The Middle of the Dark

You may or may not have heard there was a Star Wars movie in theaters.  What continues to amaze me is the level of discourse Star Wars in general and Episode I - The Phantom Menace in particular gets, among fans.  Honestly, we never stopped talking about it.  The conversation now centers on the merits of the film, out of the glare of the blinding hype that accompanied its release.  Most people tend to agree now it was not as bad as we first thought.  It's not even the worst Star Wars film. A lot of the conversation that takes place around TPM and the prequels centers on the 'what if;' what if Jar Jar hadn't existed, what if this or that.  If I had a nickel for every conversation I have had with Ben, Sugu or any of my friends on this subject, I'd be able to finance my own version of the movie.  And I admit - I have, off and on, been writing a screenplay of a revised Episode I for a long time.  It serves primarly as a mental exercise....

Community returns 3/15!   Streets ahead!

I had commented a while back about my concerns in general with the direction the Buffy comics have taken since about the last third of Season 8.  The characters seemed a bit aimless, and the overall story left a lot of people dazed and confused.  Out of that confusion has come a very sober wake up call in the form of Buffy's unexpected pregnancy.  It could be the aimlessness was intentional, though I maintain it didn't really work (the writing is good but not great this season) and it revisited episodes Buffy has already gone through.   The character simply needs to grow and now, certainly, she must. Typically Buffy has always presented common teenage/young adult fears via mystical/magical guises.  The pregnancy does not seem right now to be anything than what it's presented to be, which is the result of a drunken one night stand.  There's a lot to be said for this.  This is a comic book after all.  But this is also Buffy, ...

Ben wrote about the announcement that DC is going forward with an ambitious slate of prequels to Watchmen.  Alan Moore and fandom at large collectively dug graves just so they could spin in them.  Like Ben, I've thought about it quite a bit and here's my thoughts. First things first: it's a money grab.  The scale of the project speaks to that.  The reason it's happening now, and not a few years ago when the movie hit and something like this would have made sense (from a purely marketing point of view) is that the comic book industry has reached its financial and creative end .  A great deal was made of DC's decision just a few months ago to completely scrap its line and relaunch with a digital slate; the underlying thinking there was that the print aspect of the comics industry is in free fall.  Print in general is, and comic books are not the only victims . I see Before Watchmen as a last ditch attempt to both breathe life into and draw lif...

The first rule of writing is there are no rules of writing.  That's clever, but not exactly true.  The word I probably hear the most from other writers is 'rules.'  It's also the most political aspect of writing as well; usually the subject falls along one of three lines: There are no rules. There are, and these are the ones you never break (Show, don't tell). You have to know the rules before you can break them. This article over a io9 last week spoke to 10 generally well known rules about sci-fi/fantasy fiction; rules in writing generally being not what you should do, but what you shouldn't.  The article makes a case for breaking every single one of them.  I thought it would be fun to talk about each one in turn as I'm facing some of these decisions now in writing the new novel. 1) No third-person omniscient. I'll be honest - I'm not sure if this is actually a rule.  As the article points out, the omniscient perspective has long been th...

Usually when people ask me why I write books, I tell them because I have to. It's a pretty good answer and I can't think of any other way to describe it.  For whatever reason, there is this narrative engine within me that compells me to try and tell stories.  This engine is missing a belt or two sometimes, but you know what I mean.  There is a very interesting article in the NY Times this morning that poses the question in general: why write novels at all?  In the face of more popular entertainment, specifically movies, why the novel and not a screenplay?  What motivates a writer to write?  A reader to read?  The novel faces the same challenge that the play did when the novel took over the mainstream consciousness.  I don't think the novel or literature is in any danger - more people read now than have ever read.  The book will be fine.  In fact, the book is experiencing something of a revolution.  The e-reader and digital...

“From the midst of this darkness, a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous.” - Victor Frankenstein So after about a week of solid panic and lamenting the ruin of my art, I put it out of mind for a day.  Then I did what Anne Lamott did in Bird by Bird .  I sat down and just thought about what I liked in the story.  What the story was, not necessarily what I wanted it to be, or what others might want it to be.  I wrote down the characters, the places, the scenes, all of it in the journal there on the left, and I discovered something: all the pieces I liked, all the varying aspects of the story I tried to view it through, they all existed within the draft I had been writing.  They co-existed rather well.  This story - it's not fair to call it a story, really - this world has always been bigger than what I could get my arms around.  So many lenses existed to view the world through that I tried one at a time, certain th...