Big Video Wednesday - The Horn

Sliding in under the wire to throw down another Big Video Wednesday episode of Tales of Tomorrow. You may remember, back in the Big Audio Wednesday days, I tried embedding an episode of this show before, titled "The Window." This time, the show is "The Horn," but really, it's not so much the show I'm interested in. I've watched six or seven episodes, and every one has been crap.

Now, you could say, "Well, it's live TV in the 50's, what do you expect?" And you'd be right. But that's just the soft bigotry of low expectations, isn't it?

I mainly had two reasons to post this. Number one, I love the opening titles, when the mad scientist glove throws the death ray switch (followed by the title card at top). Love those completely superfluous metal rings down the back of the glove. Oh, and the artwork for those titles was apparently done by Arthur Rankin Jr., later to achieve fame and fortune as one-half of Rankin-Bass, who produced a ton of animated holiday specials like Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, as well as the Tolkien specials The Hobbit and The Return of the King. His work as Director of Graphic Art on Tales of Tomorrow was his first credit in show business, according to IMDB.

And number two, I noticed this credit tonight. The show was produced in cooperation with these guys.

Who were they? Not much evidence to go on, at least not online. But there is this description of a piece of Heinlein correspondence, about science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon working with a guy named Mort Abrahams (who is credited as producer on Tales of Tomorrow) to organize a group of SF writers to script a TV series titled "Tomorrow is Yours." And then in Dancing Naked, William Tenn describes the group as a cooperative who would be the exclusive writers for the show (ht: Bill Spangler in this comment thread on IROSF). Does that mean Theodore Sturgeon scripted some of the episodes?

I'll hunt around a little more and see if I can find anything interesting. In the meantime, if you want to see some very early, very primitive sci-fi live TV, here's "The Horn."

Pounding It Out, Day 15, and a Vault Extra

Well, I'm still managing to stay almost exactly on pace, which is good, but at the same time...

If you read enough books about novel writing, you'll come across things like this:

Everyone, at some point, sees their novel as a lost cause. The characters are one-dimensional. The plot isn't going anywhere. The language is abysmal.

--No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty

One thing I've come to recognize is that I tend to run into a wall at a certain point in all my books...It's around that point that I find myself losing confidence in the book--or more precisely, in my ability to make it work. The plot seems to be either too simple and straightforward to hold the reader's interest or too complicated to be neatly resolved. I find myself worrying that there's not enough action, that the lead's situation is not sufficiently desperate, that the book has been struck boring while my attention was directed elsewhere.

--Writing the Novel from Plot to Print by Lawrence Block

I've been experiencing exactly that this week. It feels as if I've spent much of the last thirty pages or so just barely crawling along, marking time until the next big scene. It's not as bad as Hero Go Home, in which I spend nearly all of Act Two doing just that, but it still feels boring. The book may not be as bad as I've thought, but for the last couple of days, before I started writing, I've had that feeling of, "This is starting to really suck. Is all this effort really worth it? Who could possibly find this interesting?"

And the worst part of this feeling is that I've finally hit the big mid-book turning point. I wrote the first part of it today, and it wasn't easy. I try to write with a light touch, usually, funny and light, eliding over the really dark parts and heavy emotions, because I don't think I can write them convincingly.

And this scene is rather dark and brutal. There are no laugh lines (although there are punch lines, ha ha), and it goes on for a while. It has to go on for a while, because between this scene and the next, the emotional landscape is going to change rather drastically for the main character, and he can't just sort of be thrown there. He has to be dragged there, and it has to hurt every inch of the way.

And it's hard to write this sort of thing and not end up with some sort of violence porn, where you're dwelling on the violence for the sheer shock of it, and at some point, sort of getting off on how well you're describing it and kind of hoping the reader gets off on it, too.

Because you can't bore the reader, and you can't make the reader turn away or put it down. You have to keep the reader reading, so in some way, even when you're writing something unpleasant, you have to make it on some level compelling and even attractive. And that's hard to do without becoming exploitative.

So anyway, that's where I am right now--not just having to psych myself up for the daily challenge of "how do I link this scene into what's gone before and tie it into what happens next and keep all the characters consistent and honest and believable," but also having to pick up the considerably larger psychic load of, "how do I keep plodding through this piece of shit when I know everything I've done so far sucks?"

So anyway, to end on a lighter note, remember Saturday when I said, "No one reads Corben's comics for the stories?"

Well, here's an example of what they do read his comics for, from "Den II" in the May 1982 issue of Heavy Metal:

Corinne Bohrer is turned on...

Movie Monday - The Lost World (1925)

So I was researching that whole T-Rex scratch thing for this past Saturday's Vault, and it gave me a reason to finally sit down and watch "The Lost World," the 1925 silent film featuring Willis O'Brien's pre-"King Kong" dinosaur animation.

As a kid, I always wanted to see the film, because it was talked about in such glowing terms in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Forrie Ackerman raved about it, so I figured I had to see it. But it was not so easy in those days. I got to see a lot of classic stuff on Friday and Saturday night late movies or on Sunday TV matinees (usually the dinosaur movies played late at night, and the classic Universal monsters--Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, Mummy--played on Sundays; no idea why).

And I even got to see quite a bit of it on a big screen at a revival theater that ran for a few years in Oklahoma City. I saw the original "King Kong," "The Valley of Gwangi," "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," virtually everything by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields (excluding Fields's silent pictures), all the Universal monsters. But no "Lost World."

By the time I ran across it on the Internet Archive, I had already seen samples of the dinosaur animation in documentaries about O' Brien's work, and had no interest in sitting through the entire thing anymore. But finally last week, I did, and noticed some interesting things.

Let's get this out of the way first: it hasn't aged well. The plot is haphazard, the effects are very amateurish compared to what O'Brien and his crew would later accomplish, and modern sensibilities would likely be offended by a supporting character played in blackface. So let's stipulate right up front that we aren't watching this because it's good, but because it's historically significant and start out on our quest, shall we? Because virtually everyone and everything in this movie ended up doing bigger, better, more famous things later.

The movie starts out in London. Professor Challenger is the laughingstock of London with his outrageous claims that dinosaurs still live in a remote part of the Amazon. The ridicule has made Challenger a bit crazy...

Or maybe he was crazy to start with. Challenger was played by Wallace Beery, who later won a Best Actor Oscar for his role in "The Champ."

Turns out, Challenger hasn't actually seen the dinosaurs himself. He has only read about them in the diary of Maple White, a fellow explorer who was lost on an expedition to the lost plateau in the Amazon. The diary was brought back by his daughter Paula, who wears her hair in these really freakish braids wrapped around her head.

Paula White was played by Bessie Love, who early in her career appeared in D.W. Griffith's epic "Intolerance" and continued sporadically to play roles into the 1980's. Her final film was "The Hunger," the lesbian vampire story starring Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon.

Challenger's rough manner has kept him from being able to raise funds for a new expedition until reporter Edward Malone comes along, played by Charlie Sheen.

Okay, actually his name is Lloyd Hughes, but he has a Charlie Sheen-esque expression in several scenes in the film. Malone has the stupidest character motivation ever: he is desperate for a dangerous assignment, because he's engaged to a woman who demands he risk his life to prove his manliness before she will marry him (she never actually appears in the film). Malone convinces his paper to finance the expedition, with the help of Sir John Roxton, a famous big game hunter who is in love with Paula.

So the characters travel to the Amazon, where they see some exotic wildlife then very quickly find the plateau. Fans of Pixar films will get a pleasant jolt at this moment, because the plateau in "The Lost World" was revisited in Pixar's "Up."

The expedition climbs up onto the plateau, where they encounter dinosaurs and a goofy ape man played by Bull Montana. Sir Roxton finds Maple White's bones and watch in a cave. He gives the watch to Paula. Meanwhile Edward has figured out that Gladys, the bitch back home who sent him on this death trip, is not worth staying faithful to, so he woos Paula, and they decide to get married. Aw. Sir John is heartbroken, but keeps a brave face because he wants Paula to be happy.

A volcano erupts, the travelers escape without a scratch, and as luck would have it, they find a live brontosaurus that has also fallen off the plateau. They have living proof! At least until the brontosaurus escapes to rampage briefly through London, then swims off down the Thames (no, the brontosaurus does not climb Big Ben and have to be shot off with airplanes, although how cool would it have been if he did?).

This shot kind of interested me, though. Lileks highlights shots like this when he reviews old movies just to see what kinds of details about daily life they reveal. In this case, the ads on the left for Black & White Whisky (it's still around) and Schweppes Ginger Ale (the lighted signs on the left blink and not all three were on at once, so you can't see it in this screencap). Between the two, of course, is Bovril, which I've never tasted but is apparently some kind of British salty meat juice. On the right side is the London Pavilion theatre, which is showing the 1924 version of "The Sea Hawk." It was remade with Errol Flynn in 1940, but it's not one of his better known roles.

So anyway, everyone lives happily ever after, or sort of. Challenger loses his brontosaurus, but at least nobody's deriding him as a fraud anymore. Edward and Paula ride off blissfully into the sunset. Everybody's happy except this guy: Sir John Roxton, the big game hunter.

He was in love with Paula, and she ran off with Edward. And he spent his personal fortune to transport the brontosaurus back to London, only to have it escape literally as they were unloading it from the ship, so there's no way of making his money back on that. So after this final shot of his forlorn face, he probably went back home and shot himself. Or maybe he looked up Edward's ex, Gladys. Same diff.

And what really sucks is the guy who was saddled with this shitty part was the best actor in the movie: Lewis Stone, who went on to play Judge Hardy in the "Andy Hardy" series of films. He went from playing second fiddle to dinosaurs to playing second fiddle to Mickey Rooney, yet somehow kept his dignity. Wow.

Pounding It Out, Day 13

Going into Sunday, I'm barely hanging on. I was several hundred words short Friday, 500 words short by midnight Saturday, but kept pushing through to make my Saturday word count, plus a little, by 1:00 a.m. this morning.

It's hard because I'm into Act II now, the big, swampy middle as it's called, getting into territory where I had only a very loose outline. Imagine driving from New York to Los Angeles, trying to navigate with a globe of the world and a magnifying glass. New York is marked and Los Angeles is marked, so you know where they are in relation to one another, and you see the terrain in between, but there are no roads marked. You know the roads around the New York area pretty well, and you've driven around to neighboring states some, so you got going just fine. But now you're somewhere like Kentucky and nothing looks familiar at all, so you just keep pushing generally south and west, knowing that eventually you'll hit the ocean and then all you have to do is head down the coast till you run into it.

That's what writing a novel is like for me. On Angel Baby, I got lost and gave up around St. Louis. On Flip, I took a couple of wrong turns, ended up in Nebraska (home of WoTF quarterly winner Matt Rotundo! Hi, Matt!) and quit. On Stripped, I got to Las Vegas and said, Screw it, close enough" and settled down.

I've tried to outline more carefully every time I've started a new project, but it just doesn't seem to work out that way. I started this book with a pretty good grasp on the overall structure of the story, and perhaps more importantly, a more extensive backstory for the characters than I'd ever had before, so the problems seem to be solving themselves pretty handily as I go along. I'm speeding right toward the book's major twist, not a surprise twist, really, but the major turn that's going to change the kind of story it was into the kind of story it will be.

For the "Star Wars" geeks out there, this is Luke Skywalker deciding to rescue the Princess. For the entire movie thus far, the story has been "Dodge the Empire and get the droids to Alderaan." Then it turns out Alderaan's been blown up, and the Falcon has been captured by the Death Star, and our heroes have no idea what to do. They know they need to escape, but after they escape, they've got nothin'. Then Luke finds out the Princess is being held on board, and now he's got a new purpose and a new resolve: rescue the Princess and get her back to the rebels, which sets up everything that happens in the second half of the movie.

Then again, the twist I've got coming up could be seen as more of a first act twist, like Luke discovering his aunt and uncle have been killed. And since I heard Friday that Hard Case Crime is looking for longer manuscripts than 50,000 words, more in the neighborhood of 75,000, you could make the argument that 25,000 words is a decent place for a first act twist (a little late for a first act, but it depends on the story, really). Except that I don't know how much story I can fill with after this twist. My plot outline gets more barren the farther it goes. So for right now, I'm calling myself halfway through until my plot proves different.

Out of the Vault - Rip in Time

Richard Corben was one of those guys who got the word "legendary" appended to his name almost from the time he was first published. His work in underground comics and in the adult-oriented magazine comics like Creepy and Heavy Metal was so unique, so appealing and technically polished and instantly recognizable--you'd be walking through a record store and see a Meat Loaf album and go, "Hey, it's Corben! Cool!"--that his reputation as an artist was guaranteed.

But here's the thing: no one ever, and I mean ever, read a Corben comic for the story. You read it for the airbrushing, the lovingly rendered environments and strange beasts and graphic violence and heroically proportioned over-muscled men, but most of all, perhaps even really in spite of all those other things that sometimes just got in the way, for the naked hypersexualized women with humongogigantonormous tits.

But what if Corben decided to expand his audience by doing a comic without naked women with, you know, tits that require a lot of typing to describe?

Then, my friends, you'd have 1986's Rip in Time, a 5-issue black-and-white limited series published by Corben's Fantagor Press.

Rip in Time was drawn and published by Corben and scripted by Bruce Jones, who had worked with Corben at Warren Publishing. Jones co-wrote, with April Campbell, one of my favorite comics of the 80's (which I believe is still in the Vault--I'll check and if not, I'll do it next week), Somerset Holmes. But without Ms. Campbell's moderating influence, Jones's characters could be astonishingly crass and unappealing.

Take, for instance, Rip in Time. A secret government project run by Colonel Sharon Nelson (an extraordinarily heartless bitch) and Dr. Philpot (who uses secret videotapes of her nude in a changing room to blackmail Col. Nelson into having a drink with him) develops a time-travel machine. They prepare a test to see if they can open a portal into the Cretaceous Period.

In the meantime, police detective Rip Scully--supposedly the toughest, best cop in the LAPD--is on a drive with his rich fiancee Maggie. Rip is using her for her money, and Maggie is using him because she likes strong, dangerous men. They run afoul of a liquor store hold-up by thugs Sid and Darlene. There's a shoot-out in which Darlene is wounded in the shoulder...


Sid takes Maggie hostage and escapes with her in her car. Rip follows in Sid's car, dragging Darlene along. By an extraordinary coincidence, both cars somehow crash into the secret underground military base just as the time-travel experiment is underway, and before you can say, "Cool, naked cavewomen vs. dinosaurs," the four of them are trapped in prehistoric times. Alas, though, there are no naked cavewomen.

Rip and Darlene battle their way through the hostile environment to find Sid and Maggie, because Rip is determined to a)save Maggie and b) arrest Sid. Along the way, he and Darlene fall quickly (and unconvincingly) in love. Meanwhile, Sid and Maggie are having their own bonding experience...


Heartwarming. And at the same time (millions of years in the future) Col Nelson has summoned another soldier named Roper to hunt down and assassinate the four time travelers--apparently, it doesn't cause any sort of time paradox if they step on butterflies or whatever, as long as they never come back to the present. If they do, it will be bad, says Col. Nelson.

So, to recap, here is our cast of characters:

heartless, murdering bitch soldier

devious, manipulative scientist

gold-digging but otherwise noble cop

rich girlfriend who likes to be slapped around

psycho criminal

psycho criminal's girlfriend who isn't really bad, she was just abused as a child

really psycho soldier-assassin, because cops=teh awesome and soldiers=teh eval

And no tits. Seriously. Not a nip in sight, which--let me repeat--NO ONE EVER READ A CORBEN COMIC FOR THE STORY.

Oh, yeah, and remember that time Darlene got shot in shoulder, ripping her shirt (see above)? Completely forgotten in subsequent issues. The shirt has even mended itself without even a spot of blood.


But let me say, the dinosaurs are awesome, lovingly rendered in big panoramic panels. There's a triceratops stampede in issue 2 which kicks serious ass, and best of all (for me, anyway), midway through issue 3 (which means midway through the series) there's this.


In case you've forgotten (or never learned) why that's awesome, let me remind you (or clue you in).


This was a throwaway moment in the original "King Kong" (animated by Willis O'Brien) which echoed another throwaway moment in the 1925 silent film, "The Lost World" (also animated by O'Brien)...

Which is mainly remembered today because the Great and Powerful Harryhausen then referenced it in "The Valley of Gwangi" (which was based on an abandoned Willis O'Brien project).


Since then, other animators have homaged the same moment, such as this moment from "Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World." Note the arm in the screencaps below. It's hard to see because the lighintg is so bad, but the motion is really visible in the movie.

I'm certain there have been other projects that have referenced that same ear/face scratch, but I haven't been able to find them. I know Harryhausen did it at least once more (in test footage he did as a teen that I couldn't find on-line). I thought he'd done it in some of his other films, but couldn't find a similar moment in either "Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," or "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger," or "1,000,000 Years B.C." They didn't do it in Jackson's "King Kong" remake, either.

Anyway, if there's any doubt that Corben was deliberately evoking "King Kong" there, this should erase it.


One of my favorite moments in the Kong-T Rex fight, translated quite lovingly and faithfully into what was otherwise a pretty crappy comic book story.

You may wonder why I'm spending so much time and effort on a couple of throwaway panels like this. Number one, I'm a huge stop-motion fan from way back, and number two, this is what fans do. We pan the gold from the considerably larger amounts of dross so that we can feel as if our time was not wasted.

Oh, and by the way, Corben is fantastic, but seriously, write this upon your heart and remember it--nobody reads Corben's comics for the stories.

Feeling Stoked

Not only am I still right on target with my daily word counts, I also sat today and wrote up Saturday's Vault in advance. That never happens. Usually I'm scrambling around on Saturday scanning and cleaning up and resizing and writing. Sometimes when I get to Saturday, I don't even know what book I'm covering yet.

So to have it all done and published and ready to post automatically by Wednesday is a luxury. I don't know if I'll end up doing extra writing with the extra time on Saturday, or just using the time to do something else, maybe something I never take the time to do.

But reality check: last time I tried a NaNoWriMo-style writing pace, I was able to keep on pace for two weeks before bombing out and finishing the month with 28,500 instead of 50,000. But I had several different circumstances. I was employed. I was still living with my wife, with all the extra responsibilities that entails. I bought myself City of Heroes as a birthday present and got sucked into that massive MMORPG time sink.

And perhaps most of all, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to exceed the word goals, because I wanted to have a marketable novel that was more than 50,000 words. And I was putting extra pressure on myself, because I was writing something that I had been contemplating for something like 15 years. It had a large cast, and a complex plot (at least, it had several tracks of action going simultaneously).

Now, I'm not really pressuring myself much. The length I'm looking for is exactly 50,000 words. The novel is a new idea, and a simple one, straightforward. I'm not trying to redefine a genre or transcend it, just sit comfortably in it with a vivid story and some interesting characters.

Pounding It Out, Day 8

Right on schedule at 13,000+ words. What I'm struggling with right now is to resist the urge to make it funny. I mean, I understand that comic relief is an important component to any story, but when I set out to write this, I intended a dark crime thriller, and as I go along each day, I keep hitting funny beats.

Which is not necessarily a problem. When I analyzed Money Shot, I found that it threw in a violent incident every now and then to keep things moving. I haven't done that so much in my book so far. Like I said in an earlier post, I may restructure after this draft is done, but right now I'm writing the story straight through. So I'm doing a lot of setting up right now, and in the absence of the violence that will propel the book in later chapters, I find I'm using a lot of humor to keep it moving. And as a smart friend of mine (and an awesome writer in her own right) observed last night when I brought this up, there's a difference between writing a comedy and writing something serious with characters who are funny. And she's right. That's the line I'm trying not to cross.

The thing I'm fighting with right now, though, is that as the book progresses, I'm seeing a way for it to come to an ironic end. I know, I know, I was supposed to plan the ending before starting, and I thought I did. But actually what I had planned was the climax, not the denouement. And I'm seeing where what I'm building now could move toward a final bit that is, not funny exactly, but ironic and meta and maybe too cheap for the darkness that went before it. Except then again, we're not talking about art here, but a quick and dirty crime novel.

I'm holding the idea in my head for now. We'll see what actually comes about when it comes about.

Movie Monday - Swordsman II

This may seem shorter than usual, but it's not so much because I'm distracted by the novel. I'm a little put out, because this week's Movie Monday has been such a pain in the ass.

I figured, why not stick out the kung fu thing for one more week, because I've got one of the gonzo classics on DVD--"Swordsman II," starring Jet Li from 1991, before he was a household name in the U.S.

So I popped in the DVD to rewatch it, and it was even crazier than I remembered.

But...

I don't know if there's something wrong with the DVD, or something finicky with the DVD player in the television I bought last year, but the movie won't play smoothly. It hangs up and jerks in spots. The climax was completely unwatchable. I had to play it out on my computer.

So I did. And then I spent a couple of hours doing screen caps. But I forgot that there are steps that must be taken, and when I went to scale down the screen caps today, they were all blank.

So I sighed at the prospect of a couple more hours of work, and tried to pop in the DVD, and both my DVD drives are down. One won't read the DVD at all, and the other one won't open. What's the opposite of LOL? WTF? HOK (Head on Keyboard)? I rather like that. HOKHOK!

SO I visited Youtube, and yes, someone has the entire movie posted there, but I was not mentally prepared to spend the time necessary to get new screencaps that will end up looking like shit. So, except for one pic I found on-line that matches one of the screencaps I lost, there are no images in this week's Movie Monday.

So anyway, "Swordsman II," or "Swordman II" as the DVD cover states (the title in the movie spells it right), is a crazy wu xia adventure that, like so many 90's kung fu movies, is put together from a hundred pieces of awesome that somehow don't quite manage to click together. But it's a hell of a show, if for no other reason than the sheer audacity of everything they tried to do in it.

Jet Li stars as Ling, a wandering hero who, with his sidekick Kiddo (played by Michelle Reis), wants to reunite with his fellow students from the Wah Mountain school (which apparently figured in the first film, which I 've never seen). They plan to retire to remote Ox Mountain, where they will stop fighting and heroing and instead relax and party. Ling wants to spend the rest of his days drinking and partying with women. He's like a kung fu Seth Rogen!

However, on his way to the rendezvous, he gets caught up in a power struggle between rival factions of the Sun Moon Sect. One faction is led by Ling's love, Ying (Rosamund Kwan), daughter of the sect's former leader, Master Wu. The other faction is led by a young man named Invincible Dawn (on the disc I have--I've seen other articles translate the name to Asia the Invincible), who has imprisoned Master Wu and stolen a sacred scroll which holds the secret to ultimate spiritual martial arts power.

Ling's problem: unbeknownst to him, he has also fallen in love with Invincible Dawn (played by Brigitte Lin), because the scroll's power is turning him into a woman.

But this bare summary of the scenario can't begin to describe the craziness that this film contains. "Swordsman II" was produced by Tsui Hark, so over-the-top is sort of an understatement. Here are some of the things you'll see in the course of this movie:

Snake-flute! Running on top of tall grass! Ninjas riding on giant flying shuriken! Tomboy tying buns in her hair to look feminine! Ninjas burroming underground and into tree trunks! Pressure-point paralyzation! Poison spitting! Deadly needles (yes, the inspiration for Professor Pierce, if you must know)! Giant hooks! Swords fighting by themselves! Two different characters cut off their own arms! Vacuum hands! And enough exploding bodies and buildings to fill three other movies! With musical interludes!

And all this happens in 108 minutes. With really crappy subtitles. Although this has apparently been released in the U.S. market as "Legend of the Swordsman" dubbed in English, so it'll probably be easier to find that way (although it also cuts 8 minutes off the running time, so most of the bloodier parts are probably gone).

Anyway, if you're curious about just how crazy HK cinema can get, "Swordsman II" is a pretty decent primer. It's fun.

Pounding It Out, Day 6

After 5 days, I'm a little ahead of schedule, but every time I've tried to look at the MS so far today, I've had that little twinge of panic, like, "I have no idea what to do with this next scene." So I'm avoiding by, among other things, blogging.

I went to a friend's house Friday night to see (and mock) "Prophecy," the John Frankenheimer film from 1979, starring Robert Foxworth and Talia Shire. It's a horror movie with an environmental message. It's not often that you see a movie centered around a rubber monster chasing people through the woods that manages to be laughably pretentious at the same time, but this one manages it. There's a moment in the middle where Robert Foxworth, the doctor hero, gives a monologue about the dangers of mercury of such scientific illiteracy that it rivals an anime translation or a speech by Al Gore (which is not to downplay the dangers of mercury, but in this movie, mercury works on the level of Marvel Comics' cosmic rays). Leonard Rosenman's score sounds exactly like the score of every other movie he's ever scored. I mean, exactly. And yet...

There are scenes of awesomeness in it. Not awesome in the sense of great writing or acting or special effects, but awesome in the same sense that Battle to the Death was awesome just because it was a comic book about ninjas vs. zombies. In "Prophecy," there is an axe vs. chainsaw duel (bloodless, sadly). A fish eats a duck. A kid asks Talia Shire if she's going camping while she's carrying a cello case.

And there are projectile people. Seriously.

Sadly, they don't all explode into feathers.

Watched "Roadhouse" again today. It was on Spike and I was bored. Not bored enough to sit through the whole thing, though, just had it on while I did other things and came in occasionally to see the good parts. The good parts without nudity, anyway, since Spike cuts those out.

Okay, need to work on the book now. Or maybe mow the lawn...

Out of the Vault- Batman #246

So I figured I would stop beating up on independent small-press comics for a while and beat up on one of the big boys. We have long heard of Batman's reputation as the World's Greatest Detective(TM), so here is a story in which Batman has to solve a typical mystery. The story is from Batman #246, cover dated Dec. 1972 (note the creases on the cover--your hallmark of authenticity!). You be the judge of his skills.

The story, "How Many Ways Can a Robin Die," was a fill-in issue. This was published in the middle of Denny O'Neil's heralded run on Batman in the early 70's. A few issues before, Batman had wrapped up his legendary battle against the master villain Ra's al Ghul, finishing up in epic style in a Neal Adams-illustrated sword duel between Ra's and the Batman, shirtless but still hooded. A few issues after this one came the equally legendary O'Neil-Adams story, "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge."

But they can't all be classics. For this issue, neither O'Neil nor Adams took part (except for the cover which looks as if it were penciled by Adams). The story was written by Frank Robbins (usually an artist, but he occasionally wrote as well) and illustrated capably enough by Irv Novick and Dick Giordano (who was Adams's inker on Batman as well).

The story opens as Batman swings high above Gotham, trying to track down the source of a rogue Bat-Signal. Someone is shining the iconic spotlight from a location other than police headquarters, and Batman is determined to find out what it means. When he gets there, he sees Robin standing atop the tallest building in Gotham. Robin doesn't speak to him, so Batman climbs up to see what's wrong. Before he gets there, though, Robin is struck by an arrow and falls to a ledge below.

Batman rushes to his ward's side and discovers...


Batman searches for Robin the next day, but he is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, Batman figures out that the taunting note means that the arrow is a clue. Obviously, Robin's next death will take place at the Striped Arrow Country Club (seriously).

Batman goes there the next night and witnesses a stage magician do the old "swords through the box" routine with his pretty female assistant. When the box is opened again, however, a dead "Robin" falls out with a sword through his back. Batman tries to stop the magician, but his opponent escapes with the aid of some smoke bombs.

Batman rushes back to check on Robin, but it is another dummy (a suspiciously realistic dummy, I must say). A taunting note stuck to the sword blade (which mysteriously appears after the magician has vanished) tells Batman that this is another clue to the next "death," which could be the real Robin.


From this, Batman figures out that it must mean Sword-Fish Pier at Cape Fear. Because the villain, whoever he is, knew that Batman would think about "fishing for the right word combo...like a fearful idiot." Even as a 10-year-old, I thought this was lame. In fact, I was sure that he had figured out the clue wrong and would end up waiting at the wrong place until he had a last-second flash of insight.

But no, the next night at the pier, he sees Robin drop into the ocean with a concrete block tied to his legs. Batman dives after him and...


That's right. Without confirming that this Robin is really a dummy, Batman takes the note's word for it and swims away, leaving Robin to sink. Luckily, he's dealing with an honest killer, and that really was a dummy.

The next night, having figured out that Robin's "watery grave" was a clue to St. Elmo's Graveyard (St. Elmo being patron saint of the sea), Batman finds a hanged Robin dummy inside a crypt. But the killer PROMISED it would be the real one this time. A metal gate clangs shut, and Batman is trapped, "imprisoned...by an unseen executioner I can't even touch!"

Batman reviews the clues. "Four killings in a row...a row of death...'Death-Row'...like the 'prison' I'm in!" (Robbins loves ellipses and quotation marks). He busts out of the crypt and rushes to a pay phone, where he calls the warden of Gotham State Prison, where he sent up five murderers. Four of them had killed their victims by arrow, sword, drowning and hanging. But he can't remember the fifth.

The warden tells him that the fifth was "released a week ago...on an 'inadmissible-evidence" reversal! Your 'conviction," Batman...Emil Ravek!" (What did I tell you about ellipses and quotations?)

His memory jogged (or should I say 'jogged'), Batman rushes to the site of Ravek's last slaying, the Waxworks Murder Museum (oh, you think maybe that's where Ravek came up with all those realistic dummies?), where he finds the real Robin drugged with his head in a guillotine. Batman grabs a metal platter from the Salome display and stops the guillotine blade, then fights Ravek, throwing him across the room to land on the scales of Justice, defeated.

So to recap: Batman, the World's Greatest Detective(TM), confronted with a series of Robin dummies "executed" (now I'm doing it) in different ways, ignores all the real evidence he is presented with, such as the Robin dummies or the weapons used to kill them. He doesn't interview any witnesses, say, the magician's assistant (who disappears from the box and is never thought of again) or maybe the people at the country club who hired him. He doesn't do any forensics, such as checking for fingerprints.

Instead, he plays word-association games that just happen to put him one step behind the killer for the entire issue, until the final scene.

All told, the issue isn't horrible. It's pretty standard for the Batman of the day, and was mostly acceptable to me as a kid.

But seriously, World's Greatest Detective(TM), my ass.

Pounding It Out, Day 4

I'm right at 6,000 words right now, which is a little behind schedule for today (but today isn't over yet). And now it occurs to me that the book might benefit from a little time-jumping, showing later points in the story while doing all the exposition and set-up in flashback.

There's a danger in this approach, really a double-danger, which is that 1) the reader might get confused by all the jumping back and forth, and 2) flahsbacks are a kind of hokey device.

But for right now, I'm just writing straight through, from beginning to end. And it's funny how I really had to get into the story for the connections within the story to start making themselves known.

That's the problem I have with outlining. With every attempted novel that gets bogged down because I'm not sure where to go next, I tell myself, "Next time, I'll spend a lot more time on the outline and avoid this."

And of course, it doesn't happen. I read this neat quote by Lawrence Block in the essay anthology, Writing Mysteries. In an essay about writer's block, he says this about outlines...

...a writer working from an outline always knows what he originally intended to have happen next.

And that's what happens to me, every time. As I'm writing, my characters begin to define themselves, and my world takes shape, and at some point, what I originally intended to have happen seems unmotivated or false or simply physically impossible. And then I have two choices: either abandon what I intended, or find a way to shoehorn it in somehow, because getting to my big climax depends on this thing happening, no matter how unbelievable it is. And as I get further into the book, these things pile up faster and faster, and I dread reaching the end, because it's just stupid now. So I write slower and slower until I abandon the book entirely.

It has happened with every single book so far, without exception.

On Blue Falcon and Hero Go Home, I was eventually able to come back after a hiatus of a few months, slog through the problems and get the thing done, although Hero Go Home still doesn't hold together entirely well. I like the opening, like the ending, hate everything in between. It's like a Twinkie with shaving cream in the middle.

On the first novel I wrote, Stripped, I just admitted surrender and wrote a quick ending at about what I considered the two-thirds mark. Skipped the third act entirely.

On Angel Baby and Flip, I've never been able to solve the problems.

But at the same time, something happens while you're writing, as you're learning who the characters are and what they do in the time when you're not writing about them, that leads to countless little a-ha's. When all of a sudden, something you couldn't figure out before suddenly slides into place, because you know enough about the character now to know why they would do this, or why someone else should do it instead.

God, I've missed this.

Pounding It Out, Day 1

I started writing the novel just a little after midnight. The working title is Death Wave. Hokey, I know, but when you read the book (assuming I finish it, of course), I think the tone will fit.

The writing went pretty well, but then, the first day always does. I sometimes spend days thinking about the opening before I write it, playing the scene, tuning the language in my head, so when I actually start typing, the first few pages roll out pretty fast.

I didn't do that so much this time; the scene I mostly toyed with was one that occurs roughly halfway through, by my reckoning, a scene that helped me really get a handle on my main character and the tone of the book. But I had toyed a lot with the opening sections, too, so it went pretty smoothly.

I only did about 1,000 words, though, and by the NanoWriMo chart, I need to average around 1670 a day to get to 50,000 in thirty. But after I've slept some and checked the job listings, I'll have the rest of the day to make up those 670 words. I'll probably get pushed out a little bit ahead.

I don't want to kill myself, obviously. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and I tend to flare early and burn out quick. But I hope that doesn't happen this time, and I have some small reason to hope.

Revisiting

I hate to disappoint anyone who may have been searching for Movie Monday (though considering I never get comments on Movie Mondays, I doubt anyone is actually disappointed), but it's on hiatus today. I have other things going on.

What other things?

Well...

A few years ago, I was writing a lot. Writing short stories and trying to get them published (and even succeeding a few times). Working on a Digger novel. Joining writing groups, both here at home and on-line. In the last couple of years, though, I've written very little. I didn't seem to be progressing, really, and working futilely on Hero Go Home to no success really took a lot of wind out of my sails. Throw in my marriage disintegrating and job stress and buying a house and buying and losing a business, and you have the ingredients for deep depression, not productivity.

But

Lately, I've been kicking something around. Something different from most of what I've done before. A novel, something short and definitely not sweet, something geared to a publisher like Hard Case Crime. I'm thinking about pounding it out fast, old-school, like Walter Gibson or somebody. Or new school NaNoWriMo, if you will, only not in November. I've got a few interesting characters, I think, with actual backstory (which has never been a strong suit for me), and I've got a very bare bones outline. I've got to fill in the third act better (I always say this, and never do it, but I'm doing it tonight), but I think I'm ready to start writing it tomorrow.

September First is the launch, and I want to have it finished by the 30th. I'm unemployed, so I've got the time. If I do get a job between now and September 30th, I'll cry all the way to the bank, but I'll still try to finish by the thirtieth.

So yesterday, I dug through some old manuscripts and found the first act of a novel I started in 2004 or so. I was just publishing Blue Falcon through iUniverse and looking toward my next book. That next book was going to be a big science fiction thriller titled Angel Baby.

The premise: a United Nations project to establish a grid of orbital power satellites is about to come on-line, providing free electricity to everyone everywhere in the world. It promises clean power, improving the environment as it improves the quality of people's lives. A new age of peace and prosperity.

But on the eve of the final satellite launch to bring the grid on-line, a woman working on the project, an atheist, has a vision of an angel. And the angel tells her that the global satellite grid will bring about the end of the world.

Ooh.

I wrote the first act fast, and then petered out. Even though I had an "outline" for the rest of the book, it wasn't very specific, and I found I was having trouble converting that outline into specific scenes. The biggest problem was that my outline of the second act basically jettisoned most of the characters from the first act, leaving me little material to work with.

I went back and reread that first act last night, and I've got to say, it has problems. There are sections that are very weak, where you can tell I'm faking the funk. Especially the exposition scenes where I'm trying to get out basic facts while also working in themes and distinctive character bits and foreshadowing and you can see the seams showing and none of it feels real or sincere.

But there are other scenes that work pretty well, and the plotting is actually pretty tight. Things work together, actions by one character push actions by another, and by the time I reached the end, I really wanted to see where the story went.

It gives me some confidence. I had lost that confidence in the wake of Blue Falcon, when I attempted three different novels, only to end up stymied on all three. This one will work out, I think.

Of course, I could be wrong. Ask me again in a month.

Out of the Vault- Battle to the Death #1

Okay, if you read the post about Castle and Joanne Kelly this past week, you know that I occasionally get caught up in runs of coincidence, or synchronicity, or call it what you will (maybe just selective noticing), but here's another example.

In last week's Vault, I talked about The Realm, featuring perhaps the first published work of penciller Guy Davis. After I published that entry, I became curious whether Davis had gone on to do anything else notable in comics and discovered that he is currently the artist on the Hellboy spin-off series B.P.R.D. I have some friends who are big Hellboy fans, so I thought that was cool.

So then this morning, I realized I needed a comic for this week's Vault. I went to the "B" box since it was open and started flipping through at random. And stumbled upon a long-forgotten title known as Battle to the Death, published in 1987 by Imperial Comics.

Battle to the Death, written by John Arcudi and drawn by Jim Rohn and Dave Harrison, starts out at a rock concert being held in Hiroshima, where a bunch of mohawked punks are head-banging to the band when suddenly a zombie walks out on stage. The band flees, but the crowd thinks it's just part of the show, until...


Well, that puts a damper on the party. More zombies converge, and the police evacuate the area and cordon off the arena. Meanwhile, police inspector Tanasa has dragged the band to headquarters, where he harangues them with this rather unique monologue (click the image for a larger version if you have trouble reading it)...


Police lieutenant Katsu tells Tanasa to lay off the band, because the real answers are to be found with the zombies. He heads down to the police cordon, where the zombies have broken out and are in pitched battle with the cops. The cops are losing badly, and Katsu is in mortal danger.

But it turns out Katsu has "friends in high places" and has brought help--a gang of ninjas. The ninjas battle the zombies for a while, but it becomes apparent that, though ninja are masters of killing, killing doesn't work on zombies since they're sorta already dead.


Katsu and ninja buddy Isho head back toward the arena, but cut through a graveyard, where they stumble upon a weird mausoleum guarded by zombies in cop uniforms. Turns out, this is the temple of the Flame of Life, which is what reanimated the zombies. Katsu and Isho battle a giant living idol in an attempt to snuff the flame. They succeed, and the zombies fall.

But their problems aren't over. For when they leave the temple, Katsu and Isho encounter Inspector Tanasa, leading a group of really big dudes with rayguns and weird helmets with bug antennae on them.


Aliens?

Battle to the Death ran for three issues, but I only have the first one. I don't think I so much chose not to buy subsequent issues as I just never saw them come out, because ninjas vs. zombies vs. aliens is my kind of book, even if it never went as far over the top as I would have liked. It was fun.

But I was talking about weird coincidences. So here's the thing: when I saw that Battle to the Death was written by John Arcudi, I thought, "Hmmm. I've heard of him. He's written other stuff I liked." So I looked him up.

Turns out, he wrote The Mask, the original comic which inspired the Jim Carrey movie (the comic was much darker and harder-edged, and I'd like to see them actually make that story someday). And he wrote Barb Wire, the comic which inspired the Pamela Anderson movie (no one's perfect, although any movie sporting that much cleavage is not entirely bad--at worst, you can turn the sound off and just look at cleavage).

And it turns out (although you've figured this out already, because I set it up several inches above) he's now the co-writer on B.P.R.D. Battle to the Death was one of his earliest published jobs, and I just stumbled across it this morning after just stumbling across one of the artist's earliest published jobs last week.

I don't know how this happens, but it does. Maybe Joanne Kelly is trying to tell me to read B.P.R.D.

Corinne Bohrer disbelieves.

Day Break

Back in late 2006, ABC made a risky decision concerning one of their breakout dramas--Lost. Lost was a complex show: intricately scripted, with a large cast, shot on location in Hawaii while taking place literally around the world, heavy on special effects. Episodes were produced slowly, which meant that shows rolled out sporadically during the first two seasons, with lots of reruns sparking lots of viewer complaints.

So ABC tried something new in the fall of 2006. They launched the third season of Lost with six new episodes before putting the show on hiatus, and replaced it with a new series, another twisty, complex drama that played games with time in which every passing detail might mean more within the overall picture than first appeared. The new series would run for 12 weeks (thirteen hours including the two-hour pilot) and present a self-contained, complete story: beginning, middle and end.

That series was Day Break.

After the two hour pilot aired, I have to admit, I was worried for my favorite show. The pilot was so good, taut and action-packed compared to the relatively slow-moving Lost, that I worried that it would suffer the same fate as Boston Legal, which went on a "temporary" hiatus to allow Grey's Anatomy to launch in its timeslot. But Grey's Anatomy was a hit, leaving Boston Legal in limbo until space could be cleared in the schedule to give it a lesser slot. I didn't want that to happen to Lost.

As it turned out, I didn't need to worry, because Day Break ended up getting canceled after 6 episodes. Which sucks, because it was an excellent show. Luckily, the entire series is available on-line at Hulu.

Day Break stars Taye Diggs as Detective Brett Hopper, a good cop who is framed for the murder of an assistant district attorney he has never met. The case against him is airtight, it seems: the gun was found in his closet with his prints on it, a shirt with the victim's blood was found at his girlfriend's place, and the victim's wife claims she saw Hopper do it. Hopper is interrogated, held without bail, and shipped to the county jail.

Then mysterious men break into his cell during the night and haul Hopper to a rock quarry, where an even more mysterious man shows Hopper a video of his girlfriend being shot. The man threatens Hopper's sister and her children if Hopper does not confess to the murder. "Just remember: for every decision, there's a consequence," says the mysterious figure, channelling the Ghost of Authorial Message. "Decision. Consequence."

And then Hopper awakes the next morning, in bed with his girlfriend. Only it is the same as the morning before. Same time on the clock. Same pigeon at the window. Same garbage truck outside. Same traffic report about a spilled truckload of diapers.

The entire day is the same, except that Hopper now moves through it differently, learning new things about the conspiracy that's trying to trap him. And as he moves through each new day, making new choices based on his new knowledge, he changes the world around him. He's in a web on interconnecting events, and whenever he pulls a string here, it causes a vibration there.

He tries confronting. He tries escaping. He tries surrender. Some choices have better consequences and some have worse, but all choices reset the next day.

Except that some don't. When he helps his partner resolve a personal crisis, she awakes next iteration feeling "different," ready to resolve her problem without Hopper's prodding. And Hopper is given hope that if the day can change, the day can end. He just has to untangle the knots tied around him and reach the truth.

At thirteen hours, I think the show probably goes a little too long. I mean, I understand that the economics of American television demand a minimum thirteen episode order, but it felt a little padded.

Then again, compared to the bloated, overstretched monstrosities that X-Files and Prison Break became, Day Break was a model of storytelling economy. The mystery was deep, and thankfully had nothing to do with evil corporate barons, or evil Republicans trying to stack the Supreme Court, or evil NSA agents. Yes, there are corrupt public officials and politicians, but they aren't transparent right-wing strawmen, so I was glad of that.

And the cast is excellent. Taye Diggs makes a compelling lead, determined and good-hearted, yet believeable in his flaws. The supporting cast also does excellent work, especially Adam Baldwin (always a favorite) as an Internal Affairs agent who was Hopper's former partner, and also Hopper's girlfriend's ex-husband. Clayton Rohner gets a good turn also, as a crazy street vagrant who may not be as crazy as he appears.

So if your favorite show is on hiatus, and you're looking for something to fill a few empty hours, give Day Break a try. It was a great show that never found the audience it deserved, but it's still there, waiting for you to watch. Just like the sun coming up every morning.

Castle and Incestuous Guest Stars

So I mentioned a while back that I'd started watching Warehouse 13 on SyFy. It's a fun show. Stars Eddie McClintock and Joanne Kelly have a nice chemistry, and Kelly handles the role of straight woman to McClintock's clown with grace. But she also sometimes has a grating quality, and there's a weird twist to her mouth that puts me off sometimes.

So then I started watching The Dresden Files, and there was this episode with this absolutely gorgeous female vampire named Bianca. Of course, I noticed early in that the lighting and make-up seemed designed to give her an unearthly sheen, almost glowing in every scene she's in, and I figured it was a subtle hint at vampire magic or something (that was really a pretty decent show). But there was something familiar about the twist to her mouth in certain scenes. I figured I had to have seen her before somewhere.

Yeah. Joanne Kelly again. But really hot this time.

Speaking of television, I decided to give Castle another shot. I caught one episode during its regular season, and I was underwhelmed. If you'd asked me yesterday what put me off about it, I couldn't put my finger on it, but something had rubbed me the wrong way about the show on the one episode I caught.

But I have friends who like it, so I thought I'd give it another chance. So I found it on Hulu and picked at random an episode titled "Always Buy Retail." I sat back determined to watch with an open mind.

And I can see why people might like it. Nathan Fillion, after all, is talented and charismatic, and has appeared on several fan favorites, like Firefly and Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog. And the writing isn't completely horrible; there's some witty dialogue and stuff.

But as it turns out, it the episode I picked first was the one episode I'd seen before. The series premise: Castle is a mystery writer who follows NYPD detective Kate Beckett around, with the intention of using her as source material for his next book. This episode's plot: someone is killing people and performing voodoo rituals over their corpses in the attempt to find a mysterious something. And I remembered all the reasons I hadn't liked the show.

Reason the First: the dialogue is too cute, and the writers are too impressed with their own cuteness. Early on, Castle sleeps with his ex-wife, then immediately regrets it, and in relating his problems to Beckett and her partners, Exposition Detectives 1, 2, and 3 (hereinafter referred to as ED 01, ED 02, and ED 03), describes his ex-wife as a "deep-fried Twinkie," a guilty pleasure that's fantastic in limited doses, but sickening when indulged in every day. Witty, but not witty enough for them to keep repeating the damn catch-phrase throughout the rest of the episode.

Reason the Second: this being an ABC show, the PC is so thick, you'd need a machete to hack your way through. When they discover the first body, Castle mentions that it looks like a voodoo ritual. Only he pronounces it "voe-doo," because any good PC lib nowadays has got to use affected pronunciations of foreign terms to show how intellectually superior he is, like "Pokeestan" or "Hava(choke)ee."

And then just to show that the cops aren't conservative retards stuck in the 40's (and also to fullfill the EDs' roles), they don't respond with, "What, you mean 'voodoo'? The zombie thing?" No, one ED blinks stupidly and says, "What's that, some kind of Star Trek thing?" and another busts out with, "It's a religion practiced primarily in West Africa." And it goes on like that for the rest of the episode: normal white people who, one would assume, have seen a zombie movie or two, yet are completely ignorant of even the concept of voodoo, while their intellectual betters tell them how peaceful and spiritual the religion is and how it gets a bad rap in the media (media that these people never watch, apparently). Doesn't matter; the voodoo thing is a red herring anyway. It's all about drugs and forged documents and shit.

(ETA: Rereading this, I think I emphasize "white people" too much -- it's not so much that I'm racist as I'm tired of the fictional trope that people of color are so much more spiritually aware than us white goobs, so we must constantly be preached to and educated - it's condescending)

Reason the Third: EDs. They exist for no reason other than to ask stupid questions for the benefit of the audience and to be impressed by Castle's wit, which they then repeat endlessly throughout the rest of the show (okay, that's sort of going back to Reason the First, but I just got real tired of "deep-fried Twinkie" after a while).

Reason the Fourth: Castle is an idiot. He shows up mid-episode with a Kevlar vest which he has emplazoned with the word "WRITER" (to match the cops' vests which bear the term "POLICE"). Later, he brings a champagne bottle to a gunfight.

Reason the Fifth: As stupid as Castle is, he's smarter than the cops.

So anyway, I got bored later in the evening and tried another Castle episode, titled "Ghosts." Not as bad the first one, I've gotta say, although I saw the big twist coming from very early on. But here's the thing: at one point, Castle and Beckett run into another writer who has been interviewing the murder victim. And guess who plays the writer?

That's right, Joanne Kelly again. Three weeks ago, I'd never heard of this woman, now I can't get away from her. I think she's stalking me. Corinne Bohrer is concerned.

But seeing Joanne Kelly all over the place reminded me that Warehouse 13 has its own guest star problem. Eight episodes in, and they can't stop stunt-casting actors from their other shows. Stars of Eureka and (now cancelled) Stargate Atlantis have appeared already (and maybe someone else I can't remember) (ETA: A ha! Tricia Helfer from Battlestar Galactica also did an episode), and another Eureka star will appear on next week's episode.

I know this is a general condition of television, but for some reason it seems more pronounced with Warehouse 13 (though maybe only because I've run into the Joanne Kelly thing lately, plus the chick from Farscape on another episode of The Dresden Files- maybe they're all just running together in my head).