Notes from the Underworld

On Nerves and Hitting Them

2010-03-07T12:08:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-04T10:38:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-02T15:06:00.001-08:00

(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

2010-03-01T08:10:00.001-08:00

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.

An Editor's Dreams

2010-02-28T20:53:00.000-08:00

My sense of time is utterly destroyed.

It keeps occurring to me in bright flashes, moments that leave me stunned and doubting and recounting the days: somewhere at the beginning of 2010, I completely lost my macro-scale concept of time. I can still count seconds; still feel hungry at the right times of the day; but when trying to recall how recently something happened, I find that my judgment of such matters is gone.

I just finished a night's writing, working on the manuscript for a short story, and when it came time to save the new version to my rough drafts, I was shocked to see that the story that had "languished far too long" had only been laying abandoned for seventeen days. Every few minutes I find myself having to remind myself that it's only been two weeks since I started at my new job; that I'm only two weeks gone from when I last saw my friends from out of town and only three weeks from my arrival for a vacation in Fort Bragg. This weekend feels like it was all at once four days long and only one day (perhaps helped by having slept very poorly on Friday night). I can't believe tomorrow is only the start of March, on basically any level: this year has had so much adventure already.

Speaking of adventure, I have had the first unpleasant experience with my new job as far as the ways it has leaked into my day-to-day life: I've begun to have copyediting dreams. Both Friday night and Saturday night I found myself dreaming of being at work, hunched over a gray-filtered doppelganger of my lovely and spacious desk, with a manuscript in a manila folder in front of me; and both nights I have found myself chanting and maundering to myself as I go hunting for errors, so desperate to find something wrong in the blurred mess of chimerical page proofs that I would swear dream-me was sweating. Both times I felt defeated, or panicked, like I was not able to find something wrong, but not because there was nothing wrong; and both times I woke up gasping in a way I haven't since the old and indomitable nightmares of attending a final for a class I never bothered to attend.

I like to rant about the lack of strong, challenging rites of passage in our modern world, but I think I may have found one. Maybe I'll get a tattoo to commemorate surviving it once I'm through to my ninety-day review; or just go all the way and get scarification on my face.

To make this germane to the blog again, I will say that the good news is that the new job has not impacted my writing (though I find myself uninterested in talking about the nuts and bolts of it). This year has actually been fantastically productive, and my slip-ups in scheduling have been unnoticeable, in the sense that I have not found myself kicking myself when they occur. The biggest snag I have struck is the technical limitation caused by Wednesday (the new laptop) being in some senses a large netbook—notably, thus, a machine that lacks a CD drive. This had made submissions to magazines difficult, as I cannot easily edit my writing files into tarted-up .doc files and get them sent out, and I in fact am behind on submissions for this very reason. I plan to attempt to fix this issue this week and address the backlog, because the truth is, without submission, this career is going nowhere; and the the longer I wait, the more awful and looming the world of rejection and judgment is going to seem when I do get stuff out the door.

And now, this post is long enough; and my attempts at further prose have been so purple I think they might be leaving the visible spectrum. Suffice to say that life is anxious, and busy, but good; and that this blog and all its trappings, Randall and company included, are firmly anchored as part of my life.

Whoa.

2010-02-21T09:23:00.001-08:00

The first week at the new job is done, and the title is all I have to say: "Whoa."

The culture and ethic here is very, very different from my old job. I don't want to engage in bashing my old proofreading position, so I will say that it was what I needed when I was at it; but this new copy editing job is definitely the right next step up. This includes, as a mixed blessing, the fact that this new job is actually a serious, forty-hour-plus work week: I have spent my first four days embroiling myself in the style guide and various secondary sources dealing with the kinds of certification exams we produce material for*, without many more breaks than those mandated by law and the occasional need to take two minutes to reset my brain. It's challenging, it's new, and it's exciting; but this does mean that I am not able to take much time online during the day, which in turn has meant that I haven't had much time for blog updates.

Fortunately, this is in part because I am spending large portions of my evenings writing. Book Three of Not Providence is as of now about a quarter of the way into its rough draft phase, and I have finished 1.9 short stories already this year, with a third about halfway done. I'm back in that place where I find myself getting jolted at random with bits of inspiration and new possible twists in my stories, which is honestly a lovely place to be. I'm trying to get the energy together today to deal with a magazine submission, but something—I suspect fear—is making it feel like a mountainous ting to surmount, so I may have to cleanse my brain with an episode of Lost before I do that. And yes, in a more mundane context, I am finally watching Lost; see earlier in my blog for why I'm allowed to be behind. (Please take that sentence in the spirit of good fun.)

Lest this whole post start with the letter "I", I (damn!) would also like to bring everyone's attention to a recent bit of entertainment and enlightenment—the Guardian's ten rules for writing fiction, in which a variety of authors give their ten rules for, well, being a writer. I reacted to being sent the link with a burst of skepticism, but the sender is someone I trust, so I clicked it, and was pleasantly surprised, even uplifted. Out of all the advice, the only one I disagreed with much at all was Elmore Leonard's Rule Three, and even that I don't take much issue with—I do think using a verb other than "said" can be a good thing, especially in terms of avoiding adverbs after "said" (in my eyes a much worse crime), but I agree that "said" is a much more transparent word than many writers will admit. I particularly love Margaret Atwood's and Neil Gaiman's lists of advice, but other particular gems of wisdom include:

Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said". (Roddy Doyle)

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue. (Helen Dunmore)

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire. (Geoff Dyer)

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand. (Anne Enright)

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money. (Jonathan Franzen)

And the one I most needed to hear:

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity. (Anne Enright)

All of it is that pithy, that insightful, and that valuable; if you're looking to write, this is an article to read. Though do have the courage to disagree with them sometimes; the only thing I think is an absolute for all writers, always, is the one piece of advice all of them seem to repeat endlessly, and the one that I found, in its Zen way, most enlightening:

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. (Anne Enright)

Write. (Neil Gaiman)

Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style. (PD James)

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go. (AL Kennedy)

So, I'm going to go just that—write, in my own voice and as close as I can get to without fear—and try not to worry about how I'm coming up on the end of my projected break from Not Providence, or the fact that I'm getting on a train in a couple hours, or the possibility that all I'm going to do is receive face-stinging rejection letters for a good, solid while.

As soon as I eat some breakfast and finish an episode of Lost.

(And thus was the Great American Novel left to die...)

*For those not wholly in the know on this one, my new position a copy editing gig for a company that makes a variety of books, but mostly review and study guides for various licensing exams; I am choosing not to name them mostly because I do not want to even for a second seem like I speak for them as a company.

On Return and Disruption

2010-02-14T21:19:00.001-08:00

I thought I was going to sit down and write a post about my last days at my proofreading job: the sensation of packing up my desk, the oddity of shaking hands and speaking words for the last or the nearly-last time.

Then I thought I was going to write an entry about being up in Fort Bragg again, and the joys of seeing my parents for a little while.

Then I thought I was going to write something about being home again around the time I actually got home.

Sorry, everybody. I've been busy.

As the above suggested, the day after my last day at the marketing company, I stuffed six days' worth of clothing and three books into a duffel bag, and rode the train up to my aunt's place up in San Francisco, where we had the first and largest celebration from my father's 60th birthday. From there, it was off to my vacation in Fort Bragg, and that is where I was until yesterday, when I rode down in the company of friends. Now I am in my house, and have done a little cleaning, and am about to go sit down with a movie and get some laundry folded, like the domestic creature I am.

Unfortunately, I feel a great deal of things about this past week, but I don't know how to codify them. A trip home to Fort Bragg is all at once revitalizing and melancholy; like I love my time there, but know that I can't stay there and be consistently happy in perpetuity. It's a place I might love to come back to once I'm older and more established; it has an energy like nowhere else I've ever been, except possibly Santa Cruz—though the shared factor there may just be a nostalgia for a time in my life when I had less rigid scheduling and less non-academic responsibility. (Here's hoping the copy editing for the new company will give me a bit more satisfaction on that front.)

I am happy to have been able to spend my dad's sixtieth birthday with him and my mother, there in the home he helped build for us; and I'm happy I got to be home for a bit and just focus on relaxing, with a side business in studying the Chicago Manual of Style a little for new job purposes; and I'm happy to have come home to friends who missed me and were missed in return, with a feeling of having pushed my reset button before a major and somewhat intimidating venture.

That is all I can say for certain; anything further would risk turning into that turgid stuff that happens when I push my muse too far. So for now I'm going to go have a glass of champagne, and watch the final leg of a movie; and be grateful for the sense of a home in two places, and for having so many friends and loved ones in both. I promise tomorrow I'll put the smarm back in full effect.

Maybe I'll even blog about it.

Ups and Downs

2010-02-02T11:49:00.000-08:00

I feel like I've used that title before. Maybe because it's incredibly jejune.

Anyway, I am having a very busy week, but I felt that updating was the right move, as it's been, only two days in, a week full of ups and downs (fortunately, almost all my direct and personal experiences have been ups); I have about ten minutes, so pardon as this becomes a bulleted list full of link salad.

Personal Up: This week is my last week at my current job. I'll be moving to a new position a little closer to home, more money, smaller company, etc. etc. It's a weird feeling to be on my last week somewhere—the last time this happened, the store was closing, so we were all on our last legs. My mood is one of completion and celebration, but also a little bit of loss—loss of the people and the familiarity and those all-important rituals—but I still have to jump through the usual hoops. It's like a really lame Irish wake.

Book World Down: Amazon's little war with MacMillan. I am less than impressed with Amazon's behavior on this front. While books may get marked up a lot, books get marked up for a reason, and you are, as John Scalzi said it, "unload[ing] a shotgun into a crowd of writers" when you pull this kind of action against a publisher. According to the New York Times, Amazon has relented; but according to John Scalzi, some books from MacMillan imprints are still not available on Amazon, so I suspect either Amazon is badly managed or they are trying to stab at their foes even as they fall. Mr. Scalzi's thoughts on how to deal with this are all at once obvious and brilliant; if you want to help an author catch a break, listen to him.

Speaking of corporate entities I am less than pleased with at the moment, a personal corporate Down: Google. Google has decided, as of today, to discontinue the FTP service that allows me to broadcast this blog here on my website, for good business reasons that nonetheless make my life complicated. The workaround they are offering is not as robust nor is it truly a replacement; as such, I think it's time I look into WordPress, so stay tuned for a possible format shift. You'll be kept updated, I assure you.

Creative Up (no pun intended): Up has been nominated for both Best Picture and Best Animated Picture. This is stupendous news; Up well-and-truly does deserve the Best Picture, and just being nominated goes a long way toward pulling animation out of its current ghetto of separation. I dream of the day that variations on a medium will all be judged equally (animation vs. live-action film, sequential art vs. novels, my favorite topic of genre fiction vs. fiction), and we just came a tiny step closer. My only worry is that splitting its nomination between two categories could also split its votes, but, a man can still dream.

And finally, here at the bottom, a Political Up (liberal politics to follow, you have been warned): My country is getting the wheels moving on repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". I think that letting anyone who is fit to serve do so is the right decision in all matters, and seeing things start to shift pleases me. I recognize it will take time (unlike a lot of America, it seems), but I'm glad that the government is starting the move.

That's all the news that's fit to type on my lunch break; now, please pardon me as I go lift weights and eat hummus. It's an exciting life I lead.

[Rabbit Hole Day] Further Disappointments

2010-01-27T12:30:00.001-08:00

Gentle Readers, I ask you: what is it with me and the 27th of January? You'd think my cognitive biases would have picked a different day to fixate on as my special "rotten day".

I'm really sorry I didn't mention this before...I got a little preoccupied and decided to try to just put it behind me, but then I was reminded of the date.

Last year, on the evening of January 27th, I was hit by a car. It was traumatic, but given how little damage I took (and given that the girlfriend who constantly reminded me of it is gone), I more or less forgot about it. Which is odd in and of itself, really; but rather than reflect on that right now, the important part is that forgetting meant I was doomed to repeat.

So January 27th rolled around yet again, and I treated it like any other morning. I cocked my head at how little coffee my machine made this time around, but otherwise it was a grey winter morning with very few complaints. I walked down the bleak-chic street between me and downtown Mountain View, coffee in one hand, lunch in the other, and contemplated the little pleasures of annoyances of my world.

Do you see what's coming?

Yeah, so I stepped into the intersection, forgetting (there's that word again) how cars love to not check what's happening in the crosswalk before making the right off Shoreline.

They didn't hit me; thank God, they didn't me. I really do not want to know what would have happened if I'd taken an Expedition to the chest. They honked; I jumped back; and when I slammed ass-first into the edge of the curb, my vision went white.

I'd forgotten about most of this, but I did remember the sky; it wasn't so much polluted as it was a normal sky repainted gray. My mouth tasted sour, my whole body felt sunburnt, and an invisible hook was stabbing into my chest; and a familiar, black-haired man was staring into my face and throttling me.

"What the fuck?" These dreams seem to make me say that a lot.

"You're back." The man—his name was Dick, but we didn't use it the entire time I was there—looked utterly shocked. "You're back again."

"Probably?" My mind felt greased.

I sat up, took stock. We were sitting in the shadow of a huge gray block, a giant rectangle some hundred or two feet high. The building was the terminus of a brown earth street; stubbier, uglier buildings flanked us on either side, and those disappeared about two blocks down into a huge green-stone plaza, empty except for the ugly brass fence surrounding it. Everything was dark and wet; the street around me smelled like fresh rain.

Years of watching movies like this came back to me. "How long have I been gone?"

Dick smiled at me, the kind of smile you expect from a grandpa in a whole lot of pain. "Month. Maybe two."

"Okay." I wiped my face off, tried to make nonsense make sense. "Weren't there like five other guys with you?"

"Gone," Dick told me, sad all over again. "The things they left took them."

"The things the other guys left?"

Dick shook his head. "The things the ones in charge left."

He was standing a good distance away from me now, then a little closer, looking and then pointing up at the block behind me. I stood up and gave it a serious look. It was just a piece of stone thrust down into the dirt; it might have been a building if it had doors, windows, or any sense of having been worked. There were indentations, little cracks here and there, but it seemed more like weather than deliberation. And yet, somehow I could tell it wasn't always that way.

"What, was that where they lived?" I asked.

Dick didn't look away from the building. "It's where we burned."

Lightning flashed, or else I just blinked very quickly in a bright light. We moved in jump-cuts down the empty street, over to the brass fence and the plaza. Up close I could see the wire strung between the brass poles, clean, shiny concertina loops like you'd see in World War II trenches. I peered through the wire and the brass at the green stone: dulled from what clearly used to be a sheen, streaked with mud and piles of dirt...as I looked I thought I could hear screaming, and what might have been attempts at prayer.

"A prison," I said. "A prison." Not sure why I said it twice.

"That was before."

"Prison for dead people?" I asked.

Dick perked, straightened up; his eyes bulged as he stared away from me down a side street. I started to ask another question, but then my ears pricked too. Footsteps were echoing off the buildings.

It was just one or two sets of footsteps, nothing big or impressive; but something in the way they resonated sent chills down my spine. I looked at Dick, and he was frozen in the same position; dream-people aren't known for their reliability.

Then the shadow spread out along the wall, and the footsteps were joined by a rattling; and around the corner came three men moving in formation, bowed under the weight of a huge iron kiln, five feet across, its lid open and the inside already belching fire.

"No," Dick said. "No, no, no—"

"We're here to be punished!" the three men said, running right for us. "We're here to burn!"

Dick's big "No" stretched out and distorted, becoming this awful bass soundtrack under the charging men. He put out one arm that he just kept flailing, and I started to think the guy was locked in place.

A voice whispered in my ear: "This isn't how it's supposed to be."

Then the hook in my chest gave a yank; and air whooshed by my ears; and I was sitting back on the curb. The Expedition hadn't even checked to see if I was alright.

I was shaken, of course; it didn't help that I had to sprint to make my train. But after someone else brought up January 27th and that weird post about being hit by a car, I have to wonder, was there some weird causality that made me walk out in front of a brainless SUV driver today? Is there a reason that the block of stone I saw kind of looked like the building I work in made out of plasticine? Also, why did I forget about this until today?

I'm guessing I'll have to wait a year or so for answers. And I hate the idea that that's all I could have to say.

The Day-to-Day

2010-01-27T10:10:00.001-08:00

This keeps coming up of late, so I felt like I should blog about it. It is this logic which supports 50% of the the Internet.

When meeting new people, or when people discover for the first time what I'm trying to do with my life, I get a lot of the same questions: what are you writing? Have you ever been published? Why are you bothering with genre fiction? (I won't dignify the last question with a response.) These questions are all fine and good. But I get other questions that people don't seem to realize are related to those questions (well, the two worth talking about). Questions like why it's so hard to get me to come out on weeknights; why I sometimes take a while to watch or read things they've lent me; why I sometimes get depressed or angry or excited, or why I just suddenly stop talking for an hour or two during a conversation on Instant Messenger.

Here's the thing: I don't work 8 hours a day. I work more like nine or ten.

My writing regimen is not even the strictest I've seen, derived from the "beginner's" writing regimen laid out by the inimitable Stephen King in On Writing (the single best book on writing I have ever read). That regimen is 1000 words a day (about 4 normal word processor pages, ish, depending on how often I break paragraphs), 5 days a week. Sometimes I will cheat and count an hour or two of editing as "equivalent" to 1000 words, so that I get editing and submission done without killing myself in the process. And of course, I allow for unique situations (depressed friends, birthdays, weddings, emergencies, etc.) to make me miss an extra day or so a week, and tend to take a vacation around about Christmas, like everyone else does.

What this means is, my average weekday starts like everyone else's: get up, groan about how early it is, rob the coffee maker of its payload, etc. The middle of my day is pretty typical, too—though I guess I exercise more than the average American. But my evening is wildly divergent.

I get home later than most, because I take the train. So call it 7. Most nights, I have to cook; call that about an hour's worth of time. That's 8. I eat dinner then, usually while watching an episode of something on DVD, or part of a movie. We're at 8:30, 9pm. Then I go and write.

This is where things get nebulous. Sometimes, I'm done writing by 9:30, all's well, nothing odd to report, no concerns whatsoever. Some nights, I'm still staring slack-jawed at the computer screen come 10, wondering why I can't decide which of the characters in this scene will catch all the stray bullets coming at their conversation. Once in a while, usually due to forgetting to turn off Digsby or daring to click on my TVTropes bookmark, I wind up there all the way until 11. And then, I'm spent.

Sometimes, if I was in the middle of a movie, I'll watch the rest of it; sometimes I'll watch another episode of whatever show I'm watching. Maybe if I feel really good or I reached some important milestone, I'll have a Jameson's (neat, please), or walk down to Cost Plus or 7-11 to get something sweet. But usually, I'll just get in bed and read.

I do get two days off in a week, but you'd be amazed how fast those disappear. Am I playing D&D that weekend? One left. Do I want to go out on a date? Oops. What if I want to go out on a date and I have guests for the weekend and there's a new movie out I want to see? Well then, I'm glad I only visit the gym at my office every other day, because I need to get some writing done on my lunch break.

So, if you lent me a book and I keep deflecting whether or not I read it, that's why. If I've had a DVD of yours for eight months, that's why. If I keep vacillating about whether or not I want to come out to the bar tonight...well...you know the answer. I'm tightly scheduled, a lot of the time, and there are weekends where all I want is to get up in the morning, curl around my coffee, and get some of this beautiful work done. Writing is the world's most delightful thief, grabbing onto my time and my life and not letting go; and I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.

In Response to This Recording: The Seminal Works of Speculative Fiction

2010-01-22T10:28:00.001-08:00

So, I write speculative fiction. That shouldn't be a shock to anyone here.

This also means I read speculative fiction, among a greater many other things. Again, not a shock.

What might shock you is twofold: first, you might be shocked by This Recording's 100 greatest sci-fi and fantasy novels; and if you like that list, you might be shocked by how much I disagree.

Top 100s are fascinating academic exercises, and This Recording is no exception. There is no doubt in my mind that much of this list is great—I've read a lot of them and I cannot doubt the writer's taste. However, I think that he misses a lot of seminal works in favor of the things that built on them—passing up the Tolkiens in favor of the Martins, as it were.

I disagree with this tack. If you want to read 100 great speculative books, read the stuff on this list—or rather, read 1-99 on this list, and then read something else instead of The Word for World is Forest (LeGuin's weakest book if you ask me). However, if you want to read the big movers and shakers, the people who will give you a grounding in the catch-all genre of spec-fic and show you where it's going, I have to recommend a slightly different set; and so, I will put my money where my mouth is, and do just that.

Tyler's List of Things You'd Better Read
The roots of modern speculative fiction

I have to start with the names everyone will quote as the fathers of speculative fiction—people who are so important I couldn't possibly categorize them with their descendants. These are J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Ray Bradbury; and going back even further, you have the whole of mythology from any culture, notably Homer. The rest of these are specific to the sub-genres that splintered off of their work, or are antecedents of theirs whom you might not generally consider, or who have gotten dwarfed by later works.

If you like sword-and-sorcery books, your assigned reading is the short stories of Robert E. Howard (try the collection The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian) and Fritz Leiber (I got the collections entitled The First Book of Lankhmar and The Second Book of Lankhmar, but your area may collect the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories in different volumes). In the latter case, Leiber literally invented the term "sword and sorcery" to describe these types of stories; and in the former case, Howard actually owes more to H.P. Lovecraft than he does to Arnold Schwarzenegger—he is surprisingly literary, actually, without losing any of the machismo that attracts young geeks to the Conan movies. These men are often-imitated, but rarely equalled; Leiber, especially, will come up here in a minute.

If you like your fantasy dark, you have to check out Michael Moorcock: The Elric Saga (the first book, chronologically, is Elric of Melnibone). Moorcock didn't invent the anti-hero, but he did take it to its zenith; the Elric stories are the stories that practically every dark fantasy writer is using as their compass.

If you love weird fiction and horror, you need to read H.P. Lovecraft (widely available), but also Lord Dunsany and Robert W. Chambers. From Dunsany, pick up Wonder Tales; his sense of wonder and whimsy—and occasional chilling surrealism—was the foundation of Lovecraft and his colleagues and imitators. From Chambers, you need to read The King in Yellow; while much of the book winds up being relatively standard romantic fiction, the first few stories set the tone for the ideas of madness and something inhuman beyond our ken that form the other pillar of the Lovecraft ouevre.

If you love urban fantasy, my first pick may surprise you: Rudyard Kipling. Read "Wireless" (found in the wonderful collection of Kipling's fantasy and horror stories). I have to once more underline the name of Fritz Leiber; his two novellas "Our Lady of Darkness" and "Conjure Wife" are deeply important to the ideas of magic in the modern world. Lord Dunsany's Wonder Tales also gets a nod here, just to be thorough.

If you love cyberpunk, there is one name you need to know: William Gibson. Stephenson is great, but he built upon the platform built for him by Neuromancer. It's all here: cybernetics and their effect on how human you are, super-rich people who control the world, mercenary hackers, weird geopolitics...the book even coined the term "street samurai", fer Chrissakes!

If you like deconstructions of superheroes, this one is obvious: Alan Moore. Watchmen. He's to blame for the Dark Age of superhero comics, but so what? Tolkien is to blame for the Wheel of Time.

If you like sci-fi as social commentary, you have to start your journey with George Orwell's 1984, of course, and move from there to Kurt Vonnegut and Cat's Cradle, and from there to Philip K. Dick and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Orwell really started the ball rolling with speculative fiction being used to hold a mirror up to human behavior, and Vonnegut and Dick are the two who, in my humble opinion, ran the ball the furthest down the field.

If you like alternate history, many, many names will be thrown out there, but I come back to another one I already mentioned: Philip K. Dick, with his The Man in the High Castle. A story of the Axis winning World War II,

If you like steampunk, put down your fantasy-steampunk hybrids, and check out this now-familar name: William Gibson. The Difference Engine (co-written with Bruce Sterling, another great cyberpunk name) is the book that kicked the whole thing off, and while I'm not sure I enjoy the plot that much, its ideas underpin the entire steampunk genre.

There are so many other writers whose names I want to throw out there. Neil Gaiman is amazing, and George R.R. Martin is great; but they are more seminal in the modern canon than they are the compasses by which the meta-genre of speculative fiction sails. So, rather than babble about everything I ever loved, I will leave you with this list. I think This Recording did a pretty amazing job of writing down some great spec-fic books—but I think this list will help you see where some of those books came from.

The Power of the Blank

2010-01-12T21:22:00.000-08:00

Old writing wisdom (read: the Internet) holds that one of the most fearsome things a writer faces is the blank page. This is, supposedly, why one of the most tired little chestnuts a new writer can trot out is a character waking up in a blank white room with no memory—a manifestation, so say the experts, of the writer's deep fear of the blank white page/screen that they have to fill, day after day, with words.

Somehow, I didn't get that. For me, the most terrifying thing is not the blank page; it's the crowded page. When I'm having writer's block, it's rarely because I don't know where to start (not depending on my writing for food and clothing does alleviate that pressure somewhat; it's usually because I don't know how to continue. So I dread the end of the work day, when it comes time to head home to that page full of words, all crammed together in neat little rows, and I am not sure which word should come after that; and then which one should come after that, and after that, and after that...

So sometimes, I just open up a new document. Even if I'm working on the exact same story, somehow the whiteness and the expansiveness of it gives me the breathing room I need to move forward with the story. This has gone on for as long as I can remember, honestly; back in the days when I thought about being a Very Famous Cartoonist I remember that any drawing session I sat down for was best fueled by the presence of a big stack of blank white paper right next to me, as though somehow I was going to produce 300 pages of Artistic Genius right there at my family coffee table. And even beyond direct inspiration, I have always been surrounded by blank paper and unused or nearly-unused office supplies—even my desk at the office has an unopened ream of paper sitting on it, near my Inbox. (admittedly, that was because my makeshift ergonomic adjustment was one ream of paper too high, but I haven't bothered to move it yet, either.)

So, I do not doubt the fear of the blank page—I think I've ever experienced it from time to time—but I do have to say that a blank page can do a lot of good, too. Blank pages are just another little bit of magic in the bizarre spell that is art, a symbol that can be channeled in one of several directions; for right now, I'm just going to be grateful that my particular corner of the mental landscape seems to view them in a positive light. After all, at least when I get hit by the inevitable Writer's Dread, I've already written something; though then again, that does mean I have something to focus on when it comes time to hate my own work...

Isn't writing fun?

(The answer is yes.)

Review: Ink

2010-01-09T09:24:00.000-08:00

And now for happier topics:

See Ink.

No, seriously. You should. It's likely this is the first you're hearing of it, and it's very unlikely you recognize any of the names involved in its production; but this is one of those times where independent film soars.

Because this film works so heavily on its atmosphere, and because it is not something like Paranormal Activity that you're likely to know much about, I am going to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible.

A summary has trouble doing this film justice, because, lacking spoilers, it is impossible to make it sound anything but trite—and the inability to summarize its originality may be Ink's only weakness. It's about a world just beside and layered over our own, where beings of light and beings of shadow govern the more ephemeral aspects of our existence; it's about one angry, tortured soul and his decision to purge himself of that pain; and it's about humanity, and family, and what has to happen for us to change our path.

But what makes Ink stand out is not the skeleton of its plot; what makes Ink stand out is the meat and the skin, the way the details of this other-world are executed and the style and tone of the setting. Director/writer Jamin Winans creates an urban fairytale that manages to step outside the typical bums-at-a-Ren-Faire look, with a mythology that makes you shiver as much as giggle. The cinematography is expertly frenetic, and the actors hit the proper note at allo times. The movie is often quiet, and often cold; but these are part of the Ink mystique. Even the sparse smattering of fight scenes manage some originality, even as they derive a dash or two of inspiration from Guy Ritchie or the Wachowski brothers. The movie takes unknown actors and a low budget and runs with them, breeding originality underneath a layer of predictability. One look at the design for the Incubi, and the industrial-Dreamtime look of the sets, and I'd almost bet money you'll be sold.

And do not get me wrong, this film is on occasion predictable; some of the hints as to what is going on are perhaps too broad, and the story at base is a layer of black and a layer of gray over something we've all seen before. But it manages to never coddle its viewers—there is no scene full of exposition that doesn't feel natural within the flow of the story, and even those take place much later than lesser productions would have allowed; and beyond that, it does so much good with the details of that predictable story that I cannot fault them for sticking within the bounds of their chosen fable.

In the end, I give Ink five out of five terrifying black-and-white nerds. This is proof that it's not telling something original that matters; it's telling what you can find in an original way. A must-view for fans of Henson, Gilliam, or del Toro.

That's It

2010-01-08T10:10:00.000-08:00

I'm done with you, Republican talking heads.

For those not in the know, I apologize for ruining your morning, but apparently Rudy Giuliani, Mary Matalin, and a few other right-leaning chin-waggers have now claimed that there were no domestic terror attacks during the George W. Bush administration. When asked about 9/11 and the shoe bomber, they have attempted to claim that 9/11 was "inherited" from the Clinton administration.

Horseshit, people. If you want to twist history to claim that the (successful) attack that we have come to call 9/11 was Clinton's fault, then the same should theoretically apply to Obama and this latest (failed) attack. Bush inherited the security forces and regulations set down under previous administrations, and so did Obama. Even if Obama did something to cause the weakening in security, say that; don't claim that Bush had an immaculate record, especially not when the shoe-bomber was found even after the initial crackdown his administration engineered.

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term," [former White House Press Secretary Dana] Perino told Fox News last November. [source: above link]

Of course you told Fox News that, you useless piece of shit. Get out of my damn country and stop polluting a perfectly reasonable conservative party with your idiotic, anti-intellectual, public-insulting lies.

If you believe this—if you want to say that Bush was a more successful President in this sense—then okay; that's why we have First Amendment rights. But I have them too, and I want to say a couple of things to you:

First of all, you are wrong. There was a terrorist attack during George W. Bush's first year as President, and sources across the world will back that up. President Bush didn't "inherit" this attack from President Clinton any more than President Obama "inherited" the Christmas Day attack from President Bush. To claim otherwise is historical revisionism, similar to that practiced by a variety of fascist and otherwise oppressive regimes. Like, say, China. Who are communist. Bet that stung to hear, huh?

Second of all, I hate you. You are exactly what's wrong with politics today. This isn't about issues or debate anymore, and it hasn't been for a long time; but this is beyond the fucking pale, people. This is yet more cashing in on the deaths of three thousand people and the fears and pain of countless more, just so a political party can win itself some influence. You are a disgrace to my country and to the vision of its forefathers.

To the "journalists" and "leaders" propagating this statement: If I could make it happen, you would spend every single moment of your lives unable to concentrate, to move, to think, for all the shame you feel at having said this. You should be fired and blacklisted from your professions for this behavior. You're ruining my country. Get out. I want a dialogue between right and left, not this insane cycle of mudslinging and lies that make up the morass of American politics right now. If you are marketing this story as truth, I don't even count you as human anymore. I hope your life consists of perpetual suffering. Especially you, Fox News. I would love it if you and whoever your left-wing equivalent are would go off the air and out of print and disappear. Stop poisoning our minds.

Excuse me. I need to go and do work now. Thanks for interrupting, you mendacious piles of dung.

Not Providence: A Metaphysical Pit Stop

2010-01-05T09:11:00.000-08:00

Hey everybody.

So, first of all, the usual Tuesday announcement: Part 22 is up, and Book Two has come to its somewhat troubled conclusion.

Now, the second part: Not Providence is going on another break.

Before anyone panics, this one isn't because I have to move again, or anything scary or stressful like that. It's simpler than that, so much so that I can summarize it in three words: I'm burnt out. Wait, scratch that: I'm burnt out, and I need to focus on my career.

Not Providence is great fun; it's an unusual format for me, and a style I really enjoy writing in, if not the one I tend to default to. It's fun world-building within the confines of my creation and trying to wend my way from where Randall is currently to where I plan to put him at the end of Book Four (which will be the concluding chapter).

Unfortunately, Not Providence is a challenge in more ways than just structurally: it's also a challenge to my schedule. For the past not-quite-year, I've been sacrificing one to two nights of writing every week to getting the following week's update ready to go; this is not including the nights of writing that actually went into the project itself. And near the end of Book Two, I could feel my own satisfaction with the project dropping off as I lost my update buffer and was forced to pour more and more time into it (and getting less and less time to revise plot twists and details).

All told, Not Providence accounts for something like 75% of the writing I did in 2009; and while that's perfectly normal for something of its current (and ever-growing) length, the problem here is that Not Providence is free. That sounds cheap, I know; but honestly, I am just starting out as a writer. I have three publication credits to my name (and counting, we hope). I've just barely gotten agents to start reading my work. I am not yet in a position where 75% of my time can be going to a project I am not and do not plan to be making money or forwarding my career on. Plus, even beyond the money, I have ideas pounding at the back of my brain that have been waiting since last June or so; I need to give them time to come out and dance around and see if they are worthy of my energy and attention.

I in no way plan to stop writing Not Providence; it's planned for four books and four books will happen. And indeed, some energy will still be going into it: a break with two books complete is a great time to start trying to attract new readers, now that the promise of an insurmountable archive panic is not in evidence; and beyond that, as I was riding to work today I had the perfect opening for Book Three. I just need a couple months to work on other projects, try to expand my readership, and get Book Three squared away before I start putting it out on the Webbernets.

For those of you reading now, thank you, and please keep in touch; the site will in no way go dead just because Not Providence is temporarily in stasis, and who knows? I might have some other little tidbits to let you read. Do pimp me ou--er, recommend me when you think it is warranted, and don't hesitate to give me feedback when you want to. Just because it's free doesn't mean I don't care, after all.

In closing, do not fret, and do not chalk this up to yet another one of the half-finished projects littering the Internet. I won't be that guy. Randall will ride again; it'll just take a little time to get him ready for it, and he's got some brothers and sisters who need my attention.

Goodbye for now, my drooling hordes. A real blog post will follow later this week.

Here Come the Countdown

2009-12-31T11:36:00.000-08:00

Alright, it's done.

Provided all goes well, I will be spending tonight in the company of friends (and, just maybe, family); and, together, we will be celebrating the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010.

I've said before I'm big on rituals; this is no exception. While I try to avoid the insane laundry-lists of New Year's resolutions that plague so many people, I do think that the New Year's holiday is a fun and useful way to hit the Reset button and try to get things together.

Normally, I have a long reflection on the previous year, but this year, it's pretty simple: 2009 was rough. I know I said 2008 was rough, but you must understand, 2009 was rough in comparison to 2008. I dealt with feeling like a failure and some pretty hefty bouts of depression, and in my social circle, that felt like getting off lucky. Near the end, it was hard to believe that some of the things that happened in January and February happened this past January and February—hadn't some of this happened somewhere else, some other time, earlier in my long life?

But then again, not all of that was because of misery. The year has felt full because the year has been, well, full. I've done more writing this year than I think I have any year previous, and met more ideas about new experiences and revisited adventures with a profound "Yes". It's been rough for me, and often the new adventures were the kind with the screaming and the resonant cello music; but in the end, life is about adventure; and as I've always said, I'd rather live on a rollercoaster than a merry-go-round.

So this year is about more of that. This year is about picking up the skills I've been wanting to pick up; about getting to the state of health that I have desired; about writing and fighting for success in same; and about making the changes in work, love, and play that I can see waiting for me on the horizon. And that is all about New Year's I have left to say.

So by way of farewell: 2009. You were a thuggish prick; but one that made me really think about how I live my life—I think I'll call you the year of Tyler Durden. And like Tyler Durden, you were useful and entertaining for a while...but I'm very, very glad you're gone.

Goodbye, 2009. You were difficult, but you were full.

Hello, 2010. I'll be watching you.

And to everybody else: Happy New Year.

Not Providence: Before 2009 Self-Destructs

2009-12-29T09:08:00.000-08:00

Part 21 is alive and kicking. From now on, Randall will be known as "The Negotiator".

Okay, not really.

Enjoy the update, folks; the peacekeepers of Book Two will see you one more time in the New Year.

Review: Sherlock Holmes

2009-12-27T22:48:00.000-08:00

Short version: A well-crafted and visually enthralling reinterpretation of the Holmes mythos, with a high degree of attention and faithfulness to same; worth a watch for anyone who is willing to take their Holmes with a dash of irony.

Longer version, con MILD SPOILERS:

Robert Downey, Jr. plays a degenerate genius faced with a new and dangerous challenge; Jude Law plays the more traditional and upright man who acts as Abbott to Downey's Costello. They fight crime in a stylized but largely faithful rendition of Victorian England.

Sound good?

Now add in that their characters are adaptations of two of literature's most famous characters, and that the film is being directed by none other than Guy Ritchie, he of the camera ninjitsu and stylized violence.

If that doesn't still sound like it's worth a try, you're right; this movie isn't for you. As for myself, I went in to Sherlock Holmes a skeptic, and came out grateful for my willingness to try something new.

First of all, let me say: Yes, in this movie, Holmes and Watson beat people up. However, it is clear that this violence is a stylistic choice on the part of the director and the writer, not just somebody slapping the Holmes name onto a Victorian action movie. The detective work is all there, right down to the insane leaps of deduction that we could have made, too, if we'd had Holmes' peculiar body of knowledge; this Holmes just adds bareknuckle fighting and Bartitsu to his list of skills—skills which, as the writers have tried to make clear, are here and there implied in the original stories, and which are approached by the film in the same way it seems likely that Holmes would approach them: analytically and with a cold precision that a normal person could not muster at that speed.

Let me also say that the version of Holmes brought to life by Robert Downey Jr. and Ritchie's cinematography is one of my favorites of all time. Holmes is captured here as an eccentric genius, prone to bizarre behavior and serious self-abuse when not occupied by a case, lacking in social graces when his work does not require them, and self-absorbed in the extreme. In addition to Downey's acting, Ritchie's methods of portraying Holmes' thought process are mesmerizing; I really felt like I saw (and heard) the world the way a mind like Holmes would experience it.

I have to give credit to the other points of brilliance shining in this movie, too: Law's performance as Watson, the original straight man, is pitch-perfect, showcasing the character's intelligence and his occasional distaste for Holmes' lifestyle, and adding in a fast-paced banter that makes the relationship engaging and gives it the feel of a deep and lasting friendship. Mark Strong is delightfully scene-chewing as neo-fascist Lord Blackwood; Rachel McAdams does a great job as a character whose identity I will not spoil; and the rest of the crew are excellent, as well. Ritchie's camerawork is amazing throughout, and whoever is doing foley, prop, and set design for this movie deserves a nomination or two for capturing a filthy, crowded, dismal view of Victorian London, and for fascinating gadgets that manage to capture the genius of their creators without veering off into unnecessary steampunk.

Special praise has to be given to the script, though, above and beyond making fight scenes in a Holmes movie actually work. The script is not only engaging, witty, and atmospheric, but seems, to this amateur's view, painstakingly researched; it captures the climate—social, political, and meteorological—of England in that time; builds on scientific theory both from that era and (in the case of the inventions) a bit beyond; and gets its dates and facts straight both for actual English history and the (sadly) fictional history of Holmes, Watson, et al. And on the note of history, the most important of the script's strengths is the sense of love: the feeling that the writers knew the Holmes stories well and wanted to do them justice, even as they traveled a bit of a different path than more traditional versions of the character and his mythos. The story feels like fan-fiction, but more Laurie R. King than GeoCities: this is fan-fiction worthy of being published, provided it comes with the caveat that the writer knows where they've strayed from canon.

If I had to put a black mark on the film's record, it would be its preoccupation with being epic. The movie feels like it was born to be marketed as "Sherlock Holmes's greatest adventure yet", with the plot very publicly encompassing the entirety of England and involving a plan to—what else?—take over the world. Likewise, for as much as I praised the fighting for being interesting, one or two of the action segments felt a little shoe-horned in, as though this started as a much more action-oriented script and got cut down to size. The movie is at its best when it's the calculating, bizarre version of Holmes involved in a dark mystery, with the action blended in here and there as appropriate; a massive chase scene with a giant French bruiser feels like a maraschino cherry on my steak.

END SPOILERS

All that said, I highly recommend this movie, with the caveat that being too much of a purist about Holmes will make this movie feel like a drag. But if you can accept a mention here or there of fighting skills turning into Holmes beating people up with night-sticks, you'll find a clever little mystery and a lot of fun bits of Holmes trivia, wrapped up in a stylish and witty shell that even manages to be a little bit cerebral. I give this movie four out of five brilliant deductions, absolutely none of which are elementary.

Review: Christmas

2009-12-27T21:42:00.000-08:00

Christmas this year was nearly flawless.

I won't get into an itemized list of loot—I'm at least five years older than finding that awesome—but I will say that the gifts for all of us were very well-received by their intended targets; that I procured a couple books, one of which I had never heard of but which had great promise; and that I have now added to my day that great modern ritual that is delay-brewed coffee. The biggest gift news, of course, is that I am typing this blog entry from the keyboard of Wednesday, King of the Acer, the new Aspire laptop that has joined my little family of inanimate objects I talk to like roommates. (Tenbones, the Vaio who had been my previous literary companion, is now retired and living out his dotage in continued service to Tyler and country.) So, everybody please try to make the young'n feel welcome, and be glad for old Tenbones, now consigned to being the computer full of music and movies and the occasional CD.

More than presents, however, this year really was about family. I've heard it said that Christmas really is better for adults than for kids, and while I miss some of the magic it held as a child, I have to agree. As an adult, I can be enchanted by the lengths to which NORAD went with their Santa tracker; I can appreciate the joy of others unwrapping their presents as much as myself; I can enjoy the little things like a drink with my dad or the joy of waking up to the smell of breakfast casserole. This year drove it home in occasionally painful, but almost always exultant ways. The only bad part about it is that Santa left us for another year, and I was forced to come back south and tackle all the mundanity again.

But soon, I tell myself, it will be New Year's. Soon there will be celebration. And every morning, or at least the mornings on which supplies do not run low, there will be fresh-brewed cups of dark coffee, ready for me to drink.

One last time, before I let this part of the holiday slip by: Merry Christmas, everybody.

Christmastime, Pretty Baby

2009-12-23T08:51:00.001-08:00

I think my writing work is taking a nap for the holidays.

That's right; today is the last day of the grind, and then after a night with a houseguest it's off to the Great Green North of Mendocino County.

My Christmas got off to the exact right start this weekend, as I received a present from a new friend who I keep insisting can't possibly be that new, and an old friend whose company I had not shared in a long while. I am now the proud owner of my first Christopher Moore book; and of a black piece of canvas that says, simply, "What Would You Attempt if You Knew You Could Not Fail?".

I nearly teared up opening that one. It is now proudly displayed in my living room, in full view of my armchair, where I will sit, and read Christopher Moore, and think that I know exactly what I would attempt—and I'm attempting it nearly every day. Fantastic timing on that one.

So, just one more day; just a few more QA jobs; and then it's the long drive and the foggy windows and the constant winding greenery that leads to my house (and yes, the hotel that looks like a golf course fucking a salmon run). My aunt will put on her reindeer pajamas; my father will crank the Elvis Christmas album; and we'll crack more than one bottle of wine and get down to the important business of playing board games, opening presents, and spending time with family. And during that time, we'll all reflect on our year and be grateful for the time to be with each other—though the food may be fattening, though one or two of our usual guests may not make it, though the fireplace may fill the house with smoke, it's Christmas, damn it, and nothing is going to make it anything less than that.

It's likely that I will not have time to blog while I am up there, so I leave you with these thoughts: Whatever holiday you're celebrating, whatever you choose to call it, I hope yours is incredible; and I say to you, with all the best hopes and intentions: Merry Christmas.

Not Providence: The Opposite of Holiday Cheer

2009-12-22T08:57:00.000-08:00

Time to open your present, Gentle Readers!

...Oh, thanks for trying to save the wrapping paper, I really appreciate it...

...nah, it's okay...

There you go! Aren't you excited?!

It's Part Nineteen!

Because nothing says "Happy Holidays" like traumatized children.

My Perfect Day

2009-12-17T23:19:00.001-08:00

(Posted from my Formspring.me site; this one seemed worth sharing.)

What would your perfect day look like?

I would wake up early, 8 or 9, in a warm bed, with an overcast day outside. I'd get up to a clean, warm house, and I'd go for a jog through a lovely, crisp, autumnal little neighborhood.

Returning home, I'd meet up with the woman I've chosen to marry and have coffee, a bagel with the works, and a blueberry muffin for breakfast; then I'd kiss her goodbye and sit down to write. Writing would go smoothly and perfectly, all the words synching up, the plot challenging me but being overcome, the characters all sparking to life; then after writing, I'd get to take a walk through a winter-frosted forest complete with a strange abandoned house and a frozen lake.

From there, I'd go to a job in radio or voice-acting--just part-time, enough to have fun and to help pay the bills.

I'd meet my mom and dad for lunch at a little cafe: something middling-light like the sausage sandwich at the cafe by the Menlo Park Caltrain.

After the late lunch, it's back to work to finish everything up at the "day job".

In the evening, I'd read and watch whatever DVD I'm working my way through at the time, finishing in time for my wife to arrive home and for me to start preparing dinner (assuming we aren't going out for tapas to celebrate something). Then we'd curl up on the couch (because in my perfect day my living room can support a couch) and watch a movie before heading out to live music or a spoken-word event up in San Francisco.

At night, well, at night there'd be sex. Duh. And then we'd snuggle and get enthralled in some deep conversation until we were both too browned and muzzy to try to talk anymore.

That, right there, is my perfect day. Minus the treasure hunt that threads its way through the whole day and at least one opportunity to wear a pirate hat.

Ask me anything

The Christmas Spirit

2009-12-16T23:51:00.001-08:00

I've been having a lot of trouble this year with getting into Christmas.

This is weird for me; Christmas is usually my favorite time of the year. Everyone's merry and happy, families are together, there's a certain magic in the air. This year it feels like no-one is trying; like Christmas has been some lights strung in my living room and the need to buy presents and maybe some catered lunches in my office. I blame the recession (also the Commies); I assume that somehow, in most budgets, Christmas just got cut completely. I don't even know if I've seen any ornaments.

But this...somehow, just this tiny little video was enough for me to get myself into the Christmas spirit. It's silly, it's sometimes obvious, but it's creative and it's well-wishing and it's just plain cute; and I think maybe that was what I needed. Perhaps Christmas really will be Merry this year.

I think I'll go see a tree tomorrow. I can't afford one of my own...but maybe I can go see someone else's to tide me over until I decorate the one at my folks' house.

Yeah. That'll do.

Not Providence: Uploadageddon

2009-12-15T11:01:00.000-08:00

Alright, my assorted barnyard animals...

It is done.

Since real-life troubles and circuitous legalese have prevented me from having sale-ready, collated copies of Not Providence Book One ready for holiday consumption, I have gone ahead and done it.

As of now, tyler-hayes.com includes the NEW, IMPROVED Prologue, "The Devil Inverted; the entirety of Book One, "The Progress Trap"; and is fully up to date on Book Two, "Magical Thinking". The site updates are not fully complete—the old and much less personally-enjoyable titles are still in evidence here and there—but this will hopefully hold you over. Also, make sure you load my stylesheet; the updates now include some poor man's protection against site-scraping that will make your reading life hellish if it doesn't load, and I promise there is nothing invasive in there.

Read.
Enjoy.
Disseminate.

Merry Christmas.

Not Providence: Pardon Our Nonexistent Dust

2009-12-15T09:16:00.000-08:00

Point the first: Part Nineteen is alive and kicking. Who pieced that together?

Point the second: Things are going to look weird around tyler-hayes.com for the next few days. I'm doing some site overhauls and my schedule is such that they're happening piecemeal. You'll be seeing some weirdness with formatting (though hopefully not actual breaks in said formatting), places where the titles of Not Providence's books mismatch, and other little oddities; I swear they are temporary and will be made as non-intrusive as possible.

Point the third: We are now beginning our serious push to increase our readership (beginning now so that there's momentum behind the push after the holidays end), so if you aren't reading Not Providence or following the blog, please note that Book One, "The Progress Trap", will be going back up on the site some time today; and if you are reading, I'd love it if you'd recommend it to someone who might like to give it a try. Consider it a very low-budget Christmas present.

And now, off to Real Work. Have a great day, everybody.