Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

I just finished watching the third act in this very interesting side project by Joss Whedon.  Originally conceived during downtime from the writer’s strike, this musical is an experiment in distribution (Internet) and delivering quality without serious expense. 

In essence it’s a throw away side project, a “what if” made real.  What surprised me was the emotional impact at the end of the 3rd act.  The characters are really fleshed out for only three 15 minute episodes and they just draw you in.  So when everything falls into place in the last episode, you don’t notice the hidden emotional “punch” till its smacked you upside the head.

This not only made me appreciate the show more, but made me reflect on the power of the short story.  It’s not a format that is financially viable for most writers yet when used properly can have as much of an impact as a novel.  Sometimes even more impact because the points made are sharper, more raw and less encumbered by prose.  You can see it plainly in the furious discussions between fans of this series.

I’ve had a hard time getting underway with my writing goal and in conceiving of novel-esque ideas.  But after seeing a short story executed so well, I think I may have to dip back in those waters.

Wordle?

I stumbled upon this site from a writing technology blog I hit every so often.  It creates a nifty Web 2.0 style word cloud out of any RSS feed or block of text you give it.  For shits and giggles, I popped in my RSS feed and here’s a couple I came up with:

I get the feeling I might be writing a lot about books, reading & writing… hmm….

There she goes…

June was the month of death by apathy.  July seems to be the explosive change month. 

Pieces I’ve been personally waiting to fall into place, not only fell, but are slamming several layers deep into the Earth’s crust from orbit.  I’m undergoing some intense career related and personal direction changes to say the least.  Getting more of a grip on where I want my life to go, as opposed to just trying to hold onto the bucking bronco.  

Ra’s career has suddenly exploded in the same manner.  Just today I dropped her off at the airport for a two month internship she’ll be doing in Cebu, Philippines.  Yup, the fucking Philippines.  She’ll be working on the set of an ongoing movie in production and post-production capacities.  On top of that, she’ll be working with Fashion TV Asia.  There’s also a film school there where she can partake of classes and workshops on her non production days.  And if that’s not enough, she’ll be training for underwater photo shoots/movie work. Of course this will all occur in tropical weather with lush beaches.  Nope, I’m not jealous in the least.

These are some of the examples of the radical change our lives are undergoing.  Positive, much needed and in the right direction, but very intense with no signs of letting up.  Frankly we thrive on challenge.  If I’m not under pressure then I’m bored.  Ra’s a workhorse to a ridiculous degree.  I honestly believe she could physically give 110%.

We’re all for challenging activity over mind numbing lulls.  This is also the beginning, since other phases of plan “kick ass and take names” haven’t started yet.  All in all, 2008 started with a whimper but is looking to end with one hell of a bang.

June is still a pain in my ass

More so than any other month this year, June has been consistently difficult in many ways.  This isn’t the difficulty of a challenging project, but almost like my ability to live a normal life is being stymied.  It feels like death from inertia.  I’m stalled and can’t get going.

My motivation to pursue goals has been sapped from my bones.  Ninety percent of all interactions with my girl end up in misunderstandings or conflict.  Work is work with an extra dose of bleh.  It’s almost as if all my internal wiring is crossed.  Thankfully it will be over soon.  My only concern is that some of this crap spills over into July.  That would really piss me off to no end.

Its even a chore whipping up a dismal little post such as this.  I haven’t had the urge to finish my TMBG concert post or pursue my story ideas or anything.  I read a couple of books, but even that hasn’t sparked any mental juices.  This lull has been professional, personal, mental, physical and spiritual.  Frickin’ jacked from all angles with no relief in sight.

I just read a bad book

Every so often I come across a book that makes me say aloud while reading “I could do better.”    Book One in the Anita Baker series, “Guilty Pleasures” by Laurell K. Hamilton is one of those.  I’m not even going to link to it because I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone.

First let me say two things.  One, this post will probably contain spoilers for those interested in the series.  Two, I’m not a published author so I technically don’t have a leg to stand on in that respect, but I am a consumer of written materials so my criticism stems from being an unsatisfied customer.

Let’s start with the length of the book.  Barely over 250 pages its definitely light reading.  I find the Jim Butcher “Dresden” series to be enjoyable popcorn books (similar to popcorn flicks) but even those are respectably over 300 pages. Not to mention better in many more ways.  Also, the events in the book occur over the course of basically 72 hours.  To have that much bullshit jam packed into three days is crap. 

Characterization in this book is flimsy at best.  We spend more time reading about what characters are wearing than seeing any action from them or dialogue that reveals them in any real fashion.  Anita Baker is the stereotypical tough “short chick.”  Even with a first person narrative you really don’t get a sense of her.

Motivation is also another issue.  Actually, a HUGE issue.  This is a book about vampires, werewolves and all that bump in the night shit.  Suspense of disbelief is de facto with this genre, but when even in these situations you’re wondering what the fuck is this character thinking, you have problems.  Anita really doesn’t do anything of her own volition.  She rolls with the punches and barrels ahead with no real thinking.  The book is painfully plot driven.  At one point the phone rings and she jets off to put a zombie back in the grave, instead of formulating a plan of attack to kill the 1000 year old vampire that’s after her.  Her excuse to perform this ritual is so paper thin it hurts.  Its just an excuse for the author to put her in another “situation” that she needs to get herself out of.  Very very lame. 

Even one of the main traits of this character is brushed off at the end.  From the very beginning of the book we see Anita rail against mind control.  She has an intense fear of it as is shown throughout the book, YET at the end of the story she lets the one vampire that is actually infiltrating her mind live.  Intense pathological fear that gives her the willpower to resist it most of the time and she lets the one that CAN invade her mind live cause he’s a lace wearing frilly pretty boy. Nice.

The final showdown was disappointing as hell too.  Anti climactic to a T.  You think a 1000 year old vampire would A, fight a hell of a lot harder and B, not be such a 1 dimensional “sadistic child” character.  We get that she’s a child bride figure.  It’s written almost every time the character appears.  We get the fucking point, but it seems that the author forgot that the child bride deal was supposed to be a facade for the vampire.  You don’t live 1000 years by being a petulant child, you accomplish that by being a ruthless cold blooded motherfucking killer with Machiavellian skills.  How did this temper tantrum throwing little bitch become a master vampire of St. Louis? 

The more scrutiny the book is under the more it falls apart, which is sad.  I was looking for a good supernatural series in an Anne Rice sort of vein.  Instead I get this weak attempt at a narrative that might get better for the first couple of books, but which devolves into thinly veiled pornographic romps with nightmare creatures.  C’mon, Anne Rice’s sex was erotic not Skinamax.  I’m not willing to invest any more time in a series that might be ok for 3 or 4 books but slide into shit (as per what many of the reviews have said).

It was like a bad film, not B movie or campy enough to be amusing.  All it did was leave me unfulfilled and wanting my money back.

The Joys of Technology

Allow me to get a little nerdy here.  Digging through my storage I stumbled upon one of my first laptops, an eMachine M6805.  I decided to pull it out and use it for a pet project, namely a Kubuntu installation.  With a 64 bit AMD chip and 1.25 GB of RAM it’s a solid little machine for being several years old.

In a former life it been my test bed for Vista.  The logic behind that was if it ran well on this it should run well on any newer hardware I acquire.  Not to mention, my main machine was running XP SP2 at the time and I wasn’t inclined to screw with it.

Being the thorough geek that I am, I do a little googling* before slapping Linux on it.  My research proved to be fruitful and I discovered an issue with the older BIOS firmware.  Thankfully a simple upgrade would resolve it.  Well, I thought it would be simple at the time.  Like I said, it was my Vista test bed, so that damn bloated OS was still running on this puppy.  I downloaded the BIOS update and tried to run it.  No dice. Then I went and tried some of the tricks that Vista is supposed to have under it’s hood (running in XP compatibility mode, turning off DEP, running as an Administrator, etc).  Nothing worked.  Not a single damn thing I tried would allow this update to run.

At that point I just had to laugh.  In order to install Linux I would have to install XP.  The fact that Vista couldn’t perform a simple BIOS update was just hilarious.  The more I play with Microsoft’s newest toy, the more convinced I am it’s just a pig in a dress.  Same old stinky shit (a little worse for wear in my opinion) with some pretty trappings to hide the hideousness.  In the very near future Linux will successfully pass the “grandma test” and once it does those cats in Redmond are going to be in for a rude awakening.

Thank you for indulging my very dorky bitching about M$.

 

* I didn’t believe it either, but this is now in the dictionary.

Books about Writing

Getting back into reading on a regular basis was easier than expected.  It also made me realize just how much I truly missed reading.  I haven’t regularly read books in years which is sad when considering that reading was one of my greatest joys while growing up. 

I recently picked up a bunch of books at once.  A mixture of “writing” books and fiction.  I’ve devoured four so far, which is a pretty good start.  My first conquest was “Telling Lies for Fun & Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers” by Lawrence Block.  As I’ve mentioned before the moment I finished it I wanted to re-read it, that’s how good it was.  Had that been the only book acquired I would probably be on my 5th read through by now. 

The second book I read was “Storm Front” by Jim Butcher.  I’m a fan of the short lived TV show The Dresden Files so moving onto the source material wasn’t a far leap. It was a quick read and more a popcorn book than anything, but the attempt at a hard-boiled detective novel mashed up with magic in the modern world was catchy.  I’m definitely picking up more in that series.

“The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles” by Steven Pressfield was the third.  A little arty like “Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg yet it had some interesting insights.  Ones that took me by surprise and rang true.  There are some nuggets of wisdom to be found in this one.

Lastly, I just finished “On Writing” by Stephen King.  Since I was a kid he’s been one of my favorite authors.  Not everything in his vast catalog is good, but a majority of them have been and a few of them have been amazing.  Say what you may about the subject matter, the man is an expert storyteller weaving complex narratives effortlessly.  “It” is a perfect example of that.

Of the “writing” books I’ve read the two that have been the most useful are Block’s and King’s.  Both of them detail the nuts and bolts of the writing profession.  The reality of a writer’s life as opposed to the popular fantasy.  They also both espouse several axioms of the writing craft. 

1. In order to be a good writer you must be a voracious reader.

2. Output is crucial to writing.  The more you writer the better you’ll be.

3. Dedication is not the only thing necessary to become a writer, but it is crucial to being a successful one.

4. You must love what you write or else there’s no point in doing it.

A corollary to #4 would be “Write what you know” also known as “Write the truth”.

On a funny side note, King mentions that his daily writing goal is 2000 words a day and that a beginning writer should aim for at least 1000.  Glad to see I wasn’t too far off the mark in my initial thinking.  He also recommends the aspiring author take a day off which I haven’t included in my challenge, but still sounds like good advice.