Yes, I Know What I Said Before

I'm almost finished with the second draft of Hero Go Home. Yes, yes, I know what I said before about putting it aside to write a better Digger novel. But even in that entry, I mentioned that as soon as I decided to stop, my block seemed to disappear.

Here's the weird thing: when I wrote Blue Falcon, lo these many years ago, it took me almost exactly one year to write the first draft. I thought the second draft would go much faster, but once again, it was almost exactly a year.

When I wrote the first draft of Hero Go Home, I seemed to have learned a lot about how to write novels. Instead of a year, the first draft only took about seven months, from November 1, 2005 to May 27, 2006. I figured I'd knock out the revision over the summer, get the book in the mail by fall.

Instead, here I am with about 10,000 words to go, and it's looking as if it will be within a week or two of the one year mark by the time I finish. A year again. What the hell?

Oh yeah, and speaking of Digger, it looks as if Agog! is finally going to publish the DaiKaiju sequels this year. I'll be in the number three anthology, due for publication in October. I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, it's cool to finally end that suspense and add another publishing credit to my resume, not to mention the fact that every published Digger story increases the potential audience for the novel. On the other hand, the story is approaching three years old now, I think, and it's not my best work. Both Digger and I have grown since the story was written. I'm tempted to ask them if I can polish it up a bit before publication.

Creepy Memory Lane

When I was a kid, I loved scary stuff, but I hated being scared. So I would simultaneously seek out and avoid creepy stuff. There was a local horror movie show that would come on at midnight on KOCO channel 5 in Oklahoma City, called "Nightmare." It would open with this guy in a long robe with a scythe and a hood hiding his face. He'd walk through a fake graveyard, CO2 fog clinging to the ground, and there was this creepy narration, and then he would pull down his hood to reveal that his face was a skull, then the movie would start.

That creeped the shit out of me. I would watch the movie, but I would close my eyes and turn down the volume, or else turn the channel knob just for a couple of seconds right before he would drop that hood. I remember one night, I fell asleep waiting for "Rodan" to start, and woke up just as Skull Guy was saying, "I hope you enjoyed the movie." I got even more creeped out than usual, knowing that the entire terrifying spectacle (I hadn't seen "Rodan" yet, so I didn't know how comical it really was) had played out right there in the room with me, without my being aware of it. Brrr....

I'm reminded of this tonight, because when I was a kid, my friends were constantly telling me about this cool scary stuff they'd either seen on TV or heard on the radio. One was "Johnny Got His Gun," which I never really watched all the way through, but I've seen bits of it on TV. The first time I saw it for myself, though, or bits of it anyway, was in the video for the Metallica song, "One." The kids at school would go on and on about the dude with no face tapping Morse code with his head, "Kill me. Kill me. Kill me."

Another one was "The Vulture," a Z-grade movie starring Akim Tamiroff, about a guy who turns himself into a hideous bird-man to kill his enemies (and I should mention here that there were a lot of commercials for horror movies that just terrified me as a kid--"War of the Gargantuas," "Dracula vs. Frankenstein," "Mad Doctor of Blood Island"--where I couldn't believe the actual movies were so cheesy and cheap-looking when I finally saw them years later). I still have never seen that one.

There was a third, a legendary song called "D.O.A.," about this guy who dies in a crash. I remember specifically being told a lyric about his arm feeling numb, and he looks down and nothing's there. It hit the charts briefly in 1971, when I was 8-9, and though I occasionally tried to listen for it, it was never on. The crazy thing was, for years afterward, I not only never heard the song, but never ran into anyone else who'd even heard of it.

And then, tonight, I'm listening to Lileks's last few Diner podcasts, and he's recapping some Seventies songs, and BAM! "D.O.A." in all its cheesy, creepy glory. As death pop goes, it's not awful. It's certainly upfront: no tiptoeing around the subject, couching things in code language. The guy's dying, his girlfriend's dead, end of story. "One" is a creepy video, but the song is sort of bombastic and dull. This song is simplistic- not scary, but certainly cold.

And then there's "I'm Cold," by Whale. Whale was this weird little Swedish group. They put out an awesome single called "Hobo Humpin' Slobo Babe," a wall-of-sound assault with a video featuring their hot female singer in braces and polka dots. Their EP was followed up by a very uneven album called "We Care." None of the songs, except for "Hobo Humpin' Slobo Babe," is very good.; the lead singer has an affected cutesy style, and the backup singers are tone-deaf. Everything sounds kind of cheap and off. Until you get to the next to last cut on the disc, and then there's this weird little number, with Cia Berg singing these spaced out lyrics in her little-girl voice, and it's sort of delicate and lovely until you realize she's singing about being trapped in a car after a crash, going into shock as the car burns, and this gospel chorus rises up in the background as she sings, sounding like they're taking her soul straight to heaven, and it is one of the eeriest fucking songs I've ever heard, seriously.

You can tell that "D.O.A." has got my mind going in a lot of directions, all of them backward. But I'm telling you, what a discovery to finally hear that song after over 35 years.

Comics Come To Life

So yesterday, I see this story about a scientist discovering 'kryptonite.'

And today, I see this. Hmmm...

Planet with higher gravity than Earth, orbiting a red sun...

Looks like we discovered Krypton at the same time.

Earth Day

For their Earth Day issue, Urban Tulsa (a mostly-unreadable free weekly 'newspaper') this week features on their cover She-Hulk as played by Mary Steenburgen.

Almost Ashamed That I Think This Is Cool

Michael Jackson is in talks to mount an elaborate show in Vegas, complete with, wait for it...

A 50-foot-tall, laser-shooting robot replica of himself.

Remember "Moonwalker?" The straight-to-video production featuring Michael Jackson as a protector of kids vs. a vicious Joe Pesci? There's a sequence in there in which Jackson transforms into a giant robot (pictured at left--more pics from Moonwalker can be found here).

This new plan sounds like he wants to make that special effect come to life. A giant laser-shooting robot wandering around in the desert, visible to landing airplanes; will it just wander around out there randomly, all the time, like a giant Roomba, or just during shows, I wonder? While I love the audacity of hte plan, it kind of creeps me out that it's Michael Jackson proposing it. I'm all Jackson'd out.

Maybe he could battle it out with a big Celine DionDroid, though. That might be fun.

More International-Small World Crap

Just because I find it fascinating how the global economy is shrinking the world and making this kind of stuff commonplace:

Next year, a plant in Ardmore, Oklahoma is supposed to begin producing cars for MG, the bankrupt British company that has been resurrected in Nanjing, China., to sell in the US market. Chinese British sports cars for Americans via Oklahoma.

And here I just bought a Chevy, an American repackaging of a Japanese redesign of a Korean car. Damn.

Debating a Waste of Money

Money was tight over the winter, so I stopped smoking good cigars and made do with Blackstone Cherry pipe tobacco cigars, tasty but cheap. Now money's flowing a little better, so I've recently bought some good authentic cigars again. Problem is, I'm getting tired of my little black plastic travel humidor that only holds like 5 cigars. I want something more substantial.

Problem is, I want something out of the ordinary. I mean, this is nice, but dull. These are gorgeous, but really expensive. This is a little over the top, but I love the metal plate on the inner lid.

Then I thought, you know, I have a friend who paints decorative boxes and does really awesome work. I should buy a cheap plain humidor and commission her to decorate it. But her stuff, while beautiful, is more girly-fantasy oriented than I want. I want a box that looks like it sat on the desk of some dude from the East India Company while he composed dispatches commanding troops on steamships to raze Burma. Manly, but not plain. And not insanely expensive. You know?

Is that too much to ask?

Incredibly International

So I've been involved in a writing contest which has had some incredibly ironic results, but I can't really write about them until the whole thing's over at the end of the month. So until then, here's something vaguely interesting:

Shooting has started on a live-action version of Blood: The Last Vampire. Blood was originally a Japanese animated cartoon about a girl fighting vampiric monsters on an American base in Japan during the Vietnam war. The movie is being filmed in Argentina by Ronny Yu, who is Chinese, and stars Ji-Hyun Jun, a Korean actress. It's being financed by Pathe, a French distributor. It's not quite as international as Lost, but it's close.

Cool And Yet Not

I'm having very mixed feelings about Heroes nowadays. I still like SuperHiro best of all, but I don't like the directions they've taken his storyline. First, they made him way too naive. Then they crippled his power just as he was really learning to rock with it. Then they pulled that dinosaur bait-and-switch. Then they introduced Hiro's dad, and as cool as it was to see a cameo by George Takei, I really hate that they basically changed Hiro from an average sarariman schlub with an awesome secret into a super-rich geek who's just been slumming.

And now, as kick-ass as last night's episode was, they've tied in SuperHiro's dad with the Invulnerable Cheerleader's adoptive father (her biological father being, of course, the Flying Pol) and it's all just getting too damned incestuous for words. Less with the twisty backstory connections, more with the super-powered ass-kicking please.

Speaking of super-powered ass-kicking, I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but the new commercials for the Fantastic Four sequel look awesome. I was underwhelmed with the first one. Too sitcom-y, lightweight cast, slim plot, really stupid reiterpretation of Doctor Doom. But I've got to say, the scenes of the Silver Surfer from the first trailer really got me going, and the glimpses of the FantastiCar in the new commercials (plus the hints that Galactus himself might be featured) have me totally sold. Only things that worries me: the movie doesn't come out till June, and they're already blitzing the commercials in February. How loud does the hype machine have to get for this movie to get out from under the shadow of Spiderman 3 (which also looks pretty damn good).

Delay

I meant to post something last week, but Blogger decided to switch me to the new system, and I had to create a new account and everything. So to save a little work, I'm going to cross-post some stuff I posted to an on-line writer's group I belong to.

Last Monday, I posted this:

So I've been fighting this idea for a while, but I think its time has come. I started a novel featuring Digger, the main character from my first published story, in Nov. 2005. I finished the first draft in May of last year, and I'm currently stalled, stumbling blindly through the last half of the second act. Although I thought I put some good stuff in it, I've been very uncomfortable with the book on several levels.

I think the book's problems are fixable, but I'm not sure at this point that it's worth fixing, at least not right now. Basically, the book just does not feel like the Digger short stories. It's darker, not as much fun. It's not as if there's a big pre-sold audience of Digger fans from the two short stories sold so far, but obviously I did something right with those stories. Any novel I write should try to emulate the qualities of the stories that got them sold in the first place, and I just don't think that this is the one.

In the last couple of days, I've started playing with an idea that feels big enough to be a better fit for a Digger first novel, with the current book maybe being the second in the series, assuming the first one sells. I don't want to abandon what I've done so far, but I'm tired of floundering around with this revision, and I want this to be fun again.

So for now, the current draft of Hero Go Home goes on the shelf, and I start outlining (tentatively) The Hero's Junket.

And then on Friday, I posted this:

Brains are stupid, stupid, stupid things. I've been horribly blocked on Hero Go Home for months, feeling a deep dissatisfaction not only with certain plot details, but with the heart of the book's storyline as well. It just seemed like a misfire from start to finish.

Hence my statement on Monday that I was shelving Hero Go Home in favor of a book that promised to be more fun to write. So what has happened since then?

I've rewritten two scenes of Hero Go Home that I was stuck on. Because once I no longer cared whether I finished it, my mind suddenly let itself start addressing the problems it was afraid to face before.

To quote one of the great philosophers of our time: "You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! STUPID!"

I'm still outlining the other one, though. Writing is starting to get fun again.

So you can see that I'm stuck in a sort of "six of one, half-dozen of the other," situation right now. City of Heroes isn't helping. I'm having a blast with it, but it consumes far too much of my free time.

Score!

So one of the more depressing things I went through last year was the long wait on several stories I had submitted. In the last three weeks, I've started getting some responses back.

Realms of Fantasy passed on "King of the Kars." Intergalactic Medicine Show said 'no' to "Shell" (after holding onto it for almost a full year). And after 14 months, Baen's Universe is buying "Double-Secret Weapon," the Digger sequel I sent them a month after they accepted "Astromonkeys!" Now I really need to get back to work on Hero Go Home.

Still no word on "Frame by Frame." They had extended the open submission period several times; last I heard, they're closing submissions in mid-March.

In TV, Heroes pulled a Lucas on us. Several episodes ago, they set up what looked like a possible romantic relationship between Peter and Claire (yes, I know she's still in high school, but she'll be of age soon). Last week, they dropped the bomb - Peter is Claire's uncle. Oops.

Super Bowl

The game last night was pretty good, although the continuous rain made it look like a thoroughly miserable experience for everyone there. The rain made for a sloppy game with lots of turnovers, and Chicago fell apart in the second half, so it wasn't so much a nail-biter. But the half-time show with Prince wasn't nearly as embarrassing as it had the potential to be. The half-time show has always been something to be endured more than enjoyed, but since the infamous 2004 show, it's become something to be actively dreaded, and how sad is that? Maybe after another year or two, now that we've had Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones and Prince to wash the taste out of our mouths, the half-time show will begin to lose its taint.

My favorite commercial of the show? The Blockbuster mouse torture spot.

I'm finally beginning to cool down on City of Heroes fever, and this week's return of Lost and Survivor should bring things back to normal, which means I may be posting more.

Heroes and More Heroes

Well, Heroes returned last week, and I was mostly happy, although I thought the bit where Hiro fulfilled the prophetic of him facing off against a dinosaur was a big rip-off. Total bait and switch. And Studio 60 came back, but meh. I found that, unlike Heroes, I didn't miss it while it was gone.

In the meantime, I've been playing City of Heroes every spare moment for about a month. I got my graphic and memory upgrades installed, and the game plays so much better, and looks so much better than it ever did. The big thing is, when I stopped playing last year, my main character was bogged down at level 38 and had been for a long time. He was out of missions until level 40, therefore had to either team up or street hunt for experience, and I'm not normally a team player. So things were going slowly.

Since I've come back, in a month of concentrated play (including this past weekend which I spent hours playing, because it was a double xp event), I've pushed him from 38 to 43, and the game is fun again. I thought about posting some screenshots of just how much better the game looks, but that was a lot of work, so I won't.

Got to get ready for work.

An Old Nemesis Returns

I'm still here, just busy. What's been taking up most of my spare time is an old friend/foe, City of Heroes. I had quit for about three months, due to boredom and burnout, but their Christmas event lured me back in. And once I was in, I was stuck.

Funny thing is, I quit partly because I wanted to save that 15 bucks a month for other things. But after Christmas, not only did I spend the 15 bucks, but then I spent another $20 to finally buy City of Villains (a good deal since it came with another 15 dollars worth of free gametime, so I only spent $5 on the game itself), and then close to $150 on computer upgrades so I would play the game with its recent patches. I was already barely limping along on the lowest graphics settings across the board. I'm hoping the upgrade does some good in other areas to help justify the cost, though.

And ironically enough, after a week or so of City of Heroes, I've come up with some ideas for the big scene that I stalled out on the Hero Go Home rewrite. Of course, I haven't actually written any of it because I've been too busy playing. But that will change soon. I think that rewrite may soon be churning along again.

Kirbycise

Jumping on a bandwagon here, but it's a fun bandwagon, so I make no apologies.

If you want to burn off those extra holiday calories, try a round of Kirbycise.

The Bad Thing About Complex Serials

TV dramas with a complex continuing storyline are great when they work. But when they fail to connect with a big enough audience, they get moved around or just plain cancelled without warning, leaving those viewers who enjoyed the show with a lot of hanging threads. Shows I watched this season that have been cancelled in just such a fashion: Vanished, The Nine, and now Daybreak.

Which confounds me, because Daybreak was an awesome show. Taye Diggs made a compelling lead, the mystery was deep (and for once, than goodness, not a comment on our current political landscape), and the show found some new twists to the Groundhog Day formula. The article I read about the cancellation says that thirteen episodes were produced (and since the premiere stated that the mystery would be solved in thirteen episodes, it looks like the story may be complete). ABC is planning to make subsequent episodes avaiable on-line, but it didn't specifywhether it would offer the entire rest of the series or just the next couple of episodes.

This is one show that deserves the Firefly DVD treatment.

Sky High

Finally saw Sky High over the weekend. It was a fun little movie, although I think it's interesting to contrast this movie's approach with The Incredibles. Both are superhero movies, and both are ostensibly for juvenile audiences, but both try in their own ways to appeal to adults as well.

The Incredibles did this by having a storyline that would appeal to the emotions of parents: the drudgery of work, the temptation of the affair, the terror of kids in danger, the primal bond when the family works together. This was a story that appealed to adults, on different levels, just as much as kids.

Sky High, on the other hand, takes a different tack. The story is a by-the-numbers coming of age story with a little good girl/bad girl romance thrown in. But the movie is designed to appeal to parents on a nostalgic level. The entire soundtrack consists of covers of Eighties New Wave. Off the top of my head, I remember songs that were originally performed by English Beat (2 of 'em), Modern English, The Cars, The Go-Gos, Devo, Thompson Twins. And the supporting cast contains a bunch of familiar faces: Bruce Campbell, Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald from Kids in the Hall, Cloris Leachman, Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman herself).

So it's a shallower film, but still a fun one. I ended up watching it a couple of times through.

This Is Sad

Joe Barbera has died. Like a lot of kids, I grew up on Hanna-Barbera cartoons. They were often cheap and crude, but we loved them, and I'm sorry to see Joe go.

Future Combat

This looks like one of those pie-in-the-sky "what the future might look like, but won't" articles that Popular Science thrives on. The basic idea is cool: using suborbital space transports to deliver Marines quickly anywhere on the globe. It's freakin' step one to a Starship Troopers dropship.

But if you read the article, you start to see two big flaws. One is dealt with at some length: the transport gets the troops in, but then how do you get them back out? The other is barely mentioned at all: the transport as envisioned will only hold 13 troops.

Keep in mind that the event that inspired the whole idea, according to the article, was a planned insertion of 500 Marines. In order to carry out that mission, they would need 39 of these things dropping out of space, which is doable, but would be insanely expensive. Then you'd have 39 small groups trying to link up across hostile terrain. Then, unless the landers had some sort of conventional propulsion to fly out with, they would have to either destroy them in place or guard them until the U.S. government could come to retrieve them.

I think that until you have a design that can somehow carry enough fuel to get up to its desired altitude twice without refueling, or use some sort of mass-driver launch device to get it up to suborbital altitude without using any fuel at all, allowing it to carry only the fuel it needs for its return trip (plus attitude adjustments for the initial landing), this won't be a practical alternative.

Sacrilege

Archie Comics are (at least temporarily) abandoning their distinctive house style for a more contemporary, realistic style. I hate to be that guy, the old fart who opposes all change, but really, the Archie style was what gave them their own distinctive identity.

Perhaps even worse, the change in art style is accompanied by a change in the stories as well. A few years ago, I was reminiscing about the economical storytelling in Archie comics. I was telling my wife how they would tell these awesome, complete stories in only eight pages. Then one day I ran across an old Archie digest and discovered something amazing. Those eight page stories I was reminiscing about, those marvels of compact, economic storytelling, weren't eight pages long.

They were usually only three or four!

Amazingly, in a time when it seems virtually everybody is bemoaning the short attention spans of our fast-twitch, MTV-ized, You-Tube culture, Archie Comics are ditching a storytelling style that seems perfectly suited to such short attention spans in favor of longer, more complex stories.

I give it a few years at most, then I predict a return to the old-style stories, only this time thy'll be pitched as retro-cool.