Writing

Pandorum

Author: 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

Free Fiction Related to Yesterday’s Post

Author: April 22, 2010

I was thinking about the novel I referred to yesterday (the one whose plot is a bit too close to Avatar to really try and sell now, thanks, Cameron!). I figure, if I’m going to bury the damn thing anyway, might as well post some of it here. Why not? So here are the first ~8,000 words or so of The Only Time, by Your Humble Author. Love to hear your thoughts, private or public, on it.

THE ONLY TIME

by Jeff Somers


I. The Long Dark

1.

Hollith was hell.

2.

One thousand men and women died on Hollith every day, defending the Pump Stations and fighting for control of new territory on hot, wet Hollith. No one could say accurately how many Holls died every day, and very few people asked.

Hollith was a large planet second from its sun. There were few bodies of water to speak of. It appeared to be one huge land mass, covered almost completely by vegetation. The only non-vegetable life forms on Hollith were insects, microbes, and the creatures that everyone called, simply, The Holls. No one who hadn’t seen one could understand what they were like, or so it was said.

On video they appeared to ape-like, a grey-white in color, with rudimentary faces comprised of a jagged rip for a mouth and two small, dark eyes. They had fearsome claws and a thin, fleshy frame that sagged almost comically when they were viewed in captivity.

On Hollith, in the jungles that were their homes, the Holls were terror. Their entire bodies acted as sails as they leapt from tree to tree, flying short distances, like bats. In the endless rains of Hollith they blended into the night and were invisible. They clawed through bullet-proof vests with small difficulty and they screeched. Grown soldiers heard that sound in their sleep, and shivered involuntarily.

The Holls attacked in groups, which the soldiers called Tribes. From fifteen to thirty at once in an attack. If the Holls had the element of surprise, a similarly numbered human patrol usually suffered fifty-percent casualties, at the least. The Holls usually had surprise. There was no way to accurately track them: their body temperature did not vary noticeably from the atmosphere’s, and they rarely seemed to gather in numbers sufficient to track excretory gasses.

On Earth, many of these facts were at best little-known. The predominant theory as to why these nontechnological savages continued to offer stuff resistance to the human invasion was: sheer numbers, meaning there were simply too many Holls. The fact was, Military Intelligence could not accurately say how many Holls there were. They died at an incredible rate, and still they came on. They died and died and died —were slaughtered— and yet, after twenty years of war the human race held only three percent of Hollith, and that precariously. And the humans died and died and died —were slaughtered— and the Holls never spoke, never retreated, and never relented.

Hollith was hell.

(more…)

Fiction, Writing

Ambrose Bierce Probably Had It Right

Author: 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: 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

These Damn Cats are My Only Source of News, but Damn This Bourbon is Delicious

Author: March 21, 2010

The War of the Gem Book 1I’VE been writing since I was nine years old or so. That’s a lot of words, most of which are terrible, ugly words no one should ever see, and which I keep under lock and key for the protection of society as a whole. As you age, as with just about everything else, you slowly perceive eras in your life, chapters. Most people have a distinct era in their lives labeled Childhood, for example, and maybe others labeled High School or College or This Guy Touched Me at Summer Camp 1998 or whatever[1]. Once you hit a certain age you can see the dividing lines pretty clearly.

It’s no surprise I’m at that certain age, and I can clearly see these eras not just in my social and emotional life, but in my writing as well. I mean, I’ve been writing every day for decades, through some of the most tumultuous and ridiculous eras of my life, like She’s So Beautiful I Swear I’d Sleep with Her Brother, or The Desperation’s Gone Part III. It shouldn’t be any wonder that I can also see distinct eras in my own writing, everything organized not necessarily by the events going on in my admittedly bourgeois and dull life, but by the themes and development of the words themselves.

Now, this sort of thing is navel-gazing at its worst, of course. Sitting here going back over your reams and reams of turgid, purple prose and sighing contentedly as you note the first time you played with an unreliable narrator, or the bizarre period you went through trying to write everything as a second-person dialog, or your string of really neat ideas that came so effortlessly and now you sit and blood pops out of the pores on your forehead because you can’t think of anything nearly as good to write and the sad thing is you never even sold those great stories and and and

Uh, sorry, I lost my train of thought. The point would have been that even for this solipsistic zine, a serious and thoughtful review of the strata formed in my largely unpublished writings would be a new low. That’s okay, we’re just going to focus on one era: The very earliest one, the first things I ever wrote in my entire life. Now, you’re used to grown-up Jeff, who is annoying and endrunkened and kind of an ass (don’t pretend, I know what the Internet chatter on me is), so your instinct when you read an essay like this is more than likely to knee me in the balls. But you see, when I wrote the work we’re about to discuss, I looked like this:

ME!

That’s right: I was frickin’ cute.

The reason I started thinking about all this is because of a conversation I had over dinner a few weeks ago. A friend was telling me that his young son has some aspirations to write, and wondered if I might be willing to chat with the kid some time. Normally I regard other people’s children the same way I regard enraged monkeys: I stay as far away from them as possible; if they’re in a cage of some sort I enjoy taunting them. But I actually told this guy I’d be happy to chat with his kid if he really wanted, because of Mr. Galvin.

Mr. Galvin was a co-worker of my father’s. My Dad was inordinately proud when his son wrote a 30-page Fantasy novel (The War of the Gem; it eventually turned into a 100-page trilogy—the cover of the first manuscript is at the beginning of this post) and handed out photocopies to everyone at his job. Mr. Galvin read the story seriously, and returned it to me a few days later like this:

EDITING!

That’s right: My very first copy-edit. He was nice enough to not mark every single mistake, and I’ll never forget the revelation it was to me that you needed to use punctuation marks like quotes on a regular basis. Up ’til then I think I regarded punctuation more like optional garnishes than necessary components.

It was the first time someone who wasn’t Mom or Dad had ever taken me seriously as a writer, and it was exhilarating. It was, of course, the first and last time I enjoyed being copy-edited, but it remains a highlight of my early life. I have no idea what’s become of Mr. Galvin—in fact, I don’t know anything at all about the man, to be honest; I was pretty young when he worked with Dad and after that I spiraled pretty quickly into the era known as I Am a Jackass Teenager but Don’t Seem to Know It, during which I valued nothing and complained a lot, mainly to people who weren’t listening to me.

It was probably a good thing that my first brush with being taken at all seriously as a writer had to do with being edited, as this is the general relationship the writer has with everyone. You write something, you show it to people, and there commences several decades of people telling you that you are Doing It Wrong. So I’m probably lucky to have gotten that splash of cold water in the face right off the bat, as it likely inured me to, well, pretty much the rest of my life.

And thus my first-ever Writing Era, the You Must Comprehend Me Via Magic, ended, and my second Writing Era, Yes Everything I Write is A Recreation of The Last Book I Read and Also Too I am The Main Character and I Have Super Powers to Punish Mine Enemies began. And a glorious time it was, too. Thanks to Mr. Galvin, I started using quotation marks in my prose, making it slightly more understandable, and this began a series of events culminating in me actually getting paid to write. Hooray for me! And Too bad for society.

My current Life Era? Simple: These Damn Cats are My Only Source of News, but Damn This Bourbon is Delicious.

————————————-

[1] If you’re me, you have eras like Drinking on Jersey City Street Corners, Post-Confirmation Church Attendance, Swearing Off the Booze I, II, III, IV, and What Do You Mean I Don’t Pay My Taxes, Why Do You Think I’m Always Broke?

Bullshit, Writing

Villain Decay

Author: March 15, 2010

Ben Linus! FOR THE WIN!I’ve been hard at work writing the fifth Avery Cates novel, which is the last in this series, which means I’m wrapping things up and settling scores. Which also means I’m going to have significant page-time with the main villain. So I’m pondering villains in stories – especially SFnal stories – these days, exacerbated by the fact that the TV show Lost is also wrapping itself up, and also dealing with villain issues in the form of Ben Linus’ character. For those of you who watch the show, you know what I mean; the last episode “Dr. Linus” dealt with Ben and his descent from power on Craphole Island.

Villains are tricky. They’re like monsters in horror movies: Usually the less you see them, the less you know about them, the better it is. The more familiar we become with villains the less scary they are, either because their supposedly awesome powers are revealed to be not so awesome after all (because the hero usually defeats the villain, thus putting into question just how tough the villain was to begin with), or because we learn something about the villain that humanizes them (awww, they have a child! awww, they love kittens! awww, he could have let the hero die horribly but he saved him!).  Villains usually do have backstories, but it’s generally best to keep those backstories vague and mainly for the use of the Writer. I mean, if I’m writing a story, it’s good that I have some idea why my villain behaves the way he does. It’s usually not useful that the reader knows, however.

Part of this is the simple fact that your reader’s imagination will always have better special effects and more meaning to them than your own. If I give you a vague, menacing villain with some pithy dialog and dark hints about their abilities and backstory, you will come up with something on your own that is better – for you – than anything I’d come up with. Because your imagination is tailored precisely to your own likes and your own squicks. The moment I start filling in blanks, I’ll invariably select things you don’t think are so cool, and thus my villain decays.

Part of it, though, is simple familiarity. In a serial fiction, either a series of books or a TV show, or even a movie series if it goes on long enough, the villain has to have screen/page time, even if you put off the final encounter with the hero. Take Ben on Lost: This is season six, and Ben’s been around a lot, and he’s been one of the more popular characters. As a result he’s had a nice arc, and we’ve learned a lot about him, and recently he seems to be inching closer and closer to redemption, which kind of sucks. While I admire the way the show’s writers have maneuvered him into being a sympathetic character, I mourn the loss of the villain. He was much more fun as a character when he appeared to be a cold, ruthless manipulator rather than a tortured, unhappy soul.

The ultimate problem, though, is that readers/viewers want it both ways. They like their villains to be badass and unbeatable, they want the hero to beat the villain, and they want to know about the villain. The longer your series goes on, the more you have to reveal about the villain (otherwise you risk them becoming a humorous caricature of evilevilevil) and as a direct result the less impressive your villain becomes. If this goes on long enough, your villain often has to switch sides and go hero, like, transforming from Vader to Skywalker. This can be a dramatic moment, of course, but it does leave you with Villain Vacuum. You can then come up with a new villain, even More Awesoma than the previous one – but that trick only works once, maybe twice, and then you start to have a rather comical collection of ex-villains puddling about, looking less than impressive. This wears out your audience sooner rather than later, trust me.

The solution: Well, there is none. If you’re presenting a standalone story, of course, it’s not a problem at all, because your villain is going to get it in the end anyway; by the time your audience starts to get to know the villain, you destroy him. In a series, however, you will suffer Villain Decay, unless you’re okay with your protagonists being useless little pricks who always get beaten. Which you might be. The hero winning all the time is so predictable, after all.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Eternity on a Sliding Scale

Author: February 1, 2010

A big part of Why I Write (aside from the free booze at parties every 5 years or so, of course) is to achieve some sort of immortality. I’m pretty conscious of being a tiny speck in the universe, and a tiny speck in the flow of time since the Big Bang. I’m aware that the vast majority of people don’t achieve any kind of lasting fame, and the even vaster percentage of writers get swept aside. It’s shocking, for example, to learn that The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, two books that dominated much of my high school English courses, are now slowly fading into obscurity. Slowly, yes, but fading. I mean, shit; if Salinger can fade into obscurity, we’re all fucked.

But of course it makes sense: Part of what makes it always seem like books were better in previous eras is the simple fact that history’s manic fingers have scubbed away the dross: All that’s left after 100 or 200 years is the really significant work. The merely great eventually gets swept aside. So, maybe Salinger and Knowles were merely great, and not Great, know what I mean? They hung on for 50 years, but won’t make 100. We can’t all be Shakespeare, after all.

And then there’s me: I suspect I don’t stand a chance.

Of course, if we want to look at it with the Big View it doesn’t matter because the sun will swell up and destroy the Earth eventually, anyway, and even if we flee the burning globe for other planets, entropy will catch us, babies, and swallow everything eventually. So why bother? Since we can’t even invent a comsumer-usable jetpack, I doubt we’re ever going to conquer quantum physics and find a way to step out of time and become truly eternal.  So you have to have some perspective. The fact is, culture changes and the world moves on, and you’re lucky if you’re still relevant a decade after you first appear in print (or on film, or on the radio, or whatever).

When I was a kid, there were certain things that linked me with older generations whether I realized it or not: Bugs Bunny cartoons. The Honeymooners. The Brady Bunch – all of these weird pop cultural icons had been around for so long, people 20 years older than me knew them as well and we had a shared vocabulary. A lot of that has faded away. You can’t easily see unedtited Warner Bros cartoons any more, due to the excessive violence, occasional racism, and cheery 1940s slang. Those old sitcoms that stretch back to the 1950s and 1960s may still be on, somewhere, but it’ll be on a ghetto like Nick at Nite or something. My friend Ken and I had an extended joke concerning old Bugs Bunny cartoons the other night and it occurred to me that people 10 years younger than us (or maybe 20 years younger) might not understand a word we were saying – this is culture leaving you behind.

Which is okay. It’s a natural function, and I actually think this has been artificially retarded over the last 50 years due to television, maybe over the last 100 years due to radio and movies. It wasn’t until radio and other modern media, after all, that everyone in the country, or at least a large proportion of them, could simultaneously share a pop culture moment, then go into work the next day and discuss it immediately. And as The Entertainment Industry fractures into a million pay services that cater to your personal taste, we’re leaving that era behind. I grew up in a world with three networks and four local TV stations, a world where every major city had a handful of radio stations serving broad genres. Today you can choose from hundreds of stations and on-demand movies etc, you can buy Satellite Radio, you can massage your cultural experience into something unique and completely unshared by anyone else.

Which means when you go into work the next day, you might not have anything to talk about. Except the last bastion of shared experience, sports, and occasional movies that hit that blockbuster status.

I think we’ve hit that stage where Jeff is a little drunk and rambling, so let’s wrap it up. In closing, I think it would be best if I simply attain the wealth and power necessary to build a monument to myself, sort of like Bender’s “Remember Me” statue from Futurama:

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Solamente Jeff

Author: December 16, 2009

Something Nick Mamatas says in a post at his journal about vanity publishing and the Harlequin debacle in general resonated with me:

“What is great about writing is that an ordinary working-class person can do it without substantial investment. Other art forms such as painting, photography, music, etc. require sometimes significant outlay and purchasing paintings and instruments and such also requires a pocketful of money. With writing, you can do it on the cheap.”

For me, this also means that it’s one of the few art forms where I don’t have to collaborate. I hate collaborating, and writing was instantly the way I could create something without having to deal with anyone else’s input. Writing is one of the few artistic venues where it’s just you. You don’t need any special training (really, you don’t), you don’t need any special tools (like an instrument), and you don’t need anyone’s help. I think most writers start out as kids, just sitting in their rooms or something and realizing they can tell an entire story, with special effects and trick shots, with just a stub of pencil and a piece of paper. That’s fucking amazing, if you think about it.

I’ve tried collaborating, and sometimes it even works. My friend Jeof Vita and I co-wrote a comic book and it went really well; we then co-wrote a TV script that didn’t sell, and started to co-write a movie treatment before we sort of drifted away from the project. Despite our success – and the fact that we had fun working together – I doubt I’d ever collaborate again. I just prefer to have complete control over the work, to be honest. I don’t like having to weigh other people’s opinions.

Of course, this may explain why I spend most of my waking moments with cats instead of people.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

The Futility of Writing

Author: September 23, 2009

Ah, another week, another video. I’m having far too much fun with these. This week, we’re discussing the futility of your artistic and financial literary dreams:

As always, tell the world and let me know if you have any comments as feedback is always appreciated!

The Inner Swine, Videos, Writing