Uncategorized

A cold but happy Thursday

This evening, my parents and I attended a live broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, piped in from St. Paul, Minnesota, to our local multiplex. It was a lot of fun and a great show — the news from Lake Wobegone, Elvis Costello — but now I’m a little tired.

I went into work a little early this morning, in the hope of getting home a little early, but that plan was dashed by a meeting that ran until a quarter to five. It was an informative meeting that touched directly on some of the work that I do, developing supplemental online materials for our books, but I’m not sorry to be done with meetings for the week. Not least of all because I kind of wanted to spend the day doing a lot of that work.

And I still have editing for Kaleidotrope‘s next issue to do, plus an ever-growing slush pile. I don’t mind that so much (even if the slush is mostly rejections), but I think I’m going to have to spend a good part of the weekend re-reading and marking up stories if I expect to have them done for the April issue. On the plus side, I think they’re some really good stories.

Now, if you excuse me, there seems to be a dog barking right outside my bedroom door for some reason. I’m going to go investigate why, and then eventually find my way to bed.

Thursday various

  • Roger Ebert shares some good advice to filmmakers in his review of From Paris With Love:

    …the last thing you should do is remind the audience of a movie they’d rather be home watching.

  • Jeanne Cavelos shares some useful writing advice about looking/eye words — namely, that they’re over-used. Don’t write your short story like it’s a Steven Spielberg movie.

  • Jonathan Carroll shares this interesting metaphor:

    The mind is like a detective– it wants facts and figures. But the heart, its perennial sidekick, keeps shaking its head and smiling: There was no way in the world they were going to find the facts and crack this case.

  • Genevieve Valentine shares what very well may be the best commercial ever. Personally, I love all these dreadful pre-Empire cash-ins and knock-offs, made with no eye towards continuity or quality and before Star Wars seemed like anything more than the biggest fad of 1977.

  • And finally, Kurt Busiek shares some really interesting thoughts about storytelling and “not messing with Batman’s cake“:

    The stories are the cake, and the shared-universe stuff is frosting. Things tend to go horribly wrong when people start to think the frosting is more important than the cake, and then get better when they remember that it’s about the cake after all.

    [snip]

    This isn’t unique to superhero comics. Just like readers who don’t let it bother them that Nero Wolfe was 40 years old for 40 years straight, or that Linus was in kindergarten when Sally Brown was an infant and later they were in the same class, there gets to be a point where you decide whether you want it to be strictly logical, or whether you want it to be fun.

    I’m tempted to joke that the cake is a lie, but he raises a lot of really good points.

The last day

Yet another quiet day, the last before I return to work after a two-week absence. I haven’t even checked my e-mail since December 18.

I met a friend this afternoon for our mostly-weekly writing group, where we talked about tv shows and books and I rehashed my pet peeve with the adverb “darkly.” (I’m looking at you, J.K. Rowling.) After a few hours, we actually buckled down and did some writing. We do mostly free-writing in the group, working from a prompt we select on the spot, and I tend to generate ideas more than fully formed scenes in the forty minutes we give to each prompt. Some of those ideas have legs, and some of them don’t. Today, I had an idea for a story about a man who can see the future and so is imprisoned on an island where there is no future. I think it’s an idea worth keeping after.

Other than that, not much to report. It continues to be bitterly cold and windy here, and I continue to thoroughly enjoy watching episodes of The Big Bang Theory instead of going outside. I haven’t had too much luck with today’s New York Times Sunday Crossword, I’m afraid, but for Christmas I received a big omnibus edition that should give me plenty of alternative puzzles to turn to.

Still, I can’t help but wonder…is my vacation really over?

Happy New Year!

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. Now try How and Why. – Margaret Atwood, “Happy Endings”

Lies we tell about the past

Jonathan Lethem:

Well, just as critical theory, critique, tips into paranoia — finding patterns that don’t exist — collecting can cross that line from being the quest for value into being the quest for the subterranean, impossible artifact that will somehow validate all of your existence … You know, I used to know, I still do know, a lot of [Bob] Dylan collectors, and he’s begun demystifying a lot of the secrets by issuing them himself, but these things used to circulate as talismanic objects. And there was always the myth of the song that was even better, the musician who’d come out of some session and say, “Well, yeah sure, you heard ‘Blind Willie McTell’ because you’ve got a tape of it, but there was another song that he debuted in the studio that day that was never written down and we all begged him to play it again and he never did.” And it’s sort of like, “Well, if that song’s even better than ‘Blind Willie McTell,’ then what about the song that Dylan wrote but didn’t play that day, or what about the song that Dylan never even wrote! That might be the best one!” It’s a path of madness, and certainly I wanted to portray that terrifying descent to some extent.

Mad Men prop master Scott Buckwald:

But again, it’s a TV show, and it portrays advertising executives the way the producer wants them to portray them. I’m sure there are many advertising executives who’d go, “I was nothing like that. I would never chase women around the office,” and “I would never consider having an affair.” So that’s why I said earlier that it’s is a TV show, not a history lesson.

If you want to learn about advertising in 1960, watching Mad Men might be an okay primer. If I had to write a college thesis on 1960 advertising, Mad Men would be a footnote. I would watch it, look at it, get a little bit of flavor from it, and then do my real research.

Abigail Nussbaum:

A historical novel, in other words, is one that requires its author not simply to recall the past, but to study and imagine it, to create a believable world whose mores, customs, settings and technology are as foreign to them as they are to the readers–to worldbuild, in other words. And as in science fiction, worldbuilding in a historical novel reflects as much on the present as it does on the past, in much the same way that costumes in period films tell us more about fashion at the time they were made than at the time they purport to depict (remember Doc Brown in Back to the Future III, sending Marty to 1885 in a pink, tasseled shirt and purple pants because that’s how people dress in Westerns?).