basic plot: In the future, the prison system is on the brink of collapse as there are so many criminals the USA can’t find the money to support them. Enter this guy (I do not have sufficient respect for this movie to remember character names) who has invented nanotechnology that allows people to be remote-controlled via the Internet. Basically, they get loaded with nanobytes that mutate their brain cells and then accept wireless commands. He first creates a “game” called Society which is basically Second Life except the avatars are real live people who are paid to be controlled, and where folks remotely act out their fantasies. Then he creates Slayers, where he takes the entire US prison system off the hands of the government and death-row criminals can volunteer to play a First-Person Shooter type game as the actual avatars, or as unarmed “collateral damage” type people programmed to just wander aimlessly while everyone is shooting. A Slayer gets freed from prison if he/she survives 30 games, a collateral-damage person gets freed if they survive one. People log in remotely, select their “avatar”, and get to kill real-live people.

Naturally, there are secrets. Butler plays the most popular Slayer, who is ‘owned’ by a rich teenager. He’s been wrongly imprisoned, of course, and his wife has lost custody of their daughter and been forced to work in Society as, basically, a whore. Players select her as an avatar, dress her up any way they like, then prance her around Society until some other avatar decides to fuck her. Very sad and dystopian. Butler has secret knowledge, of course, which he makes absolutely no reference to throughout the film until other characters explain it to him, meaning his character is either the Stupidest Man Alive or the nanotech causes some severe brain damage, take your pick.

Anyway, that’s all you need of the plot. This entire movie is an example of Buzz Word Script Writing. BWSW is when a story is constructed from poorly-understood terms or phenomena the screenwriter doesn’t know much about; they watch a few YouTube vids, read a few Wikipedia articles, make a list of buzz words, and then tell whatever crapass story they come up with, sure to sprinkle the buzz words everywhere to give it a sheen of currency. Someone heard vaguely about Second Life and First-Person Shooters, and over some good drugs one night they had one of those “Dude, what if the people in Second Life were, like, real fucking people.” and there was a moment of stunned silence. Then everyone began snorting coke and drinking tequila, and three hours later there was a script.

I swear to you: That’s how these scripts get written.

Naturally, of course, they don’t really understand the appeal of either, and they are so far removed from the user bases of either that they assume, stupidly, that the people who play FPS games or who get involved with stuff like Second Life are assholes. Basically, they assume the potential audience for their movie are assholes and proceed to insult them through the course of the entire film. The FPS gamers are represented by an obnoxious teenaged kid of privilege. The Society players are represented by a grossly fat man in a motorized chair who is your typical Hollywood Gross Fat Guy (HGFG), which means he apparently doesn’t wash and has no moral basement whatsoever, because Hollywood thinks fat people are not simply unhealthy or unlucky, but rather EVIL. That’s how the film’s producers/writers see y’all: You play with computers, therefore you are either vapid and shallow, or gross and fat and unloved by society.

Cheers.

The movie is made of fail, but there is one part of the story that is really badly handled from a writing standpoint: The secondary villain. The hero of the piece is, naturally, a Badass. He’s survived dozens of these games because he’s ex-military and of course has a noble goal (getting out, clearing his name, regaining his family) so of course he’s the toughest guy in the room (and inexplicably world-famous; this movie makes the classic mistake of trying to convince us that the Slayers game and its main characters are HUGE worldwide celebrities, while showing us a game that is about as interesting and exciting as watching Gerard Butler swallow those golf balls in his mouth). That’s fine. The main villain is the exact opposite: Nerdy, decadent, rich and powerful financially and politically but weak physically. That’s fine, too, and makes for a classic, if slightly tired, combination. About halfway through the story they introduce a secondary villain who the main villain plants in prison to finally kill the hero, and he’s introduced on a video screen as a sweating, trembling black man, all bulging muscles and barely-contained anger. They fill the screen with his ominous, hate-filled face and linger on his muscular, aggressive body. One of his first acts in prison is to murder someone just for the hell of it and then taunt the hero about how he’s going to kill him and then rape his family.

And then: The secondary villain does absolutely nothing worth nothing. He’s the worst villain ever in the history of bad movies. He just fails and fails and fails, and very quickly is reduced to a joke. If I thought this was perhaps the whole point of his character, that would have been OK, I suppose, but they clearly introduce him as a genuine menace, and then couldn’t figure out how to have him be actually menacing without ruining their shaky, barely-there plot, forcing them to, you know, think about plot mechanics and such. So they give this guy a huge buildup, make you think the hero’s in for it now, and then … nothing.

Finally, we do have one bright moment. The main villain, as you recall, had mind-controlling nanotech injected into all these people, and when the hero arrives at his mansion for some revenge – worst plan ever, as HE IS FILLED WITH MIND-CONTROLLING NANOTECH – ahem, he encounters the villain and about a dozen other death-row inmates. Instead of simply launching his puppets at the hero (OR, SAY, SIMPLY USING THE MIND-CONTROLLIN NANOTECH TO FORCE THE HERO TO KILL HIMSELF) the villain begins a song and dance number with the inmates as his mind-controlled backup dancers. I kid you not. A little silly, yes, but also kind of brilliant: He’s a rich genius bent on taking over the world, and for months in the story he’s had complete mindfuck power over all these people. It makes sense that he’s batshit, and cruel. It’s a fun scene, like finding a cheeseburger still in the wrapper in a dumpster outside a Johnny Rockets.

Whew. I’m exhausted.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Pandorum

Author: jsomers May 4, 2010

Apparently, there will be an ongoing series of posts where I discuss a movie I saw recently. This will usually happen when I’m pissed off about some really lazy writing, but I suppose it might also happen when I’m blown away by the writing, too. It’s just that simmering resentment after you’ve spent 94 minutes of your life on a story that could have been good inspires more words than pleasant enjoyment does.

So: Pandorum. Came out last year to little fanfare, got some mildly non-negative reviews I dimly remember, and is now on Cable TV, so I watched it. The basic no-spoiler premise is: In the future, the world is spiraling out of control with overpopulation and global warfare. So they put 60,000 people into “hypersleep” and send them on a huge motherfucking spaceship on a 123-year journey to the only Earth-like planet ever discovered, called Tanis. Two members of the flight crew suddenly wake up from their hypersleep, suffering temporary short-term memory loss from their lengthy induced comas, and find the ship seemingly abandoned, in a sad state of disrepair, and themselves unable to raise anyone on the radio. Plus there are frequent power surges indicating that the nuclear reactor is going to fail.

There may be spoilers from this point on, kids, so if ye fear spoilers and foresee a scenario where you watch this bad movie, be warned.

So: The first 30 minutes or so are actually promising. There’s a decent sense of dread as the two crew members struggle to make sense of what’s happening, and the introduction, early on, of humanoid hunter creatures who infest the huge ship hunting down humans as they wake up from their hypersleep is a bit derivative, but effectively handled. It’s one of those movies that comes down to the revelation of the mysteries, and there was potential for some really cool mysteries, man. The problem is, they tried to cram about 500 mysteries into one story, and fucked them all up.

Mystery One is what are the creatures hunting everyone on the ship, and how they got there. That it’s obvious that they are in fact a portion of the 60,000 passengers, mutated somehow, is minimized by the fact that the story makes this pretty apparent early on. The main problem with this mystery is the simple fact that it exists, because the whole damn story would have been much better without it. Seriously. Some moron decided they couldn’t sell a sci-fi horror movie without human-eating alien creatures, so they dumped a box filled with human-eating aliens into the story. Now, the idea that these creatures have been waking people up from hypersleep and devouring them alive just as they’re waking up is indeed kind of creepy and horrifying, but the story would have been stronger, tighter, and more interesting without this third-rate Alien ripoff of a plotline.

Mystery Two is what really pisses me off: What happened to the ship? It’s the size of a city, has facilities and space for 60,000 people, and looks like its been through a war. I’ll grant another smart move in that the characters figure out early on that they may very well have been asleep much, much longer than the 123 years the trip was supposed to have taken, and this is a really intriguing question. There are apocalyptic hints that the Earth was destroyed in a cataclysm some time after the ship launched, which indicates that there was some sort of mass psychosis or something – Hypersleep Sickness is known as Pandorum, apparently, in case you’re wondering about the title. Remove the stupid monsters and stick with survivors creeping through a dead ship gathering clues as to what’s happened, and you’ve got a tense, creepy story. Instead, because of the many fight and chase scenes involving the fucking retarded monsters, they cram this mystery’s denouement into one gloriously infodumpy scene where a character introduced moments before inexplicably knows everything that happened, and just tells us. The fact that the explanation is, in fact, an idea that has potential is just an extra kick in the balls. If they’d actually written a better story and found a way to give us these revelations organically it might have been really affecting and fascinating.

Mystery Three involves that fucking title again: Pandorum. Space Madness, basically, established early on in the film as a real disease with symptoms and everything. Symptoms the two initial characters both exhibit at different times. It’s such a repeated thread in the story you start to think it’s going to mean something, and in a way I suppose it does, as it serves as the explanation, ultimately, of what happens. But on the other hand, it also fucks everything up, because there’s a clear implication, towards the end, that maybe a lot of what’s been happening is just inside once of the character’s pandorum-addled mind. And holy shit, that one little throwaway bit of business borks everything, because there is literally no support built into the story for that subtle twist. Usually when stories build up to a “it’s all in his head” climax, there’s a Sixth-Sensing in the background, all the little details that now fall into a different order and convince you that, yes, this makes sense now. There’s none of that here.

Maybe I’m overthinking the last bit; After all, it’s a flash and a line at the end. Maybe it’s the remnant of an older script or edit, where that was the intended twist. The real problem here is the obsession with the twist ending. Everyone loves twists, sure. And most people like a good mindfuck movie where the rug is pulled out from under you at the end and you free fall into a new understanding of all that went before – but this movie seemed like the twist was the whole point, and everything else is just padding so they can hold out on the twist until minute 90. And, frankly, the story would again have been stronger without the twist. If they had just stated what was going on, it’s a creepy premise. While this appears to be standard Hollywood Hackery, as a writer it’s good to remind yourself that sometimes the clever bit isn’t really worth keeping.

I’ve definitely been guilty at time of keeping a “clever bit” in a story even after the story grows beyond it, simply because I was so impressed to have come up with the clever bit in the first place. Being able to recognize when it is the very clever bit that inspired you that is now killing your story is good kung fu to have; sadly, Hollywood, as a whole, doesn’t have it. probably because movies are greenlighted because of the clever bit, and removing it also probably removes the funding.

Sigh. Oh well. Nothing is a complete waste: There’s good stuff to steal in Pandorum. You could walk away with 5 decent story ideas just from the unexplored threads this movie leaves behind, and five more from the wrong turns the “twists” throw in there. Have it.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing, Writing

Ambrose Bierce Probably Had It Right

Author: jsomers April 21, 2010

Hot damn, I’ve been busier than a cat on a hot tin roof. Normally, Your Humble Author here likes to move at a stately pace, a princely sort of slow motion that affords plenty of time for dignity, breath-catching, and refreshment. As a young lad playing Little League Baseball in Jersey City, I learned a valuable lesson: When I try to move fast, I look awkward, and sweat copiously. So I always try to keep my pace steady. Otherwise you might spill your drink.

Recently, though, that’s been hard to do. I’ve just had a lot of physical-labor type work to do recently (the joys of home ownership) leaving me with a lot less time to do my usual. As some of you know, I try to write a short story every month (well, try is a bad word for what is really a compulsion). Forcing yourself to write stories means you grab onto any piece of inspiration that floats by, and you worry about how good it is later. Usually years later, because fresh prose is pretty vitriolic and might explode in your face while you’re handling it. You also can’t think too hard about the provenance of ideas: In other words, write the damn story and worry about how original it is later.

First off, just because someone else had an idea first doesn’t mean you can’t do it better. And second: There is nothing new under the sun, only things we didn’t know about before. Trust me: The chances that the central idea in your latest story has been done somewhere, some time before are pretty goddamn good. People have been writing, in all languages and cultures, for thousands of years. You’re simply not smart enough to outsmart the rest of the world. The flip side of that is when you have a story you really like and think it’s got that certain something to become a great story, a sold story, and then … someone else beats you to the idea.

My best example of this is actually a novel I wrote some years ago. I like this novel; not sure it ever would have sold, but I like it nonetheless. It involves a force of human marines securing an alien planet in order to extract vital resources from it, while fighting and subduing the indigenous race, and eventually everyone realizes that the planet itself has a consciousness.

Right: Basically Avatar. Except in mine, the aliens are horrible, screaming demon-like creatures who tear the marines to pieces. Still, if I tried to market this book now a lot of folks would likely think I was just copying James Cameron, and I would die of shame.

The only way to handle shit like this is to shrug it off and take your base: There is simply no way to avoid occasionally sharing your ideas with other folks in the universe. As a matter of fact, a lot of books and movies out there are just riffs on old ideas anyway – there’s nothing weird about that. And since there’s some question about just how great the plot of Avatar is, anyway, maybe I should be happy that my novel remains in my desk drawer, unseen. Thanks, universe!

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Watching Technology Pass You By

Author: jsomers April 16, 2010

Y’know, since 1986 I’ve submitted 1167 short stories. Believe it: One thousand, one hundred, sixty-seven short stories. I was just preparing five more to go out today and discovered that four of the five markets I’m submitting to require paper submissions. Which means I have to print out a copy of the story, print out a cover letter, get a manila envelope for the whole enchilada and a regular #10 with stamp for the SASE. The waste of paper and time is immense.

John Scalzi, god bless ‘im, has stated categorically on his site that he doesn’t mess with paper submissions any more, and in spirit I agree: This is frickin’ 2010. The excuses and explanations as to why a magazine doesn’t accept email subs are ludicrous, and fall into one basic category when you parse them closely enough: The editors of these magazines simply do not like email submissions. They may gas on and on about printing costs (unnecessary) how difficult it is to read on screen (2000 words? Really, Mr. Magoo?) and, unbelievably, how difficult it is to share an electronic sub with other editors. Yes, you read that right: An electronic file is more difficult to pass on to readers than a pile of paper.

So, as I’m getting paper cuts and searching for stamps, I’m grousing and thinking how I would have been done with my subs an hour ago if I could have simply typed up a cover email, attached a file, and clicked send. Grouse, grouse, grouse. Mmmmn, Famous Grouse is damn fine whiskey . . . But I’m still doing it, because I still dream of selling short stories. There’s a glamour to it as far as I’m concerned. Certainly no money, but whenever I sell a short story I feel like F. Scott Fitzgerald for a moment. Plus, I’ve got a lot of stories. I write them constantly, for my own satisfaction, and once they’re done some of them stay with me and I decide to try and do something with them. No use in leaving them in notebooks for the Alien Archaeologists of the future to discover and puzzle over.

I’m not exactly George Jetson with the technology, either. Not only do I not have a smartphone of any kind, I don’t even own a cell phone for personal use. A lot of new thingies leave me cold and I’m fairly slow to get on the various bandwagons that our glorious computer companies trot out every year – but let’s be serious. Email was invented seven hundred years ago. If you’re worried about attachments, let us paste plain text in. For god’s sake, it is the twenty-first century. We may not have transporters and replicators, but by god we have electronic mail.

Enough ranting. I’m still mailing the subs when I have to. I’m just amazed. A few years ago I managed 107 submissions in one year, and that was when I was still typing everything on a manual typewriter and making photocopies to send everywhere, believe it or not. The thought of doing that many paper subs today makes me feel sleepy and irritated, so every time I find a new story market that takes email subs, I rejoice. As should you.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing

The Trouble with Awards

Author: jsomers April 6, 2010

First, a disclaimer: I have never won a Major Award for my writing. Or a Minor One. Or, say, an award of any kind. I am not bitter about this. Plenty of genius goes unrecognized in this sad world, and I have the warm comfort of booze to get me through the lonely nights in my office that is completely devoid of awards. Fuck it. I am not bitter.

Of course, they just announced The Hugo Awards (quick scan . . . nopes, not there) which is what makes me think of this topic. Would I like to win a Hugo? Sure. But here’s the curious thing: I look back on the list of Hugo Award-winning books, and I find I haven’t read quite a number of them. And, for a surprising number of those titles, frankly have no desire to (“The Wanderer” by Fritz Leiber comes to mind). It isn’t just Hugos, either – I once read through a list of movies that won Best Picture Oscars, and the same situation was apparent: I hadn’t seen a large proportion of the films, and I had zero desire to rectify that situation.

Now, I am but one slimly talented and somewhat endrunkened author, so my personal failing to absorb my own culture is not proof of anything. Hell, man, my existence is not proof of anything. All I know is, just about every single list of major awards is pretty much a snoozefest for me, and usually the further back you go, the less interested in the winners I become. This doesn’t have anything to do with time; the last two books I read were published in 1931 and 1972. I think it’s just perspective: The movie that won Best Picture last year still has that unvarnished sheen of Proven Quality to it, whereas something from a bit further back – say, Gladiator – has had that sheen scraped off and stands there shivering and alone like a drunk coed waiting for a bus after a Frat Party: Not nearly as attractive as it appeared earlier. I’ve seen it on TV too many times and I know all the seams, all the terrible line readings, all the logic problems with the plot.

You see, the simple fact is I don’t think these awards are really very good at sussing out what’s really good. Now, if I ever win a Major Award I will remove this post and burn down my own house to remove any evidence that I ever said that, because if I win a Major Award you are going to hear about it. I’ll have T-Shirts made, I’ll call you up every five minutes to remind you, and I will make sure that every cover of my books is emblazoned with the words WINNER OF THAT MAJOR AWARD so unsuspecting fools can buy copies based solely on that recommendation. And my official line will be that Major Awards are mankind’s best and most scientific way to determine art’s value. But deep in my heart I will still know that awards are generally bullshit.

Awards are useful, sure. It’s just remarkable how little use I have for them in my reading and viewing choices. This is either because I am a shallow jackass, or because Awards are kind of random and often poorly administered, or simply because something that seems really cool when it first comes out turns out to be a shallow, bloated monstrosity filled with faux importance and cheap manipulation when you’ve had some years to get past the hype. And of course people vote for things for really dubious reasons, sometimes. Now if someone would please nominate me for a Hugo for Best unresearched Blog Post, I’d appreciate it. Thankee.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Like Immortality: I Suck at Correspondence

Author: jsomers March 31, 2010

“A Letter always seemed to me like Immortality, for is it not the Mind alone, without corporeal friend?” — Emily Dickinson

The aging process is an adventure! Who knows where it will lead you...

The aging process takes us in unexpected directions, doesn’t it? It’s always disturbing. You’d like to think you’re an eternal creature, a permanent existence, when not only is it a fact that someday—relatively soon, friend—you won’t be here any more, but you’re not even unchanging. You wake up every day a little more eroded, a little more educated—changed. Unfortunately, our self-image does not always change accordingly, resulting in people like me who still see themselves as they were when eighteen—svelte, optimistic, able to handle their liquor—instead of how we are—bloated, ruined, and suffering permanent yellowed skin from debilitating liver damage.

Time is indeed a harsh mistress.

There are plenty of examples of time’s softly scrubbing fingers I could offer: My taste in booze, my aching back, the fact that I’d rather shove pins under my fingernails than go out to a movie these days. These all seem subtle to me, however, and easily ignored. One aspect of my changing existence that always strikes me these days is the fact that I now suck, totally suck, at correspondence. This is not simply bragging about my misanthropic tendencies, my friends—when the phone rings, I glance at it in annoyance and let the machine pick up, and then fail to respond. When an email arrives, it sits in my inbox for weeks, ignored and threatening. I haven’t written a letter in years. People often write me through my zine or this blog, and even if they send me emotional, interesting letters or gifts, the most anyone ever gets back is a curt note thanking them for their interest. If I am drinking while stuffing envelopes, they get incoherent threats that if they don’t stop assaulting my bunnies, I will fertilize their lawn. Or something.

In short, I completely suck at correspondence.

(more…)

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE (or, Oh, I see what you did there)

Author: jsomers March 29, 2010

People ask me why I drink. Well, to be honest, they’re often asking me what I drank, and the setting is usually an emergency room in a region where I don’t speak the language, and, naturally, I have no pants. Wait, what was I saying? Right: People wonder why I medicate myself when my life is so great. I have a loving wife (the lovely and fearsome Duchess), four cute cats (and the facial scars to prove it) and a thriving writing career. What’s to get hum about?

Other writers, of course.

Professional jealousy is a terrible thing. I’m not talking about people who strike bigger money lodes than I do, or people whose sales are higher – I actually don’t worry about that. No, what I get hum about in regards to other writers is when they have better ideas than I do, or ideas I simply wish I’d had. Pretty much the moment I meet another writer, right in-between the friendly handshake and the polite cocktail banter, I start hating them because of some idea they had that I would kill to steal.

Which brings us to Hot Tub Time Machine.

Went to see this over the weekend despite mixed reviews and several warnings that it was gross, immature, misogynistic, homophobic, and dumb. The sheer power of that title was too much to resist, so The Duchess and me and our friend Ken went to check it out. Is it misogynistic? Yep. Homophobic? Yep. Dumb? Yep. Funny? Off and on – overall I enjoyed it, and there were some side-splitting moments, but overall it’s a mediocre movie. I honestly wouldn’t steal much from this movie – the SFnal aspect of time travel is treated as a gonzo plot device and nothing more, and they quickly borrow some well-worn tropes to set the main story in motion (Butterfly Effect anyone?). There aren’t too many surprising twists as the story resolves itself, and most of the jokes wouldn’t work outside the framework of this movie and the combined charm of the lead actors, which is considerable.

What would I steal from this movie? Cincinnati.

Here be spoilers, so turn back if you regard spoilers as bad. The one thing I think this movie does that is interesting and effective from a writing point of view is fail to explain several running jokes and references. Not fail to explain them, actually, but rather boldly lampshade them and then stand around with its chest thrust out like Mussolini soaking up the crowd as it refuses to explain these bits of business. There’s a moment early in the film when John Cusack’s character is reminiscing about his old girlfriend from the 1980s, and the three middle-aged friends who form 3/4s of the main characters start chanting “White Buffalo, white buffalo” over and over again in decreasing volume. The younger kid in the car with them demands they explain themselves but they just keep chanting. It happens once more in the course of the story, but it is never explained in any way.

At another moment one of the characters refers to something that happened in Cincinnati, and the kid mentions finding a shoebox in Cusack’s closet labeled Cincinnati. The other two friends react violently, aghast that Cusack would a) keep it in the closet and b) label it clearly, adding that whatever it is is “admissible”. Again, despite thirty seconds of screen time devoted to it and the strong reactions of the characters, Cincinnati is never explained. Or even mentioned again.

Finally, and perhaps my favorite, there is the Boozy Bear: A man dressed in a bear costume shows up constantly throughout the movie, drinking and dancing. He’s just there; no one comments on it, no one asks about it, and the bear is never explained.

I love this stuff. A lot of writers get caught up explaining every single grace note and reference, terrified that people might not get what they’re trying to say, or so caught up in their own perceived cleverness that they have to underscore every bit to make sure you see it in all its glory. The three credited writers didn’t exactly create the Schindler’s List[1] of Sci-Fi, or even a movie you’ll remember two years from now. But these kinds of bits, left for you to make up your own backstory to explain, elevate even a lame story at least slightly, and I am a complete sucker for them. I’ll spend the next several months trying to figure out if there’s any clues I missed as to their provenance, and then I’ll spend several months having dreams about Dancing Bears in Cincinnati. Trust me, I’ve been through this before, though usually it’s a David Lynch movie, and not frickin’ Hot Tub Time Machine.

[1]Still one of three movies that always makes me cry. The other are discussed in Volume 10, Issue 3 of my zine The Inner Swine.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing