Attack of the Revenge of Potential Cover Art!

Winding up the week with a bit of potential cover art! (For Princesses In SPACE!!!. None of these would work for GhostCop.)

For my friend Nicole

This weekend sees the departure of my church's youth director, a truly amazing and wonderful woman named Nicole, who has been there for ten years...spanning just about the entirety, thus far, of my family's association with that church. The Wife and The Daughter started going there in 2003 shortly after we moved here from our nine-month experiment with living in Syracuse; I attended sporadically until after Little Quinn was born, when...well, I felt a need then.

Anyhow, Nicole has played a part for all that time, and now, her own life is taking her to other shores, as life tends to do. Leavetaking is never easy, even it comes on the cusp of a change for which we have long wished. Dougie Maclean's song "Caledonia" speaks to this sentiment, and the various things that homesickness can bring to our hearts. You hear it in his words and in the wonderful melody, with its rises and falls; he knows that he is returning home, but even so, the farewells to those he knows wherever he is right now will be sad in themselves.

Here's Dougie Maclean.


To Nicole and her family, Sláinte mhaith!

Answers, the fourth!

The answering of the questions continues. As Samuel L. Jackson said in Jurassic Park, "Hold onto your butts!"

Local activist Christopher Byrd asks:

Barring a cataclysmic event, would you be interested in being a judge at next year's Buffalo's Best Pierogi Contest?

Wow, that sounds fun! I know next to nothing about pierogi, so I hope I don't have to talk like some pompous-arsed foodie -- "I find the flavor profile of this one particularly fine, the interplay between the duck spleen and the Jamaican garlic." Let me know how this works!

Reader Josh asks:

What's your opinion of the work of T. H. White?

I only know White by one book, The Once and Future King. I love that book dearly and am probably due for a re-read. It's one of the finest treatments of the Arthurian legend ever written, and it is full of wonderful, beautifully poetic prose, with what may be the most gorgeous closing paragraphs I've ever read in any book. Other than that book, though, I'm entirely unfamiliar with White. Any recommendations?

Roger, who always asks a ton of questions, has one very pressing one among all the rest (to which I'll get in posts to come):

Who is going to win the NL Central? And will the Pirates, who have the best record in baseball at this moment, FINALLY have a winning season, first since 1992?

Longtime readers know that when I was a much more of an active baseball fan than I am now (my baseball interest is basically on life-support), my team was the Pittsburgh Pirates. I inherited this fandom from my father, and during their last run of success -- 1990 to 1992 -- he and I had some pretty nice bonding experiences watching Pirates games at local taverns. Alas, after 1992 and a money-induced purging of the roster, the Pirates went into a period of rebuilding, which failed. So they started rebuilding again in 1996 or so, and that one failed. And so on and so on, to the point where the Pirates have literally not had a team finish the season with a winning record -- minimum, 82 wins -- since 1992. Twenty years. That's not only a baseball record, it might well be a record for all sports.

The last couple years, the Pirates have started out well each year, giving the impression that maybe that was the year, but each time, they faltered badly down the back half of the season to still end up losing more than they won. This year, however, they've been consistently good for just about the entire year (after a slow couple weeks to start out). So, as of right now, this writing, their record is 74-52. They are 22 games over .500, and more importantly, in order for them to finish this year with a losing record, they would have to lose 30 games before they manage to win 8. (Well, technically 7, since a record of 81-81 is neither winning nor losing.) That would be a collapse for the ages. The sports poets would sing of that for generations to come. So, I feel somewhat confident in saying Yes, the Pittsburgh Pirates will finish the year with a winning record.

Now, as for their division...that's tougher. The Pirates currently own a one-game lead in the NL Central, over the St. Louis Cardinals. That's mostly on the strength of their pitching, which has been excellent this year. But I always have a hard time picking against experienced teams like the Cardinals. They've been in the playoffs nine times since 2000, and they were World Series champions just two years ago. I'd love to pick the Pirates, but I tend to be of the mindset that you don't pick against the defending champ until someone beats 'em. So my pick has to be the Cardinals.

I have a Twitter bet with a Braves fan, by the way: if the Braves and Pirates meet in the postseason, the fan of the team that loses has to post ten positive tweets about the team that wins. I'll have to say ten nice things about the Braves, who were, once upon a time, my baseball equivalent of the New England Patriots. Wow. How do I get myself into this stuff?

All for now! The answers shall continue!

Something for Thursday

Sometimes one needs a little sheer perfection. In that spirit, here is Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic in Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A Major. This work is, in my view, one of the supreme achievements in all of human art.

Answers, the third!

Just one today! But first a little backstory. Someone arrived upon my blog today by way of a search string that...well, here's what I tweeted about it:

That awkward moment when someone finds your blog using a search string that could only be used by someone searching for pr0n....

I refused to divulge the exact and icky search string (but I did admit that it had nothing to do with Star Wars, power tools, cats, overalls, or pies-in-faces). This led a friend of mine, Scotty, to get clever:

So, for my ask me anything question-if I ask what they searched for will you answer?

Well, this is Ask Me Anything!, so I must answer the question, just as Scotty asked it. So here's the answer to the question, exactly as he asked it:

NO.
OK, more answers to come! Feel free to ask stuff, too! (Except questions about that. I think we've killed that topic pretty nicely.)

And thanks, Scotty, for the loophole!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

You're sitting down to watch your favorite movie. On your lap is a big bowl of _____, and at your side is a tall glass of _____. Fill in the blanks! (With a snack and beverage. This ain't Mad-Libs and you're not going to do the 10-year-old thing of putting 'poop' in all the blanks. I'm watching you, people!)

Answers, the second!

UPDATE: Grammer fixed to make a sentence say what I meant!

Continuing the answering cavalcade! (And you can still ask stuff!)

Earl has a couple:

Which Do you find more offensive to pledge; one nation under God" or "with liberty and justice for all"?

That's an interesting and challenging question. In truth, I don't find either concept particularly offensive at all, although I am always struck by the way the Pledge was co-opted by conservative evangelicals in this country some years ago. I'm still astonished at the way George HW Bush managed to somehow hang the freaking Pledge of Allegiance around Michael Dukakis's neck like a damned dead albatross. Wasn't that weird?

I like the idea that we are one nation, and I like the idea of liberty and justice for all. Now, we can differ on what "liberty" means; one of the big reasons I reject libertarianism is because I think the notion of "liberty" that they hold dear is deeply suspect. But that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish, innit? I also have trouble with "under God", mainly because the days of Americans being able to go through life assuming that everybody around them was Christian are pretty much over. Arguing over whether the Founding Fathers intended America as a Christian nation or not strikes me as generically unproductive, since I'm increasingly of the view that what the Founding Fathers wanted really shouldn't be terribly relevant to us today. Besides, there's the fact that the original version of the Pledge didn't even have "under God" in it; that was added later by Congresscritters who didn't want to appear too Red.

Ultimately, though, I find the idea of a pledge a bit daft in the first place. What's the point? Why do we bother making kids recite this thing each and every morning? My love of my country has nothing at all to do with the Pledge of Allegiance, and I generically find oaths of allegiance to be generally a waste of time.

Would you consider switching genres in your writing? Why or why not?

I fear that last night's post may have dampened this question a little, but I hope not. The answer is, obviously, yes. Or no. Ha!

It all depends on how we draw the lines of genre. Science fiction seems quite different from fantasy, although where the dividing line between the two lies has been an eternal source of debate for fans of either and both genres for decades. One of my beta readers for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) indicated her belief that the book is actually a fantasy rather than SF, and I can see the argument; for me, it's SF but it's pretty solidly in the Star Wars end of the pool. So, did I write SF or fantasy?

Now, The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy (not the actual title), the book I started but set aside because I hadn't thought through the backstory enough, is most certainly fantasy. Or is it? The world and history are completely imaginary, but there is no magic in that world at all. None. Zero. So is it still fantasy? Hmmm!

And then there's GhostCop (not the actual title), which is, as I indicated, a supernatural thriller. Or, it's horror. Thing is, many folks put horror in with SF and fantasy! I've read quite a few horror books that are definitely horror but which are also quite proper SF. (The Stand is one good example.) So, what genre is that? I don't know.

Historical fiction is a genre that interests me, but I don't know if I'll ever have the patience to do the necessary research. There are topics that could work, though...the romance of Robert and Clara Schumann, for example, or the life of Hector Berlioz, which is a wildly cinematic life, indeed.

Last night on Facebook, a friend of mine named Mark said this:

After I saw your rewrites of movie dialogues, I thought that you might try writing a script or a play sometime.

Screenplays or plays? That's interesting. My first creative writings that I took seriously were scripts, written in grade school. They were also fan fiction. I haven't written in script format in years, though; I made the switch to prose in the late 1990s when I finally decided it was time to leave fanfic behind for good, and I've never looked back.

Well, almost.

I wrote a script a few years ago, which I often consider deleting entirely. I wrote it in an attempt to exorcise some personal demons, and...well, I'm not going to elaborate much on that. I think I could be a decent screenwriter, but my sense of things is that screenwriters have even less general chance of seeing their work produced correctly than novelists. I respect screenwriters and playwrights immensely and I like to read and study their work for storytelling insights, but I doubt I'll ever count myself among them.

OK, that's it for tonight! More answers to come!

Writing! Writing! Writing!

Behold the first word of the new Work-In-Progress, whose official Not Actual Title is...GhostCop!

Yes, I'm shifting genres and trying a supernatural thriller. No science fiction, no spaceships, no Princesses...just a normal Earth city, and the goings-on that happen there. I'm not sure what my word-count goal is for this book, but right now, I'm thinking it'll be shorter than either of the two Princesses books. Maybe 120,000 words, but as I said, I'm not sure. I may not even set a goal on this one.

And no, it's not about a cop who's a ghost. Nor is it about a ghost who's a cop. What is it about, then?

Hmmmmm....

(In other writing news, nothing new on the query front at all...but I'm sending a new wave of 'em out this weekend. And also, I had the very odd experience of dreaming about writing the other night. I almost never remember my dreams, so for all I know I dream about writing all the time, but this one was quite vivid. I dreamed that I said "Screw it!" and dove right back into editing Princesses II. What was weird is that I remember, in my dream, reading scenes that aren't in the book. Not that they should be, because they didn't make sense, but still...dreaming about it was very surreal. I take that as confirmation that my general strategy of allowing the book to fade in my consciousness for a few months is a good one.)

Answers, the first!

All right, people, let's get this ball rolling! And remember, you can still ask stuff!

A longtime reader who prefers anonymity gets us off:

Would you like to be a writer full time, or is a mix of writing and some other job ideal for you?

I desperately want to write full-time. Writing is the thing I'm best at, and if I have one major regret in life -- under the general notion that I don't really do 'regrets', as I think that most of my screw-ups have taught me something I needed to know -- it's that I spent an awful lot of time not really attacking writing all that seriously. Or when I was, I was doing it wrong. I spent too much time focusing on wrong projects, or sitting with Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) in my head on the notion that "I wasn't ready" yet for that one. Princesses is an idea that came to me in two parts, the first coming in 1999 and the second coming in 2001. I wasted ten years dragging that story around in my head. Now, maybe if I'd written it back then it wouldn't have turned out like it did...but heck, I don't know that.

I've also wondered if I spent too much time fiddling around with short fiction, which tended to dominate my writing life back in the early 2000s. My short stories tended to be long, and I remember one time I posted something to a writing-based newsgroup on USENET, along the lines of, "I can't seem to write genuine short stories! Every one I write ends up being well over 10000 words!" To which one woman, a published writer, responded, "Sounds to me like you're a novelist at heart. Write books." Did I listen to that advice? Well...not so much.

I believe that we should figure out what we're best at, and then focus like a laser on being that. I'm late to the party on this philosophy, and now I'm paying the price in terms of not being published yet. I'll get there, though.

I don't know if I'll ever get to a point where I can write full-time. But that's the goal I'm going to move toward until the day I can't write anymore. The incentives are too great. I want to do what I'm best at; I want to tell the stories that are in my head; and I want a job where I can wear overalls every single day (and let's be honest, farming and construction are unlikely at this point in my life, as much respect as I have for both).

Do you read non-fiction (e.g., history, science and nature, biographies)? If so, what do you read? Do you wish you read more?

I always wish I read more! Always always always. In fact, I'm planning to start setting limits on my Internet time and start turning off the Wifi when I need to be working -- and I'm planning to include reading time as working. It's the only sensible thing to do. No, I'm not planning to drop offline entirely, because I like the social networking stuff too much, and I also tend to think that by the time I get a book out there in one form or another, I'll have a built-in audience to start with!

As for the non-fiction I read: I always try to have some kind of nonfiction going. I like all of it, but I especially like writing that is narrative based: nonfictional storytelling that gets the factual stuff in by way of other tales taking place in and around the history. Good travel writing is wonderful for this. Reading nonfiction is essential because it gives me ideas for stories, and it gives me details from the real world that I can incorporate into my stories. Quite a lot of stuff I've read has gone into the two Princesses books already.

You know what I really don't do enough of, either? Blogging about what I read. I need to do more of that, too.

Bonnie asks:

Did you ever finish your "Battlestar Galactica" rewatch? I was wondering what you thought of the series as a whole, especially the ending.

I'm sorry to report that...no, I have't finished it. I took a break from the show, and then way lead on to way, as it does. I absolutely intend to return to it, though! I was about halfway through Season Two, I believe; they had just recovered the Arrow of Apollo and used it to find the way to Earth. I didn't stop for any reason other than I wanted a break -- I'd been watching two or three episodes a week, and I generally don't do intensive rewatches where I do marathons. I did not intend the break to get this long, though.

More answers to come! And feel free to ask more, if you like!

Sentential Links

Links!

:: “My Saturday morning writer’s advice for writers: try not to get hung up on writers’ advice for writers.” (I couldn't agree more.)

:: That is why I always tell authors and writers to physically draw their action scenes. (But then, this is also pretty useful, in terms of a specific technique. I don't totally do this, but I tend to slow down a lot when I'm writing action, because I have to keep track of it all in my mind. I think I'll start doing this!)

:: Brains are interesting. Fascinating, in fact. Sometimes I think I should have been either a neuroscientist or a psychiatrist but, with the former I might have to dissect actual brains and with the latter I would have to deal with annoying, messed up people all the time, which is not one of my talents. (You see why I never decided what I want to be when I grow up?) (Dissecting? I'm there!)

:: Note that his bed is asbestos. In another panel, we see his bedspread, carpet and wallpaper are asbestos, and his furniture has been chemically treated to be fireproof. So, clearly, Johnny Storm has some pretty bad cancer.

:: We as writers are especially susceptible to anxiety because what we function through, how we move through life, is made up of our feelings and parading our vulnerabilities before the world. In a world that increasingly advises us to Harden Up and Be Tough, and where vulnerability is seen as weakness to be preyed upon and exploited, being a writer is like throwing oneself to the lions. ("You need a thick skin!" we're always told. I don't have one. Sorry, never have. What I do have is pigheaded determination. Oh yes, that I've got. Tons of, actually.)

:: I freely admit to being charmed by the little drama in today’s Family Circus. (Heavens, this is awesome!)

More next week! And I start posting answers to Ask Me Anything! questions later today, but go ahead and still ask if you want!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Ahhh, training videos -- the bane of existence of everybody who has ever worked, well, anywhere. Personally, I can't stand training videos and I invariably find them a giant waste of time.

But this one, from Wendy's in the 80s, is fascinating. It's just your normal boring training video, dull-as-ditchwater, until you get to about the 3:40 mark.


:: James Garfield is the only President to prove a mathematical theorem. Now, there are two things Garfield can be known for! (The other is that he died of a gunshot wound just six months into being President.)

:: If you're on Facebook, go like a page called "Grandiloquent Word of the Day". Because then you'll get a daily dose of words-gone-by, words just waiting to be dusted off and used again, the vocabulary analogs of poor Woody in the toybox. And the words come with nifty illustrations!

More next week!

Last call! Ask Me Anything!!!

Well, not really the last call, since I'll still accept questions, but I'll start posting answers tomorrow, so if you have any questions, get 'em in! Comment on this post (anonymous comments are accepted!), or e-mail, or on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or...you know the drill. Got a question? Ask it!

Something for Thursday

"There But For You Go I".

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

We'll be attending our local county fair this weekend, but I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that there are people in this world who don't like county fairs! This seems really odd to me. So: County fairs, yay or nay?

Sentential Links

Just a few, so as to feel like I actually got something accomplished....

:: Is it so much to ask that your summer series actually be over by Labor Day? (Sadly...yes, it is. Since new seasons don't start until late September, that means that wrapping summer stuff up by Labor Day would mean networks have to fill three weeks with not much at all, when they'd much rather have their summer stuff amping up, hopefully increasing viewership and keeping eyes glued to ads for the new shows soon the debut or return. It's maddening, but that's the way it is.)

:: Also, he implies but doesn't out and out say that I'm nuts if I think Harry Potter is a better fantasy series than A Song of Fire and Ice. (The 'he' is Lance Mannion's son, who is frankly nuts if he doesn't think that Harry Potter is superior to A Song of Ice and Fire, which I've made clear many times -- including Lance's own comments -- that GRRM's series is really an enormous mess whose success is due to the impressive nature of its scale (the vastness of the story and the details involved really are extremely impressive) and what I'm increasingly taking as our culture's current fascination with stories of Awful People At Work And Play.)

:: Rodriquez is the sole custodian of his talent, and he is being reviled for the choices he has made about how to use that talent. I don't imagine he could be held in lower regard, by just about anyone, but really what is he guilty of? It seems to me that he has been trying to take the maximum advantage of his already substantial abilities, and isn't that what we expect from athletes? Hell, isn't that what we expect from everyone? (This will be a placeholder until I address performance-enhancing drugs as part of Ask Me Anything. There's a lot in Bill's post that I agree with, though.)

:: Confusing process and result here is not a good thing. It confuses writers who are hungry to know what “being professional” means. The things Ms. Morton describes can lead to being a pro writer, but it’s not the only path, or a guaranteed one, not by a long shot. (This is not a criticism of John Scalzi by any means, but I am noticing that the more I beat my head against the wall of publishing, the less inclined I am to read the advice of those who have made it already. That could just be my innate pigheadedness, but there's a line that Captain Picard has in the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I've always liked: "If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are.")

:: It’s now 13 years since my dad died, and he’s still in my dreams. (That's where he really has to be, innit?)

More next week! And if you haven't already, Ask Me Anything!. Seriously, folks, do you wanna see me beg?

Sunset

Sunset at home, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

'Nuff said. Busy day, and busy week shaping up....

Stick a fork in it!

At long last, after five months and eight days of wrestling with this story, the first draft of Princesses In Space II: Spacenado (not the actual title) is finished. And what a struggle this one was, at times. Wow, this was a tough book to do. I'm looking forward to editing, but I really need a bit of distance from this universe for a while, so the plan is to set it aside for my customary period of about three months. Unfortunately, that would put me into editing in November, which is NaNoWriMo, so instead I will not start editing until December 1.

I figure it should take me no more than two months, max, to go through the book, mark up the manuscript, and make the changes I decree necessary on the first time through, so my next goal is to have the manuscript into the hands of beta readers no later than Super Bowl Sunday, which is...the first Sunday in February. (I'm not looking it up right now.) What happens next? Well, obviously...another book! I think I'm going to take a whack at a notion I've had for a supernatural thriller for quite some time, and then, after that, give another shot at Lighthouse Boy (not the actual title), the fantasy epic I started but stalled on because I hadn't given sufficient thought to the backstory. The thriller's not-actual-title? I haven't decided yet, but I will.

Why start something so soon? Well, here's Stephen King, describing the output regimen of Anthony Trollope:

At the other end of the spectrum, there are writers like Anthony Trollope. He wrote humongous novels (Can You Forgive Her? is a fair enough example; for modern audiences it might be retitled, Can You Possibly Finish It?), and he pumped them out with amazing regularity. His day job was as a clerk in the British Postal Department (the red public mailboxes all over Britain were Anthony Trollope's invention); he wrote for two and a half hours each morning before leaving for work. The schedule was ironclad. If he was in mid-sentence when the two and a half hours expired, he left that sentence unfinished until the next morning. And if he happened to finish one of his six-hundred-page heavyweights with fifteen minutes of the session remaining, he wrote The End, set the manuscript aside, and began work on the next book.

Now, I'm not gonna start writing the next thing immediately, as in, right now, but I may well start later today. Why not? What else am I gonna be doing with my time? There are stories to be told, man! Zap! Pow!!

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound....

:: If you go to the cemetery in Texas where Lee Harvey Oswald is buried, beneath a stone simply marked "Oswald", you'll see a similar stone right next to it, engraved "Nick Beef". Just who is Nick Beef?

:: I saw this on Twitter yesterday. Some kid lost a part of a Lego toy, and wrote to Lego to ask for a replacement. Witness how Lego does customer service:

This originated on the @Fascinatingpics feed.

:: I'm on board with overalls, obviously, but this takes them just a bit too far for me.

More next week!

Empty Chairs at Empty Tables (or writing desks)

My desk is a mess.


In other news from the week gone by...it sure rained a lot the last couple days.




OK, back to work....

Ask Me Anything: A reminder!

Don't forget, folks -- it's Ask Me Anything! time! Just leave your questions, on anything you want me to babble about, whether serious or silly, in comments on this post. Or question me via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Flickr. But not MySpace. (Do I even still have a MySpace account? I have no idea...hmmmm....)

Ask Me Anything!

Film Quote Friday: Apollo 13

I know, I haven't done one of these in a ridiculously long time! But here's something, a favorite moment from a movie that I think is starting to border on being criminally underrated: Apollo 13.

The story is well known by this point, I hope; the moment I'm quoting here isn't one of the more famous moments, but it's an excerpt, in the movie, of an interview astronaut Jim Lovell had given before the Apollo 13 mission ever blasted off. It's the type of wonderful scene that may seem at first glance like a bit of filler, but it establishes so much about the character of Jim Lovell that it's really indispensible. And as it comes later on in the film, after the mission has already been deeply imperiled, this scene partially serves to assure us that this mission is still in good hands, and that this guy will pay attention and find his way home. Here's the speech that Lovell (Tom Hanks) gives:

Uh well, I'll tell ya, I remember this one time - I'm in a Banshee at night in combat conditions, so there's no running lights on the carrier. It was the Shrangri-La, and we were in the Sea of Japan and my radar had jammed, and my homing signal was gone, because somebody in Japan was actually using the same frequency. And so it was - it was leading me away from where I was supposed to be. And I'm lookin' down at a big, black ocean, so I flip on my map light, and then suddenly: zap. Everything shorts out right there in my cockpit. All my instruments are gone. My lights are gone. And I can't even tell now what my altitude is. I know I'm running out of fuel, so I'm thinking about ditching in the ocean. And I, I look down there, and then in the darkness there's this uh, there's this green trail. It's like a long carpet that's just laid out right beneath me. And it was the algae, right? It was that phosphorescent stuff that gets churned up in the wake of a big ship. And it was - it was - it was leading me home. You know? If my cockpit lights hadn't shorted out, there's no way I'd ever been able to see that. So you never know...what...what events are to transpire to get you home.

Here's how Hanks delivers it. I love his little conversational ah's and um's; most of all -- and this is such a tiny detail to notice, but it's just great -- as he's telling the story, he reveals what the 'green carpet' in the ocean was, and when says it, at the end of the sentence he says, "Right?" As if to lead us to the same conclusion he has reached.


I've said this before, but I'll go ahead and repeat it: I really think that all the time corporate America spends in goofy meetings and seminars and "team-building events" to try and teach "teamwork" through fake activities could be better spent by simply putting all the workers in a room and screening this movie. I cannot think of a finer example of teamwork in a movie.

Something for Thursday

Oops...how on Earth did I completely forget about last week's installment? It just totally flew out of my mind, alas.

I've been listening a bit this week to John Williams's amazing score to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the other classic score he wrote for a sci-fi film released in 1977. (If you don't know by now what the other one was, I can't help you.) Williams's CE3K music is quite different, as it is mostly by turns either atonal, or haunting, or militaristic during the "Government agency" scenes. Only gradually does a lyricism emerge from the score, becoming stronger and stronger, beginning really with the introduction of the famous five-note "Communication with the aliens" theme. Gradually Williams stitches all of this together into an amazing tapestry of emotion that is one of his more overwhelming efforts.

This is a well-produced suite of tracks from the film, edited together very convincingly into a pretty nifty listening experience.


A few annotations:

0:01: The score opens with the swirling music that plays as the teevee reports of the disaster at Devil's Tower appear, leading Roy Neary and Jillian Guiler to separately realize that their visions of some strange mountain are of a very real place.

1:30: Roy and Jillian drive cross-country into the Wyoming back woods to try and get closer to Devil's Tower.

2:12: Roy and Jillian see Devil's Tower, in person, for the first time. "I can't believe it's real!"

What follows is some suspenseful music as they continue driving into the back woods. At about 4:15, they drive past four 'dead' cows. Now they're taken by the military and processed, with Neary being questioned by Lacombe and Loughlin.

6:40: The 'conversation' between the electronic music synthesizer and the mother ship.

10:52: The terribly sad scene where Roy thinks he's going insane. "This means something...this is important." (The subtext with Roy's family is awfully troubling, really. His wife is completely justified in thinking that he's utterly lost it, but of course, he hasn't. Now, it's never established at the end of the film how long he's going to be off with the aliens, so I don't completely buy into the notion that he's ditching his family forever. But what does poor Ronnie Neary think when she reads the next day's newspaper?)

13:25: The 'returnees' begin emerging from the Mother Ship, abductees who have been missing, in some cases, for decades (the pilots of Flight 19). Among them is little Barry Guiler, who is reunited with Jillian at the 15:14 mark.

15:35: Back to the beginning of the film. The mysterious crescendo ending in a smash as we open in the deserts of Mexico.

16:00: And back to the film's finale, as the ETs come down from the Mother Ship and begin interacting with the people gathered at the Devil's Tower landing site. Roy Neary is taken away to be prepared to join the astronauts who are being allowed to go. Note "When You Wish Upon a Star" at 17:03.

17:41: The ETs choose Roy Neary. More "When You Wish Upon a Star". Neary looks back; Lacombe urges him to go. He meets Jillian's eye, and then goes up on board.

19:00: The main ET greets Lacombe; they exchange the hand signals at 20:20. Here Williams starts letting the "Alien Communication" theme take over; where it was strange and haunting before, now it's plaintive and beautiful.

21:05: All the aliens go back on board. The music begins to swirl as the Mother Ship prepares to depart. We arrive on a gorgeous chord of resolution that holds as little Barry Guiler says, ever so perfectly, "Bye."

22:17: Oh, wow. End titles over what might be the most perfectly gorgeous finale of John Williams's career. When he lets that Alien Communication theme peal forth, complete with bells, it is one of the greatest moments in the history of movie music.

Well that's reassuring....

I'm really glad to see something like this happen to a Major League Baseball player, because that's pretty much the nightmare scenario that went through my head in grade school gym class every single time someone hit the frakking ball to my lonely outpost in right field.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

I read this article with some interest:

What the tropical nation of Costa Rica lacks in size, it more than makes up for in a wealth of biodiversity. Despite occupying just 0.03% of the planet’s surface, the region's lush forests are home to an incredible 500 thousand unique organisms -- representing over 4% of all the known species on Earth. For the hundreds of animals held captive in the country's zoos, however, that hotbed of life had been replaced by the cold bars of a cage.

But now, in a remarkable push to restore natural order for all its animal inhabitants, the Costa Rican government has announced plans to close its zoos, freeing creatures from their long captivity.

“We are getting rid of the cages and reinforcing the idea of interacting with biodiversity in botanical parks in a natural way,” said Environment Minister René Castro. “We don't want animals in captivity or enclosed in any way unless it is to rescue or save them.”

I like zoos, but I find my feelings are more and more mixed, the older I get. Plenty of zoos work hard to approximate their animals' native living conditions as best they can, which is certainly a vast improvement over the "big cage with walls painted to look like Africa" kind of thing I remember from when I was a kid. But now I'm wondering if even that is too much by way of captivity. (Places like Seaworld and Marineland? Fuhgeddaboudit.)

And what about aquariums? I doubt I'll ever lose my fascination with those, and I'm already really excited about a new, glittering aquarium that is set to open in Toronto later this year.

So...zoos? Aquariums? What are your thoughts on them?

"Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."

Today on Twitter, the indispensible Sheila O'Malley reminded me that today is the birthday of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Actually, it's a misnomer to call it a "reminder", as I never knew Tennyson's birthday in the first place. But I should have, I think. I've adored Tennyson's poetry for years, going all the way back, most likely to my senior year of high school, which is the year I finally gave in to a suspicion that I'd been harboring going back to junior year: that my English teachers weren't full of it, and that there really was something to all this literature they kept having us read.

I don't recall what Tennyson poems we read that year in Mrs. Hultberg's class, save one: "The Lady of Shalott", which is one of those poems that caused in me the "mortal wound" that Robert Frost would later speak of*. I come back to it from time to time; in fact, I came back to it just this evening, while I sat outside in the grass while The Daughter had her string bass lesson. It seemed a good time to read a bit of Tennyson, and not just because Sheila put him on my mind. There's always something about Tennyson that to me suggests sunsets on perfect days. Not sadness, although he can be sad; not an elegy, although he can be elegiac. But with Tennyson, one is always aware that time is passing, that things are changing, that old things are moving into memory and new things are coming to the fore.

When I read "The Lady of Shalott" in high school, I was still a year or two away from the explosion of my great passion for the Arthurian legends. This passion has admittedly cooled in recent years, but I do still get the sense that it's a slumbering passion, waiting to be awakened one day. Perhaps it was Tennyson's poem that planted that seed, that sad verse about the cursed lady in her tower, forbidden to look upon the world except through a mirror, until one day she sees Sir Lancelot riding by and hazards a glance, bringing about her own end.

I find that every time I read Tennyson, I end up reading him aloud, or at the very least, mouthing the words. Few authors have this effect on me, if any, but there's just something about Tennyson's rhythmic alliterations, and his way of using his lines to suggest the sounds of the very things he's writing about:

The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

Anyone who reads that without sounding it out is entirely, utterly, supremely, missing the point. And Tennyson always needs to be sounded out. In this he is like Shakespeare. His words are sound, and they don't live in the page. They live on the tongue, spoken.

In my collegiate Arthurian craze, I returned to Tennyson and read his Idylls of the King, a cycle of poems he wrote which rather loosely tell the story of King Arthur and the rise and fall of Camelot. I've never re-read the entire thing, but I dip into it with frequency. One thing that has always stood out for me is a tiny thing, a minuscule detail, that comes at the end of his version of the tale of Sir Gareth and Lynette. Gareth is a young knight, born of low station, who goes off questing, and he meets a woman named Lynette, who derides him constantly. But through his valor he eventually wears her down and proves himself. In the original Malory, Gareth marries a woman named Lyonors. Tennyson, however, decides to make a change to the ending:

And he that told the tale in older times
Says that Sir Gareth wedded Lyonors,
But he that told it later says Lynette.

Tennyson felt the ending lacking in the original, so he changes it, presumably to suit his view on what the happy ending there should be. But he does it in so interesting a way! He breaks "the fourth wall", so the speak, and directly implies that he's not relating history or merely transcribing some old tale; he is recasting the stories in a way that suits his own instincts and also seems to be slyly winking at the reader, almost inviting us to decide the matter for ourselves.

Here is Loreena McKennitt's setting of "The Lady of Shalott".


* Frost's quote:

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound — that he will never get over it.

Truth.

In praise of Bugles

I have long maintained that I don't believe in "guilty pleasures": things that I like and yet I know they're bad. But there are things that come really close to "guilty pleasure" status for me, and Bugles are one of them. They're...well, they're not "good". For corn-flavored snacks, tortilla chips are so much better. More versatile. More authentic. And even Fritos are better.

But there's something nifty about Bugles that defies description. Obviously it ain't flavor, because they really don't have much. They counteract the lack of flavor by amping up the salt. And they're not uniquely crunchy, either. What I think they do, though, is have a specific way of crunching that's all their own. That shape makes them crunch very easily, almost softly, at the wide end, the "bell", as it were. But the inner end, the closed end? Ahhhh, there's a totally different crunch there. Harder. More percussive as your teeth break through it and crush it.

So there it is: Bugles combine different textures into a single snack just by being shaped the way they are. And that's why, once or twice a year, I'll consume an entire bag. By myself. And not feel the slightest bit of guilt in doing so.

Sentential Links

Because the links Never. Stop. Coming!

:: Looks like I need a good cherry pie recipe! (Oooh, that reminds me: I got tart cherries at the farmer's market the other day, so I gotta take some in with lunch tomorrow. And that deep dish pizza I made yesterday? The onions and peppers and sausage were all local! Yay, me! I'm responsible and stuff!)

:: It took thirty years...but when Shirley went off, she took the rest of the building with her. Some claim is was a tumor in her brain but I know it was that desk that drove Shirley crazy. (No! I love that desk! Say it ain't so!)

:: Our human calendars, analog, digital, and virtual, on our walls and on our screens, say it’s August 1st today. But according to the floral clocks along the roadside it’s been August here for over a week. The daylilies have faded and the goldenrod, wave after feathery yellow wave, has taken over. (I love me some August, and in fact, I have just decided the other day that I will complain about hot-and-humid July nevermore, so long as August remains an absolute treat 'round these parts. It's by far the best of the summer months. Of course, given how the seasons function in WNY, there are only two summer months. June is the better part of spring -- what everyone else in the country enjoys in early May, that's what we're basking in when June arrives. July is usually when all the unpleasant heat and humidity rock the place, although aside from a five or six day string of it, this year didn't see much of that at all. In August, though, temperatures and humidity tend to drop to very pleasant levels. Yes, technically, September is mostly a summer month, by definition, but let's be honest: emotionally, once Labor Day is past, it's Fall. Which means, soon I'll be back into overalls full-time! Huzzah!!!)

:: And if you’re going to read books, don’t just concentrate on structure. Read books about character development. For my money, THAT’S your real starting point. Good, fresh, original, compelling characters.

:: At the ripe old age of 34 I firmly believe that I am living in the midst of the Geek Golden Era. With comic books, movies, TV shows, and everything else blurring together, I am getting everything I ever wanted in life handed down to me.

:: So, in summary: I believe what we're seeing is a move towards the global imposition of a police state in the developed world, leveraging the xenophobia that naturally emerges during insecure times, by a ruling elite who are themselves feeling threatened by a spectre. Controls on movement, freedom of association, and speech are all key tools in the classic police state's arsenal.

:: Neil Armstrong is a particularly refreshing idol in this regard because there’s nothing particularly exceptional about him. Well...that’s not entirely true. He tended to crash planes. A lot.

More next week!

Further evidence that I need to get out more

Deep dish pizza is on the menu tonight, folks! #pizza #DeepDish #ChicagoStyle, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I made Chicago deep dish pizza last night. Making this meme-photo is how I occupied my time as it baked. Not reading, not writing...this.

I hang my head in shame.

(Pizza was damned tasty, though! Next, I'll experiment with gluten-free flour. That oughta be a trip.)

On Death and Villainy

John Seavey, one of the regular posters at MightyGodKing, writes at length about Norman Osborn, the human alter-ego of Spider-Man villain Green Goblin. I don't much have a dog in that fight, but I did like two different side points Seavey made along the way.

First:

I have gone on record multiple times as saying that if contrived resurrections cheapen deaths, the answer is to stop killing off characters so frequently and not to have fewer resurrections. Killing off a character in a shared universe is generally an act of colossal arrogance and short-sightedness, a statement along the lines of, “Well, I can’t think of anything more to do with this character, and I’m the Most Creative Person of All Time! The only interesting thing left to do is kill them off.” It’s never true. There are always more interesting stories to be told with a living character than a dead one, and that’s what makes resurrections so inevitable no matter how contrived they wind up being. The blame should be placed squarely on the shoulders of the killing writer, not the resurrecting one.

I think death is kind of overrated as a narrative device. It's kind of cheap, really, an easy way of amping up the stakes -- just kill someone off, to show that everything is real, that we're playing for keeps. I find that a lot of deaths in stories feel like they're there more for narrative effect than for any other reason, and a lot of them end up ringing false when it's obvious they're supposed to be incredibly shocking.

Good examples of this can be found all over the place: A Song of Ice and Fire, for instance. (Game of Thrones, for you who know it by the teevee.) George RR Martin gets heaped with praise all the time for being willing to sacrifice main characters, but I'd posit that by the point we've now reached, it's clear that he's not sacrificing main characters at all; he's just disposing of secondary characters at surprising junctures.

More oddly, though, is the odd notion that a character should develop only so much, and then they should die. This strikes me as deeply silly, and the two best examples I know are characters who didn't die: Han Solo, and Martin Riggs (of the Lethal Weapon movies). Harrison Ford has gone on record in the past as believing that Han should have died in Return of the Jedi, because he'd reached the end of his narrative and because it would have given the story a lot more gravitas. And Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black apparently left the series after his intention to kill off Martin Riggs at the end of Lethal Weapon 2 -- pretty much for the same reasons -- was shot down by the producers.

The problem here is, our lives don't end when we reach handy points in our development as human beings. Well, for some of us they do, but that's just the accident of timing, not some existential thing about the Universe dispensing with us upon our reaching of our inner Zen. It's a silly reason to kill off a character, and Seavey is one hundred percent correct: a character doesn't run out of potential stories just because one particular writer does.

And besides, "Death as route to gravitas" is...well, it's just plain overrated anyway. How many major, named characters among the protagonists die over the course of The Lord of the Rings? Two: Boromir and Theoden. That's it. And yet nowhere in that entire story would I ever claim that the stakes don't feel pretty damned high, nor that a price will have to be paid for victory.

(For the record: Yes, I do think that Joss Whedon overdoes death as well, but his deaths tend to be a lot more visceral, given his skills at getting me to care about his characters in the first place.)

And second:

(W)hen you go back and read the original Green Goblin stories, he wasn’t much of a villain. He was a C-list Kingpin wannabe who failed at everything he tried, lost pretty much every fight he was in, and whose only talent was in running away. He didn’t even really have a backstory, because Stan Lee and Steve Ditko couldn’t decide who he was going to be under the mask. (Ditko wanted it to be a totally unmemorable nobody, to show that villains didn’t always have to be someone important to the hero. Lee felt like they’d spent so long building up the mystery of the Goblin’s identity that the audience would be upset if it wasn’t someone they recognized. The dispute was one of the reasons that Ditko left the title.) Basically, the Green Goblin was by no means the most important of Spider-Man’s bad guys.

Now, I'm not sure about this, and a couple commenters in the thread over there take issue with Seavey's description of Ditko's views and departure from the series. But Ditko's point here, even if it wasn't really Ditko's point, is a good one, an interesting one.

There was a very effective episode of Magnum, PI that did this to really extraordinary effect -- so much so that it's one of my favorite episodes of that series. Magnum receives a strange telephone call from a cackling guy who promises to kill and leaves Magnum bits of nursery rhymes as clues. This pattern repeats several times, and it becomes very clear that this killer knows Magnum well and has a very specific beef with him. It's a very well-made episode -- Magnum occasionally eschewed its Rockford Files-esque tone for a kind of "Hawaii Noir" mode, usually to very good effect -- but what makes it stand out is the resolution. Eventually the killer stands before Magnum, unmasked and grinning and waiting for his sick payoff...and Magnum doesn't recognize him. Even later, after the killer has been dealt with and the whole mess is over, Magnum doesn't remember him at all. He has to go back into his own personal records to figure out who this guy is, and it turns out that Magnum investigate the guy's wife some years back in a possible divorce case, but the case turned up nothing at all and Magnum didn't even take the guy's money. I don't recall what caused the guy to spiral into insane killing, and there's a good chance that the episode doesn't even fill in that detail, leaving it a complete mystery. But that's one of the things that makes it really memorable: that the villain isn't some significant figure from Thomas Magnum's past; it's just some guy with whom he had a completely mundane association for a short time years before, so mundane that he doesn't even remember him.

Of course, I can turn this back to Star Wars. One thing that really incensed fans as the Prequel Trilogy unfolded was the idea that at the very heart of the mystery that is Darth Vader is a pathetic teenager, a guy who couldn't get over the loss of his schoolboy crush.

It's a hard thing, explaining villainy. Sometimes no explanation whatsoever is the most disturbing way to go.

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Think you own the cutest car ever? Well, you DON'T. (I don't either.) #beetle #VW #Cutemobile, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Oddities and Awesome abound!

I wasn't online as much this week (beating my book's final sequence into submission, and no, it's not done yet), but check out this car. Is that not the cutest car in the history of cars? By pure happenstance, we emerged from a store last night to find this parked next to us. How sweet is that!

More next week. And hey, don't forget to Ask Me Anything!

Ask Me Anything! August 2013 edition

It's that time again, folks!

Regular readers know the drill,
but in case you're new around here,
twice a year (February and August)
I solicit questions from readers
during the first couple weeks of the month
and then I spend the last couple weeks
answering them.

Questions can be serious or silly,
profound or strange.
I reserve the right
to post silly answers
to silly questions,
but it's all in fun!

Ask Me Anything!
(Disclaimer: Anonymous commenting is still enabled, as spam activity has fallen off somewhat. Questions may be submitted in just about any way you can get hold of me: comment here, e-mail, Tweet, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, or scrawled on the back of any legal tender denomination of paper currency in the United States or Canada. You can even ask things on Google Plus, but...well, if you do that, I might not see it for quite a while.)