A Meditation on Men and Ice

Given tonight's events, it seems the time for it.

As I think nearly all of you have ascertained, I'm one of those dirty Twitter users. I keep tweeting to some bloated concept of a minimum, but happen it does, and there's not a lot to be done for it but make sure I think before I tweet. Mostly, my feed is links, my daily writing metrics, the odd retweet of a witticism...and then hockey season starts.

It's a relatively new phenomenon for me, so I'm not surprised if you missed it; but in the past couple of seasons I've become a big fan of ice hockey, particularly the variety practiced by the San Jose Sharks. I come from a family of baseball love, so it's not new to me to understand a sport; but it is new to me to follow a sport, to be attached to its players*, to actually sting when they lose and want to show off my neo-tribal affiliation via jerseys and t-shirts. Lately I've even tried living someone else's life once a week or so and gone to my local sports bar to watch games with a friend or two, which is not as good as live but costs substantially less.

And, of course, I tweet about it. Especially once the beer starts to flow. It's not been the primary topic of conversation, but it has been a topic of conversation. And recently (and I took no actual insult from this), one of my friends saw fit to reply to me, asking, tongue firmly in cheek, "When did you become such a jock, you traitor?"

I wasn't insulted, but I was blog-inducingly thoughtful. How do nerds explain the love of sports? How do we, in a moral sense, get over the fact that we are now cheering for the kinds of guys who used to stuff us in lockers, demean our sexual prowess, and hold our heads in toilets?

It's a complex issue, and I'm not going to pretend to explain it all away here. You're not wrong, detractors: hockey is a sport like any other, and honestly one of the more thuggish ones. Yes, fights do happen, and yes, violence is condoned if not actually legalized. I won't call it graceful, though dexterity is necessary; and I won't call it intellectual, though there is a lot of strategy.

What I will call it, is entertainment. There are a bevy of obvious examples to hearken back to, but the bottom line is, people enjoy watching a competitive sport. People like identifying with a team, a group, a concept; they enjoy vicarious victory. And yes, just like Roman gladiatorial games, just like street fighting in Bangkok, just like boxing matches, we do enjoy ourselves a little observed violence.

It's a primal desire, as raw and base as mythology; people enjoy watching physical achievement. It doesn't make me stupid any more than reading Marx makes me a Communist. And yes, I am probably smarter than most of these men, but that doesn't make me better; they have physical skills that far surpass my own and that will probably always be far beyond my own, even when they're past their prime and I've spent my days learning how to break bricks with my thumbs. They have a potency to them physically that great authors have mentally, and the story they tell is more basic and chaotic, but no less compelling.

I'm sure you've heard it a million times, and I'm sure that doesn't change that I look like a fair-haired blue ape when I'm roaring at the TV screen in my jersey. But not everything I do has to advance the cause of the intellectual; and seriously, maybe it'll be good for me to broaden my interests. God knows that I know plenty of snark-suffused intellectuals who love hockey, maybe it'll inform my writing in unexpected ways.

Of course, it's easy to wax poetic about hockey when your team just qualified for the playoffs.

*You're asking yourself who my favorite is, I know. Two words, and the first one is "Nabby".

Whoops

I haven't posted in a while, and last I checked, the last post was an apology for the post before that. Not the way to be, really, but I don't mean to. Life has been a whirlwind lately, and I simply have not had much time to stop and reflect; and what time I have had, I've been writing.

I received another rejection letter in the mail yesterday, and honestly, it's amazing how galvanizing that is; I get depressed for a little while and then insistently clamber right back up on the horse and keep working. I thought back, and in the past three or so months I've finished three short stories, none of them, well...exactly short. The middle of the two needs extensive editing (not that the other two don't), but that's still a big accomplishment. And I've already got an anthology invite lined up, and another agent to talk to...so in a certain, broad-stroke sense, the blog-relevant part of my life is going well. At least I'm working, I tell myself; and at least I'm getting work done. Everything after that is just a matter of real work and patience.

Unfortunately, that's all the news that's fit to print. Next time: a meditation on the noble and gentlemanly sport of hockey.

On Nerves and Hitting Them

Okay, so...rather than respond in comments (where many won't see it):

Thanks to everybody who responded so intelligently and diplomatically to my last post. I got some really good thoughts from the other side of the suspension of disbelief debate, which is definitely something I needed.

But the main thrust of this post is an aside to that. Some of you who commented seem to have felt attacked or denigrated, and I'm very, very sorry; I really wasn't you I was talking to.

My intention, lost in the vagaries of the Internet, was to offer up my viewpoint and to take a moment for what really irks me, which is not people who have trouble suspending disbelief, but people who just won't suspend disbelief. It is a pet peeve, and so the more innocent parties sometimes catch the backlash. I had hoped, and seem to have failed, to offer up the theoretical basis on which my own (perhaps fanatically) strong sense of disbelief is based, in the hopes that I can show why this stuff sometimes happens for the sake of story, and maybe you could enjoy your next story experience a little more for it. It was supposed to come as a helpful suggestion and a little heap of my usual Interweb-snark, but the latter overpowered the former.

I fully understand bad or clumsy writing jarring one's belief, and definitely get why something could just be horribly uncomfortable to watch; I can't watch most embarrassment-based comedy for just that reason. If those who fall into those camps feel attacked, that's my mistake, not yours.

I will probably go back and edit that post a little bit—it was written during a break at Real Grown-Up Job and so lacked in both erudition and diplomacy. But editing is not the same as apologizing, and comments often go unread (especially on Blogger); so I thought I should put an apology here and let it sit for a couple days before I post again. So, in closing: I don't think any of you are stupid, and I'm really, really sorry for causing upset.

Why don't we all watch a really bad movie in solidarity? I'll buy the popcorn?

Because Otherwise, It's Boring

being a Rant on the Subject of the Anthropic Principle

So, the other day, I was watching TV with someone who does not need public scrutiny, and they said something that is, and likely always will be, one of my major pet peeves:

"Why are they doing that? That's so stupid!"

This statement hurts so much it makes my teeth fall out. It has some cousins I find equally noisome: "A person of that type (job, expertise, whatever) would never do that"; "That concept doesn't work that way"; "Oh come on, how did he not notice that?". You (hopefully) know the kind of thing I mean.

I have ranted here before about surrendering oneself to a story: my belief that suture (to use the fancy film theory concept) is the most paramount part of one's duty as a reader or viewer, and that nitpicking is, in my book, actually worse than just not watching something at all.

Today is the day I get a little more specific about why.

TVTropes, of all things, actually has an excellent summary in their article on the Anthropic Principle. To keep it short for those who don't want to click, the Anthropic Principle is originally a scientific/cosmological idea about the relationship of intelligent observers to the universe; some people have since applied it to story. The original principle states, to paraphrase, that it only stands to reason that the universe would happen to be the kind of universe favorable to the evolution of intelligent life, because otherwise we wouldn't be here to observe those favorable conditions to begin with. It may sound tautological, but when you think about it, it makes a certain Zen kind of sense.

The narrative Anthropic Principle, as it were, is a derivative of that idea, applied to the microcosmic universe of a story. Simply put, the reason that some improbable, silly, or otherwise unlikely things have happened in a story is because without those unlikely things, there wouldn't be a story. As TVTropes puts it,

For any given work, there are basic elements that are required for The Verse or the basic premise to happen. There'd Be No Story otherwise. Claiming that one of them is a Wall Banger is equivalent to saying the work shouldn't exist in any form.

Applied to the kinds of jaw-grinding situations I mentioned earlier, my answer becomes clear: "It happened that way because it happening the more logical way would abort the story right here." Even outside of speculative fiction, which of course requires a fairly large number of breaks from reality, there are certain little things that are allowed to happen because the story requires it: the distraction actually works and gets a guard to look the other way; or the right (or wrong) character sees the tiny key fall out of someone's pocket; or, most classically, the hero elects to go toward the dangerous, possibly lethal situation instead of walking away. All of these things are unrealistic in average cases; but average cases isn't what the audience tends to want. Barring incredible artfulness, nobody wants to watch the episode of Leverage where the con is found out five minutes in and everybody goes to jail; or the episode of Supernatural where the brothers get to the site of the latest haunting, realize they could die, and drive to Baja to get fish tacos instead.

This is not to say that all glosses of realism are acceptable; certainly too much deviation from reality (in a psychological/coincidental sense, not the sense where there are no vampires or cyborgs) is eye-rolling in the extreme. My general rule of thumb is twofold: First, how artfully is the break from reality dealt with? Second, how much is that break from reality needed for the story to be interesting?

An example: the first season of Lost. The plane crashes, and nearly everybody is alright; the wounds that people do have seem to hamper them only slightly, or to just cause scars (barring one or two deliberately grievous cases). The survivors just so happen to include several fit men, a doctor, a construction worker, an electrical engineer, and two veteran trackers (one of them also able to hunt). There are ample sources of food and fresh water on the island. And yet somehow, it's not settled by anybody that they can find within a couple weeks of arrival.

There are mysterious and supernatural explanations for some of this; but even below that, you can see the Anthropic Principle at work. Why is it acceptable that all these specialized skillsets, useful in this particular situation, survived a disastrous plane crash with all their faculties and limbs intact? Why is it okay that rather than the island being mostly populated by tough-skinned fruit and gamy birds, there are boars and bananas in abundance? Simple: because who the hell wants to watch a show where everybody dies within the month from infections and malnutrition? How old would the "finding water and food" plot get, and how fast?

The scenario Abrams and crew created here is a perfect example of the Anthropic Principle at its healthiest. (Apologies if my being behind on the show totally disproves my point; this is where I stand as of about episode 12 of the entire series.)

This is why that kind of nitpicking drives me crazy. This is why I only engage in it when a work has already made me disengage. Because the truth is, those conveniences fans like to yell about on the Internet? Those are the things that even make these stories possible. It's like yelling at your arm for having joints.

That said, I still reserve the right to make fun of The Core.

A Spa for the Writing Brain

(The only spa here is metaphorical; look elsewhere for massages and LUSH products.)

Last night was another night of stymied writing, shot through with stresses and doubts and more than one self-inflicted distraction of the Interweb kind. I went to bed feeling dejected about the writing experience at large, with that nasty little snaggle-toothed thought deep in me that maybe I should just gave up. Naturally, my genius being a masochist, inspiration chose that moment to strike, and I wound up scribbling notes about my current project until I was literally so fog-brained I couldn't remember them from one note to the next. It happened again this morning.

You know what the secret was? I had given up on thinking about work.

So, it's clear that I am designing a lot of blocks for myself, though they are based on some quite reasonable stressors that I cannot really help in any logical manner. As such, after some consideration, I've come up with a few basic homework assignments for my psyche that I hope will lead to a lowered stress level and an increased inspiration level (the two are only sometimes related, and then I wouldn't call it "stress" any more than I would the feeling of being two hundred feet from the end of a marathon); and because I don't always trust myself, being a creature of immoderate moderation, I'm putting it up here on the Intertron so you can all keep me, in some distant way, honest.
I will:

• Stop talking about work outside of work, beyond answering questions others ask. Adapting to a new job is stressful, but I shouldn't let it follow me home.


• Eat only food that is healthy, energizing, and what I actually want to eat. Forcing myself to eat what I brought for lunch when a craving is upon me is reasonable when I'm craving fried chicken and chocolate cake, but if I have the spare $5 and the Beli Deli is still open, there's no reason not to get a sandwich.


• Avoid drinking before I write; drinking isn't for inspiration, it's for flying the flag of surrender.


• Submit stories on my lunch break; today's was surprisingly freeing.


• Get Microsoft Office installed on Wednesday one way or another, no later than my next paycheck.


• Keep comfy clothes clean and set aside for the night time instead of always wearing them to work.


• Do whatever I have to to regulate the temperature in my house, even if that means a slightly higher heating bill.


• Not force myself to finish Eraserhead tonight. It's entirely possible that movie sucks as much as it feels like and its writing is not writing that seems to be inspiring me to greater heights. I should finish it, but not when my writing time has to necessarily happen on the heels of doing so.


• Follow the advice of expert writers and stand ready to counteract writer's block with very long walks. This is not a bad excuse to grab the occasional bite of dessert.

That may all seem basic, or may all seem insane, but it's all really exactly what I need. Maybe that says something about my creative process. Maybe it doesn't. I leave it to history to judge my shortcomings and achievements, and also to decide which is which.

Right Then

I'm not the firmest believer in astrology; I have my horoscope on my iGoogle page more out of entertainment than guidance, and in my limited experience the personalities attributed to astrological signs are so archetypal that I catch myself identifying with about half of them at various times. However, I do occasionally glean something useful from it, and it's certainly a topic a fantasy author can't hurt himself by keeping abreast of, so it stays there on my homepage.

And then I go to bed after a night of writing that felt a little bit lackluster, and wake up to this prediction for Scorpio:It's time for you to move beyond any logical concerns you have about your creative abilities and just let your natural talent take over. This may require a higher level of trust than you've previously attained, but with five planets in your 5th House of Self-Expression, the only thing that can hold you back is your fear of success. You have the vision and the ingenuity, so get out of your own way and let it flow.And I'm forced to conclude that perhaps there's more more going on with those archetypes than I'm admitting.