Goodbye Ethrus, Hello Superheroes

So our planetary romance campaign, Ethrus Prime, has finally ended, and I realize that--unlike Atlantis--I haven't really been posting updates of it here. Of course, since I moved Out of the Vault and Super Movie Mondays over to Hero Go Home, I've barely posted here at all in the last year. I posted a tutorial on how I created my character portrait, and then there were only a couple of other posts in the next couple of months.

Part of that is due to the exhaustion of trying to keep up with the daily serialization of Run, Digger, Run! But part of it was due to the game itself. It just wasn't as emotionally involving for me. And much of that is my fault for my choice of character.

Coming up with a character for this world was a bit of a challenge. It was a brand-new world, and quite extensively thought-out by the gamemaster, but I had trouble finding the kind of person I wanted to be within it. I had this idea that I wanted to be someone crazy who slowly goes sane, and so I came up with this idea: a guy who has had something done to his brain by a machine designed to fight a long-ago war. It overwrites people's brains with the memories and personalities and skillsets of loyal soldiers, therefore eliminating the need for recruiting and training and indoctrination. Grab a prisoner, stick him in the machine, and voila, instant soldier.

Problem was, a spy from the other side had infected the machine with a virus, another personality hidden in the code that would take over and defect to the other side, or perform sabotage among the enemy troops. The otehr problem was that the machine was old and defective, and so the job it had done was incomplete. Sunder (my character) was still himself, but he heard the voices of two other people in his head constantly. One was Torin, a trained sniper and assassin, a cold-blooded killer. The other was Amaris, a master spy who had the ability (like The Mentalist) to read people by their reactions, their tells. He could seduce women and fast-talk men, trained to infiltrate and persuade people to do exactly what he wanted.

Not a horrible concept, actually, and it produced some good moments in game. The problems were:

1) In an attempt to not seem like I was actually getting three characters for the price of one, with every Mary Sue skill in the book, I ended up buying almost all the skills for all three characters with one set of points, and advancing each character's skills separately. So for instance, Torin and Sunder had different pistol skills, and if Torin didn't make an appearance between skill advancements, his skills wouldn't advance. Buying all those skills meant all my skills were lower than I would have liked, and they never advanced as fast as everyone else.

2) Because I was unsure of the game world, I tried to dodge around it by giving Sunder amnesia. I planted hints as to what kind of background he probably had in my background document, but lots of it was left to the gamemaster. This might have worked out better if, in addition to having to create the entire game world from scratch, he hadn't also had another (more interesting) amnesiac character to fill in.

3) Although Amaris had one of my character's coolest moments in the game, he was not really a good choice for the game world. His conception as a con man/human lie detector might have worked well in a modern setting, but in the world of Ethrus, populated by a number of extremely paranoid non-human races that we mostly ended up interacting with, and in a party where more than one character had the mental ability to dominate a character and make him tell us the truth, he was basically pretty useless. Entertaining, but superfluous. It didn't help that the gamemaster and I had different conceptions of his reality (I posited him as a real person, like Torin, while Sargon insisted he was just code).

4) My character's main personality was paranoid and risk-averse, not the best choice for an adventuring party.

So to sum up, Sunder liked to run and hide a lot, Torin was a "master" sniper who was a worse shot than practically everyone else in the game (and falling behind all the time), and Amaris was as useful as a third nipple, plus nobody liked him. And yet, we ended up getting stuff done and having fun, and in the end, Sunder became a pretty interesting guy, I think.

Now it's time to move on to Orion Dusk, a futuristic superhero fighting space pirates in the asteroid belt, or something. I'm hoping I've done enough things differently that he'll be a better fit than Sunder, and yet, he's going to have his own issues. I'll leave those as a surprise to the people who'll be playing with him.

Oh yeah, and since I did this with Smeaton long ago, now that everything's over, I'll leave the members of the group with a couple of bits of Sunder trivia.

Back when I was first conceiving the character, I didn't know that it would be taking place on an alien world. I only knew "post-apocalyptic." So when I was coming up with my alternate personalities, I gave them more recognizably ethnic human names. Nicolai was going to be a spy/assassin, while Diego would be a historian/medic or healer.

Also, during the game, there was a physical tic I would use whenever I played the other personalities. Torin was on Sunder's left side, and Amaris was on his right. So if I would turn my head to left or right while "hearing voices," I was deliberately hearing one or the other of them specifically. And when their personalities would take over, I would tilt my head to that side--Torin to the left, and Amaris to the right. I'm not sure anyone ever consciously picked up on it, but I like to think it helped differentiate them. I know it gave me a crick in my neck sometimes.

Frazier Five-Oh

Long strange day.

Not a bad day. In many ways, a good one. But I decided for my 50th birthday, I would go out and do some things. I cashed in some quarters I'd been saving for a while and treated myself to lunch at a place I'd never been, Buffalo Wild Wings. Then I bought myself some presents: the second season of Archer was on sale, and the fourth season of Heroes, which isn't exactly good, but my daughter wants to see it, and I got some Halloween candy that was on clearance.

Then I came home and got dressed up in a suit and tie and went out to eat at P.F. Chang's, another place I'd never been. The food was really good, but I felt awfully self-conscious, sitting there all dressed up and all alone. After, I went to a club and smoked a really expensive cigar that I got as a free giveaway several years ago and have been saving for a special occasion.

So all in all, it was nice. But lonely. It's not as if I have no friends. I got lots of well-wishes on Facebook, and I have family and friends that I'll see on Saturday, including my daughter. But on THE day, everyone was pretty much busy, and I don't really have any go-to-a-club-and-smoke-a-cigar friends anymore, so that's necessarily something I have to do alone. Which is not necessarily the way I want it, but I don't see any real way of changing it for a while.

The Many Moods of Metatronic

City of Heroes will be shutting down soon. And even though I haven't touched any of my characters for 1,574 days, I decided I needed to take a last look before they're gone forever.

After playing Champions for over a year, though, getting back into the City of Heroes keymap was like learning to walk again. I had forgotten the keystrokes. I had forgotten the geography of the city. And it didn't help that multiple updates and the transition from a subscriber model to a free-to-play model had wiped out or made obsolete major portions of my character.

I will be writing up something more substantial in a few days, once I've finally wrapped up Run, Digger, Run! But for now, here's a look at the many moods of my number-one main man, Metatronic (click the image to embiggen).

The third image is his original costume (no cape, because the game did not allow you to have a cape until you earned it at level 20). When he earned the right to wear a cape and have a second uniform slot, I gave him the Masked Rider style armor you see in the second image. Later, I gave him the Super-Saiyan-style power-up in image four, updated his armor to look tougher a'la image five, and filled a slot with a civilian secret identity costume. And for the fifth and final slot, I took my inspiration from his name (inspired by the Metatron, the angelic being who serves as the voice of God) and gave him his winged form. I think, though, that I used metal wings that somehow got deleted in the interim.

Now I need to find out if I can afford to upgrade my membership to V.I.P. long enough to get screenshots of Metalord, the first character to own the name.

The Next Big Thing

I'm slowly developing a concept for my next project. I'm kind of Digger'd out, so I'm going to do something very different. I had three possible projects: a 1920's Horror/Action story that's been rolling around in my head for over a year; a hard-boiled crime story set in the 50's, probably; and a steampunkish thing set in the late 1800's in Europe.

Problems: The 1920's story doesn't have a third act. Not even the vaguest clue of one. And the characters are kind of boring.

The 1950's story is nothing but a vague idea of tone and one pithy line of dialogue. Oh, and a really strange (and probably unworkable) idea for how to structure the story, if I manage to come up with one.

The Steampunk story falls in between. There is even less plot (so far) than the horror story, but I think the characters are more interesting, and it's possible that I could develop it into something spectacular. Given my track record so far, the chances are slim, but I'm thinking that's what I'm going to turn my efforts toward as I wind up Run, Digger, Run!

Barack Obama's Jobs Plan

1. Increase regulations on businesses, making everything they do more expensive and more burdensome, including hiring.

2. Use the EPA's regulating power to discourage domestic fossil fuel production and to shut down coal-fired power plants, eliminating or forcing overseas thousands of jobs. This also makes energy scarcer and more expensive, driving up costs for businesses (and consumers) across the spectrum and leaving less money available for things like hiring.

3. Fail to pass a federal budget three years running and run the government on last-minute continuing resolutions. Likewise, propose huge increases in corporate and personal taxes, but leave temporary cuts in place for a couple of years at a time, so that businesses can never predict what their expenses will be by this time next year, including hiring.

4. Pass a sweeping change to the health care system, thousands of pages long, establishing over a hundred new bureaucracies with thousands of regulations "to be determined" in coming years, driving up compliance costs while exacerbating uncertainty over the true costs of hiring new personnel.

5. ...

6. Sit back and watch the jobs pour in.

How can any thinking person seriously plan to vote for this tool?

What I Bought

So I bought a heavy punching bag. Back before I moved out of Casa Estrogen, I went the Road House route by stuffing one of my old Army duffel bags with old clothes, hanging it from a hook in the garage ceiling, and punching it. It was a really good and intense workout which got me results comparable to what I'd had when I was lifting religiously, only with much shorter workouts. When I moved to my current house, I had no place to hang the bag (I could hang it in the garage, but it's a detached garage and not well-built, more like a tool shack with a really big door).

Plus, the duffel bag had its quirks and limitations. I stuffed it pretty much to capacity, but it was never heavy enough. After a few punches, it would just be swinging and spinning wildly. And since I left the carrying straps on that enable you to wear it like a backpack, sometimes I would end up punching or kicking a metal buckle, which was painful.And although it wasn't as heavy as I really wanted it, after a couple of months, I noticed the seams starting to pull apart.

So now I have a punching bag installed in my house. I did my first tentative workout on it today, relearning how to wrap my hands and getting a feel for the biomechanics of punching again, getting my arms used to taking the shock of a hard punch. I'm in even worse shape than I thought, but I'm hoping as I take this piece by piece: working the bag, starting to do bodyweight exercises and some kettlebell work, improving my diet--that will turn around.

And meanwhile, the act of getting the bag set up forced me to do some straightening up. Not nearly enough, but it's a start, and I've been avoiding that start for too long. If I ever want to get laid again, these are things I have to do. And seriously, I want to get laid again. Enough years have gone by.

The Life We Want, the Life We Choose

I've been having new computer fever for a while now. Part of it was just that I got a little extra money together, and like this article says (scroll down to #4), I couldn't bear to just let it sit for a time when I needed it. Because it would get pissed away in dribs and drabs and in the end, I'd have nothing and wouldn't really be any better off.

But a new computer, that would give me a leg up on some stuff. I would be able to do much better work on the website, for instance. But it wouldn't make me any more talented, and sadly, though I've put a shit-ton of work into the website, I'm not keeping up with the demands, and the income I've made from donations and books sold is negligible.

I didn't have nearly enough to make the jump to the computer I want anyway, so I finally splurged on something else. Something that costs less than half what a new computer would cost, but could end up helping me make a much more positive change.

It's been a hard few years. The separation caused me a lot of stress, which was exacerbated by my post-election meltdown. Then came the Biggest Mistake of My Life, which left me jobless and saddled with a ton of debt. The three years since have seen extended periods of unemployment or underemployment, debilitating depression from feelings of worthlessness (when your wife doesn't want you and no one wants to hire you, it's hard not to start to agree with them), and just the grind of constantly having no money--eating shitty food, not running the air conditioner in the summer, running minimal heat in the winter, and subsequently having no energy to do anything but huddle over the computer.

Trash piles up, weeds grow rampant in the yard, everything in your house except the stuff you use every day is covered with a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. And then one day, you look around at a room that looks like a bomb went off one dropped comic book and empty soda bottle at a time, and you say, "Why the hell do I let myself live like this?"

Two years ago, I told myself I was making a change, but it didn't take. A year ago, I spent a month trying to improve, but then the summer heat clamped down and work stopped. This year, I used my little bit of extra money to buy something tangible in the hopes that it will jumpstart the changes that have so far eluded me.

Because although the mess is daunting and I've let my body atrophy horribly, the fact is, I've chosen to live this way, and I can choose to live another way if I want. And I really do want.

The Odd Update

So I'm currently working way too few hours at my job, which means I'm trying to find other ways to make money. Got a bunch of watch & clock movements from Dad, so I'm playing with the idea of making steampunk jewelry. Working on a necklace now, which looks okay on my desk, but look like crap on, so more work to do there.

But here's a weird bit. I decided to look on Etsy to see who else is doing the kinds of things I want to do. And most people are not. They are either gluing random gears to stuff to make it "steampunk," or they are taking to heart the idea that gears have to serve a function, in which case they are soldering entire watch movements to random pieces of jewelry.

Which is really no more steampunk than gluing random gears, since the watch movements are all backwards and not serving any purpose other than to give a mechanical flavor. Meanwhile, I'm working on stuff that uses scavenged parts and gears as design elements, not functional machinery. But the entire thing is supposed to be a harmonious whole. Gluing random metal gears to a cloth books cover is silly; using a metal gear as a design element in a piece of metal jewelry is not (to my mind).

But here's the crazy part: I do find one (1) person on Etsy who is doing almost exactly what I envision myself doing as I develop my skills. And she's in Tulsa.

Meanwhile, I tried to learn how to do a pulp-style painting to make a new cover for a paperback edition of Death Wave, but after three failed attempts, I'm about to give up and try a new approach. And I also have to edit the manuscript and format it for print, which will be a bit of work.

Last night, we gamed and it was a hell of a lot of fun as my character tried to talk another character into bed and finally gave a speech I've been holding in reserve for over a month. It went okay, but then last night, I had a dream (which is weird, because I very rarely remember my dreams anymore).

It was like watching a cop show or movie or something, only I'm simultaneously in it and watching it. And as I'm locked in a cop car (maybe arrested for something I didn't do), the serial killer (played by a really creepy John Lithgow) appears and start head-butting the car window, cracking it. At which point efamar, trapped outside the car with the killer, says something like, "the killer's skin is really soft!," which provokes this terrified "ew!" from the audience, because he's like Hannibal Lecter: refined and probably moisturized and manicured and smelling really civilized, and yet absolutely fucking bestial, his lips bleeding where's he's chewing on them in his frenzy to kill anyone who gets in his way. And that's all I remember.

The Daily Grind

Wow, hard to believe that it's been almost a month and a half since I posted here. Just goes to show how much mental effort goes into the daily postings over at Hero Go Home.

The daily Run, Digger, Run! serial experiment is not going as well as hoped. I have a couple of daily readers, but there has been no build. What's more, it's a lot more work than I anticipated.

Because it's a lot more than just writing 500 words a day. I have to write the daily episode (and because I set myself the challenge of making each episode 500 words, no more and no less, I have to massage the episode until the length is right). Then I post it, write intros and outros and add the social icons and Twitter feed. Then I add the image header, which changes every day (and manually change the size in HTML); I make up the set once a week, using Inkscape and GIMP. And now I'm having to remember to pull out a small quote for emphasis, as well.

Then I have to open up the previous entry to pull the first episode link to paste in the current episode. After I publish the episode, I copy the link address and put in a "continue to next episode" link in the previous entry. And after all that, I have to change the slideshow on the main page. It's a long process for what ends up being a couple minutes' worth of reading for two people.

But I press on. And I'm trying to come up with more ways to make money. I'm putting together a new, better (I hope) cover for Death Wave to put on the paperback edition (with perhaps a special bonus story for added value). And I have some other projects in the works as well, but with all the work I've committed to on Run, Digger, Run!, everything else is moving very slowly.

Two Legends Pass

Within the last couple of weeks, we've lost two legends of the comics world, co-creators of iconic figures who were largely overshadowed in the public eye by their more famous collaborators.

Jerry Robinson, an artist on the early Batman comics, co-created both the Joker and Robin, the Boy Wonder. But he was virtually unknown outside of fan circles, since Bob Kane's contract with DC said that only his name could appear on Batman stories, a policy that went unchanged until the 60's, IIRC. He died on Dec. 7.

One week later, on December 14, Joe Simon also died. Joe was better known as the co-creator, with Jack Kirby, of Captain America. He and Kirby also invented the Romance Comic genre. And in later years, as Kirby was returning to DC Comics to work on his Fourth World books, Simon was writing books like Prez and Brother Power, the Geek.  It was Kirby who sucked up all the press and accolades in later years, and justly so, given Kirby's role in creating the Marvel Universe,  but Simon should never be forgotten. The men were a team for decades.

Maybe Not

Well, turns out the proofing process on Createspace takes a while to complete, so Hero Go Home might not be ready in time for Christmas. My proof copy is due to arrive around Dec. 12, and then I'll probably have to make some fixes which will delay the process further. On the other hand, I'll probably end up with a horribly ugly one-of-a-kind proof copy that I can use as the prize in a contest or something someday.

Just in Time for Christmas (I Hope)

Although it's still under review, I thought I'd let you know now that, very soon, you can own an actual physical printed version of Hero Go Home. I will post the link where you can purchase it as soon as it is available. I plan to follow up soon with print versions of Digger Breaks Through and Death Wave, although perhaps not in time for Christmas.

I've also been noodling new T-shirt ideas that may be available very soon. And there may be a major surprise announced in the very near future, if I decide that I can actually pull it off.

The point is, I need to get more serious about making money off of Hero Go Home, and the best way to do that, as far as I can tell, is to have stuff available to make money off of. I have some ideas to bring in traffic, but I don't want to spend money on them until I have some options for making some of that money back, and three e-books isn't going to cut it.

Oh, and if you're not reading Run, Digger, Run!, you should give it a try. We're eight weeks into the story now, and things are starting to heat up. I'm barely hanging on by my fingernails, getting the daily episodes posted (and today's episode, frankly, was a little rushed--I am committed to the 500-word limit, but today's episode needed about a hundred more words or so before the big cliffhang), but the characters are firming up and the momentum is starting to build. Give it a try, and I hope you like it.

So tonight, to (prematurely) celebrate breaking Hero Go Home into print, I'm drinking some cheap champagne. Also because tomorrow morning, I have to go to divorce class, which is the final step before my divorce is final. I keep hoping that I'll feel relieved once it's over, but right now, it still sucks.

Disintegration

We all have ups and downs. Riding through a down period right now. Not depressed like I was the last couple of years, just stuff collapsing around me. Had to buy some new tires, because the rubber was worn down to the radial belts. Power supply went down in my computer, which was a pain, but was remarkably easy to repair (literally the only hardware work I think I've ever done on a computer which did not require opening the case multiple times to troubleshoot the fix plus hours of cursing--even just adding a memory card always seems to go wrong at least once). I've had an upper molar slowly disintegrating for the last four years which lost another chunk last night. There's a class I need to take to finalize my divorce that I still need to schedule (yes, after 17 years of marriage and three-plus years of separation, the State of Oklahoma requires me to pay for a class in order to be divorced).

And then there's the royal screw job Target is giving its employees by moving its Black Friday sale up to midnight. I can't really blame Target; they're giving the customers what they want. I blame all those greedy douchebags who will be lining up on Thanksgiving for hours so they can buy cheap toasters. Part of me hopes that people won't show up so this doesn't get even worse next year, but the part of me that eats and has a mortgage must hope the sale is a big success so I will get plenty of hours.

I hate the holidays. I've been indifferent to Christmas for years and generally enjoyed Thanksgiving, but working in retail, I'm already sick of Christmas and hate Thanksgiving as well.

Riding the Wave

So the other night, we're doing our weekly role-playing game, and efamar gets this text alert. Everyone sort of pauses, because this never happens. So she checks her phone and announces, "Tornado warning. Huh." Which prompts a very brief discussion of tornado warnings. Brief because suddenly everyone stops talking, and their eyes go wide.

"Did you feel that?"

And before I could say, "No, I didn't feel anything," because apparently I was the only one who didn't (my feet weren't touching the floor at the time, but resting on the chair legs), the ground started to rumble and the house shook.

It didn't last long, maybe 30 seconds of real shaking, plus another minute or so for the last rumbles to die down. But everyone was really freaked out, except me. And I want to say it's because I've lived in California and earthquakes just don't faze me, except that I never felt a really major one even in California.

No, mainly I was just giddy with delight at what had happened in the game. Let's rewind a bit. A couple of weeks ago, my character found a little girl, the only survivor of a wrecked airship. And it was apparent that this girl was in some trouble, because she was being pursued by some real badasses. I wanted to take her back to her father's house, but there was some doubt as to whether or not he was in on it, and even if he wasn't, there was some doubt (mainly from efamar's character) that he was a fit father, given that he had sent her off to be wed at age 10.

But we decided we needed to meet with the father and probe to see if we could learn more about the situation so we could make a more informed decision. And as I have mentioned before, my character has alternate personalities. And as a matter of fact, one of them was feeding my main the lines he should be saying (there was a deal between them involving letting him out later to spend time with efamar's character--that bit didn't work out so well for him). The story was mostly true with one major bit of bluff in it, but the mark decided to call the bluff and start threatening the characters' lives (along with insulting the cover story).

And so I make with a few twitches and an inappropriate smile, and this wave of "Oh shit" flutters around the table. Because although my performance was no Ed-Norton-in-Primal-Fear star turn, it was enough to let them know there'd been a switch, and everybody was sort of panicked, wondering what the new arrival would do.

And of course, what the new arrival did was defuse the situation without bloodshed, because that's what he's good at. But the point is, by the time the ground started shaking, I was already riding a wave of giddiness.

Because there's a real sense of power in that "Oh shit" reaction. I'm not the kind of guy who generates that kind of reaction in everyday life, but at that table, one inappropriate smile and suddenly, everyone thinks I'm Bruce Banner and my eyes have just turned green.

It was also gratifying that at least one person at the table knew immediately which personality had emerged. I had tried to differentiate them. Seems it worked.

And now it seems as if we're stepping out into the larger campaign. Baby steps are done, small tremors have been noted, but now the shaking really starts.

I Should Be In Bed, Again

Here it is, after midnight. I'm supposed to get up at 5 in the morning, as I do every morning that I work, but I stay up till past midnight to update Hero Go Home. The image gallery on the front page is cool, but it doesn't update automatically. Every morning, I have to update it by hand--replace the image, replace the link taht accompanies the image, and add a line of code to the previous chapter of Run, Digger, Run! so you can click through to the next episode.

And the thing is, on the one hand, I'm terribly disappointed in myself. I had intended to be worked ahead with a comfortable buffer on the daily episodes, but instead, I'm barely getting each week done in time. I have episodes done through Friday, but I don't have next Monday's started yet. I barely have any outline notes. And I still need to sacan pages for Satuday's Vault and watch Blade II and do screen caps for Sunday's Super Movies. Not to mention all the sound editing I still have to do on the podcast dropping next Monday.

And yet, I feel pretty good. I spent a lot of time sound editing today. I'm starting to remember why it's taken me a year to get back to this again--it's a ton of work and frustration--but it's also fun. And I think I put together a good graphic for this week's chapter. Last week's was a little boring, but this week's is nice.

The big problem is, I'm still not generating traffic or money. I think I'm getting better at the serialization thing, and as I get further into the story, I'm hoping to generate more exciting chapters. So far, I'm worried that it has been a little uninvolving. Part of that is the nature of the format. Five hundred word episodes don't allow for a lot of emotional exploration. But as the story builds, I hope to make it more gripping. And the blanks are starting to fill in. For instance, this last week I figured out what the final scene will be. There's still almost fifty weeks between now and then, but I know where I'm headed now.

Seriously, as worried as I am that I'm dancing right on the edge, I'm also jazzed, because it looks as I'll definitely make it through the first month with 7-day-a-week posts on time. And if I can do it for a month, it's possible that I can do it for a year. And if I can do it for a year, I might actually be able to build a following and make some money. I hope.

Channeling

Today, I channeled the ghost of Arch Oboler and wrote what seems at first blush like an almost note-perfect Lights Out. The funny thing, of course, is that I wrote most of it during my shift at Target, muttering scenes under my breath as I was scanning shelves and stocking merchandise. I'm probably not the only Target employee ever to spend an entire day mumbling about murder, but I may be the first to do it for a radio-style drama. We'll see if it's actually any good on Halloween.

Gaming, Spoilers and Expectations in Writing

So last night we had a gaming session, and though not a lot seemed to happen, I came away from it pretty happy. It's tough with a new gaming world to find your place in it right away. It takes awhile to learn how the new world works. When I was in college, it was easier: a big fight against a cool-ass monster or villain, then phat lootz after, and I'm happy.

It's different now. I'm older, and I place greater value on different things. And our group is made up of writers and avid readers, so much of the joy of the game comes not from big combats, but from moments between characters who have revealed themselves over time. Last night, I had a pretty good moment with lots of conflicting emotions crammed into a relatively brief period of time. I wish I could get something that complex and interesting on the page.

And thinking back over it today, I realize that part of what made it work was that I had set up some expectations earlier. Essentially, what happened was, my character appeared to give another a hug. And in the moment between initiating the contact and explaining what it was about, there was a tension between several alternatives. Was he doing this as a  lost child needing comfort (since he had explained that he had no memories beyond a few years previously and had been wandering the fringes of society for as long as he could remember), or was this perhaps a more romantic gesture (since another personality controlling his body had hit on the same character the previous night--perhaps there was a secret crush or something)?

The reveal, when it came, managed to be both creepy and pathetic, and I hope was a surprise, upending the expectations set up while also (I think) satisfying them in a different way.

This plays into a theory I've had about writing for a while now. The trick--the really hard trick--to writing a story that works is to set up expectations and then satisfy them without satisfying them.

What?

An example: in the mid-1970's, Ralph Bakshi directed an animated film called Wizards. It was a satirical look at fantasy and sword-and-sorcery about the clash between the good hippie fairies led by the wizard Avatar and the dark forces of evil led by Avatar's evil brother, Blackwolf. It is set up in the beginning that these are the two most powerful wizards on the planet, so we know, we expect, that there will be a climactic duel between the wizards. And although it seems as if Avatar's powers are all bluff throughout most of the film, we hang in there waiting for him to bust out his Moment of Awesome, because we've been told that he's actually really powerful.

But the confrontation, when it comes, is over almost before it starts, because Avatar pulls out a gun and just shoots his adversary. And yeah, it's funny and it's a shock, and it's in keeping with Avatar's character. And yeah, this exact bait-and-switch is one of the most fondly remembered moments of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out four years later.

But the key difference is, in Raiders, it's a throwaway joke against a character we've never seen before. We had no real expectations. In Wizards, we'd been watching Avatar travel to this confrontation for an hour-and-a-half, only to settle for a swift kick in the balls. Now, knowing it's coming, I can appreciate the joke, but the first time I saw the movie, I was pissed off. Because I hadn't received what I thought I'd been promised.

And I wonder if that's part of what went into a recent study which found that spoilers do not actually ruin a story. I like surprise twists in a story, but obviously a story that depends wholly on surprise cannot become a perennial favorite, enjoyed over and over again. You can only be surprised once.

A well-told story is like a series of promises from the author--"Okay, you don't know what this means, but I promise, hang in there with me and it will mean something later, and it'll be cool, I promise!" So if you promise a fight, there needs to be a fight. If you promise love, there needs to be love. If you promise a solution to a mystery, the mystery must be solved.

But there's a trap, which is that you can't meet their expectations too square-on. There's a reason why the words "dull" and "predictable" so often go together. The story needs to be predictable, but in a surprising way, a way that lets the reader or viewer feel smart while also appreciating the author's ingenuity--"man, I knew something like that was going to happen, but I never thought it would happen like that! That turned out way cooler than I expected!"

It's a delicate balance, and one I'm always trying to do better.

It's ON! Run, Digger, Run!

The new story launched today. I'm not worked nearly as far ahead as I'd like, but it has taken me a while to get into the rhythm of the short daily clips. I'm hoping it will get easier as I get more used to it.

Misogynistic Joke of the Day

In the party supply section at Target, they have boy pinatas and girl pinatas. Boy pinatas, we're all familiar with: hit them hard and candy comes out.

But you are not allowed to hit the girl pinatas. You must instead get them drunk and promise to love them forever, then see if they'll give up the candy voluntarily. Afterward, you have to promise to call them.

The Children

Had an impromptu bad movie night the other night. We watched the 1980 horror film, The Children. And yes, it is still wretchedly bad.

But bad in interesting ways. The story in brief: a school bus carrying most of the kids from the small town of Ravensback passes through a cloud of toxic gas that leaked from a nearby nuclear plant. The exposure turns the kids into zombies with black fingernails with only one desire: to hug people. Unfortunately, their hugs kill the recipients. They burn until they are half-melted, unrecognizable husks.

So yes, it's awful. Filmed on a low budget in a small town somewhere (but a small town with some huge houses--maybe a suburb of a larger metropolitan area), there are no stars. Not one. Not even a cameo by a minor B-list celebrity has-been to pique an audience's interest. The script is awful, and the acting is worse. But it is not entirely amateurish. There are a few stylish shots, and some camera movement.

And the score is interesting. In places, it's reminiscent of the Friday the 13th movies, minimal keyboards with a hollow echoey feel, which just makes sense because the score was written by Harry Manfredini, who scored the Friday the 13th films. But in places, he also "references" (or rips off) Bernard Hermann and Leonard Rosenman. It just seems odd for this low-budget little piece of nothing to have an orchestrated score, even if it is just strings and keyboards But this was before synthesizers became ubiquitous.

Directing choices are also strange. The movie introduces us to many residents of the town, and it seems as if a lot has been left on the cutting room floor. Two women living together, one of whom seems really angry at the sheriff, for some reason. It looks like there's a history there, but it's never explained. Another rich woman is set up to be a major subplot--she shares a fairly big scene with the sheriff, and later, someone coming to see her is able to talk his way past a police roadblock--but then she disappears. we never hear from her again, there are no consequences to her scene with the sheriff, and her body is not even discovered when the sheriff visits her place later. The other people with her are found dead, but she's just gone. It just feels like a lot of stuff got left on the cutting room floor.

But as Sargon aptly observed, it's not as if they had no time for character stuff. Much of the running time is filler, dead space, as characters get in their cars, turn around, and drive into the distance, just so we know they're going someplace.

But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the film is the subtext. Stephen King in Danse Macabre talks about how horror movies often have a subtext that serves as an accurate barometer of what concerns society at large--Cold War paranoia, economic concerns, the Generation Gap. And that might be true for movies that are broadly successful. But what about a movie that found little to no audience?

Might it just be a look at the filmmakers' private fears? And what does it say about the filmmakers in this case? I mean, you could look at it really abstractly and say that it all about people we should trust implicitly being our enemies or something, but at base, the monsters are little kids who want hugs!  What about that spelled "terror" to Carlton Albright and Edward Terry, the credited writers?