Tag Archives: writery pain

Patton Oswalt, I hate your tiny little guts.

Posted on by
4

Okay, that was mean. I’m sure his guts are normal-sized. Sorry.

But goddamn it! He’s just too fucking funny. It ain’t right. I’ve got angst.

Oswalt’s been all over the interwebs lately. First with this piece he wrote about the Boston bombings, and then with this little nugget of awesome. Yeah, that’s right. It is a nine-minute improv performance about combining the Star Wars and Marvel universes into one uber-movie. (Since they’re both owned by Disney now, it would be totally possible. And amazing. Let us all hope that J.J. Abrams takes note.) Oswalt’s done a ton of weird little parts. You may not know you’ve seen his stuff, but you probably have. I recently saw him in Young Adult and I think he was the heart and soul of that movie, even if he wasn’t in it that much. I think I first heard of him when I watched The Comedians of Comedy. Bunch of brilliant, crazy weirdos, those people. Love it.

Anyway, I just read Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Oswalt’s book. Mind. Blown. I knew he was funny on stage and great on screen. This book, though, is a whole different kind of funny. I really like the way he uses a bunch of different formats: essays, poetry, scripty bits, comics, greeting cards, and (probably my favorite) a wine list. Even the list of “other books by this author” at the beginning is a joke, and a good one. He doesn’t just play around with format or genre, he plays to them, uses their tropes and conventions, which makes everything even funnier.

One thing Oswalt talks about in great detail is the intricacy of surviving nerdism in the 1980s. He’s about the same age as my sister, who is *mumblemumble* years older than me, and through whom I lived an early, vicarious teenagerhood. Bitch made me watch all the Freddy/Jason slasher-type movies and listen to Metallica when I was six, is what I’m trying to say here. It’s probably why I’m so twitchy. And so delightful. Anyway, point is, I get a lot of the references in Oswalt’s book, but there’s definitely a little bit of a generation gap as far as group enjoyment or cultural appreciation of those things goes. My generation didn’t get that stuff when it was new and being hyped in the media, so we had to discover it later on our own. Much like we did with Star Wars or Led Zeppelin or chat rooms. His R.E.M. experience was my Nine Inch Nails experience. Either way, there are so many references to books and music and movies here that I’m going to be busy for quite a while looking them all up. Good times.

The book is simultaneously memoir and pop culture commentary. It’s interesting, and very well done. He talks a lot about being a nerd and nerdy stuff, but all that stuff? That’s life stuff. Those books and movies and games and people made him what he is. It’s all inseparable, it’s all one thing. Seamless. And where he could have gotten angsty or whiny about it, instead he seems to really value all that stuff, all those experiences, and it comes across as pure enthusiasm. It’s pretty touching. His putting a positive spin on these potentially bottom-of-the-barrel moments is fucking impressive. “At least I learned something” or “It made me want something better” or “It could’ve been worse, so I wrote a script about the worst possible scenario and made a ton of money.” Dude’s an inspiration, whether that was his intention or not.

And it makes me raging jealous.

I was talking to a friend the other night and she said something about how what I write on my blog makes me seem like I’m just this one thing. Like it’s a character I’m doing or that I’m cherry-picking aspects of my personality to show here. And to a point, that’s true. Mostly for the sake of the writing. Picking a nerdy pop culture thing to talk about and then expanding that conversation into a bigger idea gives me something to nail the bigger idea to. It gives me an in, a reason. Maybe that makes me a hack or whatever, but it also keeps me reined in so I don’t go off all half-cocked about every little thing. Could I talk about non-geek stuff here? Well yeah, it’s my space. But I think putting bigger issues into the context of these small cultural things makes both more interesting, doesn’t it? All art is just a reflection of the culture that created the people who made the art, and then that art becomes a part of the culture, so the people change and grow, and then we get new and exciting art. It’s a vicious, beautiful cycle.

Sure, I could wax philosophical about something else. I find a lot of things interesting. Politics, religion, gender issues, economics, abandoned mental hospitals, etc, etc. Could I talk about, say, the war or socialized health care or right-wing theocracy on the blog? I could. It would probably be boring. Whereas if I put it sideways, tell it slant, maybe slip it into an analysis of dystopianism via scifi or horror, you’ll already be paying attention and when I get boring and ranty, perhaps you won’t notice quite so quickly. But I guess assuming that I have to have some nerd bait to lure you in to my discussion trap is pretty shitty of me. It underestimates you as an audience, so I’m sorry if it seems like I do that. I should be able to just go off about whatever for no reason, even if it is boring. And if you don’t like it, it’s only a thousand words. You can click away and come back next week. It’ll be ok. No hard feelings.

Meanwhile, if you have a single comedy-loving bone in your body, check out Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. It’s incredible. And if you don’t know Patton Oswalt’s standup stuff, you should watch My Weakness is Strong! or No Reason to Complain. He’s a genius. An itty bitty genius. Damn it.

Scalzi vs The Bigots: Round One

Posted on by
11

I’m going to do something now which totally surprises even me: I’m going to recommend an author whose work I’ve never read. Gasp! He’s on my List. I fully intend to read his stuff. Stay tuned. I’ll keep you posted. Fret not. Meanwhile, go read John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever. I kept seeing his name pop up in other writers’ blogs. And his book Redshirts was a giant meganerdy bestseller. So I checked him out and he is awesome. Mostly because he’s brutally honest about pretty much anything. His work, his friends, raising a teenage daughter, politics, religion, the business of writing, ukuleles, and probably most importantly, churros.

Unfortunately, in the world we live in, being honest about things that matter, out loud, on the interwebs, with a huge steady following, means that you’re going to have haters. Fact of life in the Digital Age, and something we’re going to have to deal with until the end of time. (Should I be capitalizing those words? Digital Age? I don’t know. Imma do it anyway.) And thus we arrive at the Scalzi-centric kerfluffle, which I find simply compelling. The opponents: in this corner, wearing the red shirt of brutally honest nerdy writerdom – John Scalzi. In the opposing corner, wearing the icky grey robes of hateful trolliness – the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit (hereafter referred to as the RSHD).

A while ago, the RSHD and his gaggle of mindless followers started making trolly comments on Scalzi’s blog and on the RSHD’s own website. Busy as he is, Scalzi still moderates all his own blog comments. Admirable. (On a related note, why don’t y’all comment more on my blog? I know you’ve got shit to say. Quit keeping it all bottled up inside. It’s bad for your liver.) So he started using “the kitten setting” on those comments, a practice which I adore adore adore. Formerly known as the Mallet of Loving Correction, the kitten setting is when a troll’s comment is edited to reflect a more fuzzy unicorns and puppies and sparkly rainbows sort of outlook. All the hatey things directed at Scalzi are turned into heartfelt expressions of the RSHD’s schoolboy mancrush on him. Feels like a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper. Lots of fluffy bunnies. Takes the teeth right out of those comments, takes away their power. It’s fucking awesome. But, understandably, it further agitates the trolls.

Finally reaching his breaking point, Scalzi decided to put his money where the RSHD’s mouth is. Every time the RSHD does his asshat thing in 2013, he (Scalzi) is going to put five bucks in a jar, up to $1,000, giving the RSHD two hundred opportunities this year to say something hateful. And at the end of the year he’s going to donate it all to RAINN, Emily’s List, the Human Rights Campaign, and the NAACP, in loving support of everything the RSHD hates.

Brilliant!

But wait, there’s more. Scalzi’s fans started asking if they could get in on the action. Not wanting to take anyone’s money up front (in case the RSHD cools down and shuts up – unlikely), he set up a pledge system: the Counteract a Bigot Drive. At the end of the year, all the RSHD activity will be tallied and quantified into money dollar terms, and everyone sends their donations all at once. Here’s the breathtaking bit: the pledges rose to $60,000 in two days. That is a lot of anti-hater money. I don’t think I can say “fucking awesome” too often about this whole thing. It’s just…accurate.

Good on you, Scalzi and fans. Good. On. You. Many heartfelt hugs and thanks.

Besides being inarguably badass, here’s what interests me about this story. I’m wondering why it seems that nerds are, by and large, really, really nice. From my perspective, the occurrence of assholery appears to be generally lower among the geekier slices of the American cultural pie chart. For the purposes of this discussion, I will stipulate to the fact that I may have built myself a bubble of liberal, accepting, open-minded, lovely people. If I hadn’t I probably would’ve punched many a bigoted motherfucker in the mouth by now. Thanks, friends, for being decent humans. Also, I’m from an infected pocket of the world where people who appear otherwise normal throw around racist/sexist/homophobic terminology as readily as they do Nascar references. My nerdly homies who rescued me from high school suicidal tendencies were never like that, nor were the people that I later gravitated toward. All these people somehow or another reinforced in me the non-judgmental mindset that my parents engendered very early. Because they’re awesome friends and awesome parents. It’s really hard for me to be objective here, is all I’m saying.

Anyway, the easy answer is that nerds are nice because we got made fun of as kids or are lonely people or have the deck of mainstream media stacked against us. I take it for granted that that’s the case. However, I think the more interesting variable here might be the influence of science fiction and fantasy. For example, look at Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry populated the Original Series cast with people of every color and creed to make the point that in the future we’re all one. We’re all Terrans, and nothing else matters. In the mid-1960′s, that was a bold anti-racist statement, even if it was couched in such ridiculousness as Captain Kirk getting the hots for the green Orion slave girl. Hamfisted, perhaps, but important. Similarly, I recently heard Kevin Smith say that the X-Men comics are one big metaphor for homosexuality. I’d never made the connection myself, but it does make some degree of sense. You have this secret that could get you socially ostracized and you keep it quiet until you can’t anymore and then you come out of the mutant closet? Yep. That tracks. And while sexism is a hotly debated topic, still, among scifi/fantasy fans, I think there are more positive female role models in those pop culture areas than in others. I’ll take Princess Leia or Jean Grey or Trinity over Paris Hilton or Snooki any day of the fucking week (my burning hatred for reality tv obviously provides serious bias on this particular point).

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for prejudice in scifi or fantasy, though. It’s often in a futuristic setting where the social mores are so different from our own as to be unrecognizable (ie, The Handmaid’s Tale). Or, contrarily, there some sort of uber evil that must be defeated by disparate groups coming together against a common enemy (Hobbits and Elves and Dwarves vs the Orcs of Sauron). Consider, too, that our opinions of scifi and fantasy change drastically as we move along our own cultural timeline. I’m fine with Kirk boffing space tramps in every color of the rainbow, but I still get weirded out when Quark makes out with that Cardassian chick in DS9. Why is that weird? I don’t know. This whole thing might be a chicken-or-egg situation, though. Does scifi/fantasy make us nicer because it illustrates and exposes us to a prejudice-less worldview? Or are we nice because of environment and circumstance, and when we get a chance to make stuff we want to show the milieu that we would ideally create for ourselves?

I’d like to find a way to examine these questions with hard science, instead of just spewing my watered-down opinions at you. But it seems like there would be too many variables. Someone should at least try to do a study. Maybe I should take my anthropologist buddy to Comic-Con and set her loose.

No, that won’t work. Comic-Con tickets sold out last week. Also, bonus, she’d kill me dead. One can still dream.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we can all show the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit how we roll, nerds and non-nerds alike, by pledging to the Counteract a Bigot Drive here. And if you’re a fan of scifi or social commentary, you should definitely check out Scalzi’s blog at whatever.scalzi.com.

The Unreliable Narrator

Posted on by
6

I was sitting in my chair, trying to figure out what to write for this week’s blog, staring blankly in the general direction of my stack of books (because my bookshelves are full – again), and my eyeballs focused on them without warning. I was somewhat surprised to notice that I’ve been reading a ton of biographies and memoirs lately. I’m not sure why that’s happening. Maybe it’s because I’ve been given a lot of books as gifts recently, or because I haven’t been around very many people, or just because my brain needed a break from fiction. That does happen from time to time, but usually I tend to swing toward weird history books or books about language or psychology, and I’ll read one or two and then dive straight back into the warm, comforting waters of scifi and fantasy. The nonfiction kick has happened before, but it always had some other accompanying obsession, you know? The books were a symptom of a bigger phase: the Beats, mental hospitals, heroin, punk rock, Buddhist monks, serial killers, teratology, 19th century circuses.

Hmm. There’s a weird pattern there. I don’t really want to examine that.

Moving on.

This biography thing is odd. And so sudden. Here’s my question: why are other people so interesting? I mean, I understand that people with interesting stories to tell should get book deals. That’s not what I’m saying. No, what I’m asking about is our fascination, as readers, with other people’s lives. Is it just voyeurism? Could it be that simple? Or, the more interesting possibility: do we turn real people into characters? Do we separate ourselves from them, through reading their stories, enough to convince ourselves that they’re not real, at least until the book is over? Do we make them seem like fiction, somehow, by tricking our brains with books?

It’s not just books, though. This is the same thing I wonder about reality television shows (which I firmly believe are the used band-aids of Satan and will destroy us as a culture). Obviously those shows are heavily edited and the people on them are poked and prodded by producers constantly. Which results in them becoming caricatures of themselves, right? The things that make them interesting aren’t the majority of the things that make them up as people, or even of the things that make up their day. No one’s going to read a biography about a normal guy doing normal stuff. But if you take out all the normal bits and stack all the weirdnesses on top of each other in a big 22-minute freakshow or 200-page pile, it becomes fascinating, doesn’t it?

Maybe it’s just me. This kind of over-analytical thinking may not be a problem that other people have. Could be I’m just wired in a strange way. Often I’m blind to my own quirkiness and assume that the things I do all the time are standard operating procedure for other humans. Like eating my cereal with a fork or insisting that there will always be a right and left sock in every pair. I swear, there’s logic there, even if it’s hard to explain. So when I tell you this stuff what I don’t want you to hear is that I have a hard time separating fact from fiction, real folks from characters. And I certainly don’t want you to jump to some extreme conclusion like “she’s delusional.” I’m not. I’ve been through all the appropriate tests.

When I was a kid we traveled a lot. Like, a lot. And I was a little twitchy, being precocious and bored, so my dad used to calm me down by having me tell him stories. Eventually it turned into a game, one only I could win. In the airport or the train station: “What about that lady in the red coat?” In the bar or a restaurant: “What’s the deal with that couple over there?” Sometimes it was more specific: “That guy in the hat is a spy, right?” And sometimes it was nothing at all: “What do you think the wind does when it’s not here?” So, to me, everyone’s a character, every moment is story fodder, a scene waiting for someone to notice it. It’s just operant conditioning. Edward Hopper, the artist, once said that he only painted lonely people. But you can’t assume that they were all lonely all the time. It was just that moment. One he took advantage of.

As I grew up and decided I wanted to write, I became a compulsive people-watcher and eavesdropper. I’d hang out in coffee shops and go eat dinner by myself just to write stories about the conversations I’d hear and the people I saw. This has also given me a hypersensitivity to detail. I call it “the cop eye.” You can tell so much about a person without ever having to hear them speak. Left- or right-handedness, type of shoes, what they keep on the table versus what they keep in their pocket or bag, the book they’re reading, mannerisms, tattoos, tics – all of these tell you something about that person, something beyond the thing itself. All that stuff? That’s story stuff.

I sometimes think about what future archaeologists will make of our history, of our stories. Who will be our primitive gods? Oprah? Bill Gates? Hitler? Queen Elizabeth? But right now they’re just people. And so is the lady in the red coat. Maybe that’s why I’ve been reading so many biographies. To get at those odd pieces of seemingly normal people. To dig them out. To see what makes them interesting. I’m sure this phase will be over soon. It doesn’t make for good blog writing. Although a few of them might be up your nerd alley. Some recommendations:

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened – Jenny Lawson (she’s my blogging hero)
Nerd Do Well – Simon Pegg (because he’s a true fanboy, and freakin’ adorable)
Just a Geek – Wil Wheaton (actor-turned-writer-turned actor again)
Magical Thinking – Augusten Burroughs (also check out Running With Scissors for utter familial madness)
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim – David Sedaris (always hilarious)
The Age of Wonder – Richard Holmes (not really a biography, but has lengthy biographical bits about lots of amazing 17th century scientists who are way more interesting than you’d think they would be)

Check them out. Let me know what you think. And sorry this post is kind of rambly and crazypants and all over the place. I’m still not operating at 100%. But I’m not delusional! I swear. And I promise that none of you will end up in a story without your express permission. Probably. The odds are in your favor.

Writery thoughts

Posted on by
7

The weirdest thing happened to me this week, you guys. I wrote a short story.

Ish. Kindasorta.

I wrote a first draft of a thing. It wants to be a short story.

What’s weird about it is that I haven’t written any new fiction in almost two years. It’s a little daunting. I fiddled about quite a bit with my novel until the whole Doctor Who thing happened and took the wind out of my sails. But new stuff? There’s been nothing for quite some time. And that’s terrifying.

Oddly, what’s even more terrifying is looking at this new thing and thinking that it might be awful. What a fun quirk of the writer’s brain that is. And I wasn’t weirded out by the story at all, at first. What hit the panic button was asking someone to read it. The second I did that, I lost all momentum. The observation of the thing changed the creation of the thing. Heisenberg’s uncertainty short story. Or something like that.

And that’s really why I’m bringing it up now. Every week I spout some verbose nonsense and put it up here in blogland, where it is habitually read by fives and tens of people. That doesn’t make me nervous at all. Because these things I say are opinions, things that I can defend, things that are (usually) based on some objectify-able outside influence which you can absorb into your own satellite system of nerdiness, or not, at your will. My opinion doesn’t change your experience of a thing.

But when it’s something that I’ve created? Out of thin air? Out of my own tortured little brain? The thought of someone telling me it’s horrible? That actually hurts. I suppose it’s that juxtaposition of feely things that bothers me. I want to write but I don’t want to be harshly judged. But I write every week and throw it out into the interwebs for summary judgment. What hypocritical bullshit is that?

“Well, suck it up, furball. Criticism is an intrinsic part of art.”

Yes, yes, I know. If I want to be a writer (a fiction writer, an author, not just a small-time blogger) I need a thicker skin. And the only way to get a thicker skin is with scar tissue, I guess. Take the hit. The hit is necessary.

But taking the hit fucking suuuucks, man.

Why are they so different? Writing fiction and blogging? I’d like to ask a professional brain-poker about that. Am I using some other part of me to write fiction? That moment when I get a little seed of an idea, an image or a line, and I feel like I’ve got to feed it so it will go the hell away, that’s an amazing moment. Those are the moments that artists live for. Inspiration. And then, after you feed the idea and it grows into a thing and you work on it and polish it and make it pretty and it’s done? That’s amazing, too. I feel like it’s worth the fear. Isn’t it? I just think it’s interesting how nonchalant I am about the blogging and then the fiction writing gives me the creeping horrors.

Here’s the bottom line: I don’t know what else to do. If I’m not a writer, I don’t know why I’m here. Maybe I’m doing the wrong kind of writing. I’ll grant you that. But I had kind of a weird childhood and was trained from a very young age to value the written word, to take shelter in escapism, and that storytelling is one of the most important things that people can ever do. Fuck thumbs, stories are what make us human. And this fear, when it pops up, makes me question that. Makes me question my purpose on this planet.

I had a conversation with a very dear friend the other night. She’s nervous about applying to grad school, questioning herself a little. And I told her that she’s not allowed to quit until she tries. Being a failure is more noble than being a quitter. Being a failure means that you have gained the knowledge that you can’t do something. Being a quitter means that you’re ok with never having learned whether you can do something or not. And that’s cowardly. So she and I had this chat (and she’s still applying, hooray!) and then two or four beers later I was telling her about the new short story and the reader fear I have about it. All this existential questioning. And I realized that we were having the same conversation again, only backwards. And more slurring was involved. So what’s the difference? There is no difference. I just have to suck it up and be a big girl and do the thing I’m scared of. And that’s that.

So what have we learned? Probably not much. But I’m going to go ahead and give you fair warning: once I’ve gone through another couple of drafts of this story I’m going to post it on the blog. This may not be the right forum for my goofy fiction, but I’m comfortable here and I trust you guys. (Thanks for that, by the way. I owe you all a big fat lot of hugs and high fives.) And if I say I’ll post it, I have to. Hopefully that will take the fear away and make it just a plain old blog deadline. We’ll see how it goes.

Oh, and sorry for getting all deep and heady on you. Watch this and it’ll lighten your mood.

Sometimes life gets in the way

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve had a rough week, y’all. Ok, that’s not entirely true. I’ve had a rough summer. But this week in particular I just can’t seem to wrap my brain around anything.

And that’s the epic tale of how we ended up having no blog written at ten in the morning on blog day.

I tried to come up with a funny story I could tell, or a witty way to call myself out on my blogging ineptitude, but frankly I’ve got nothing. Besides about eighty things that I need to get done that I just…haven’t done.

Those of you who know me may be starting to get worried at this point. I assure you, I’m fine. Please don’t call the psych ward. Or my mother.

It’s just that in a bigger-picture sense, the dishes don’t fucking matter. Finding that thing that stinks in my fridge doesn’t fucking matter. Picking tomatoes or finishing any number of started-and-then-ignored projects or taking a shower – they don’t fucking matter. And I’d like to think that that attitude could motivate me to do something that does matter. Could I cure AIDS babies or end world hunger? Probably not. But I could do my part, right?

And then I feel very disconnected from the world. Living out here, there’s no outlet for altruistic action. Besides giving money, which will probably be misused, and which I seem to be chronically lacking anyway, so what’s the point in even thinking about it?

See? This is a vicious cycle. “Nothing matters. So do something that matters. But I can’t do anything that matters. So what’s the point in doing anything at all?” And we’re back to square one. With the extra added bonus of now being forced to think about all the people who have super shitty lives and who I’m not helping with all my I-could-be-doing-something-constructive time. Square one is a monument to defeatism and negativity, I have to say. And it seems to be full of dirty dishes. I hate square one. I want to burn it to the ground.

“Well, buck up, little buddy. Things aren’t that bad.” Fuck you, patronizing voice in my head. I know things aren’t that bad. My life is fantastic. It’s the world inside my skull that’s the problem. (Clearly. I mean, I’m having a hypothetical internal dialogue with myself and typing it out so I can post it on the internet. There is something fundamentally wrong with this situation.)

Anyway.

I’m sorry for being a downer. I don’t mean to bum you guys out. I just wanted to explain myself for not being on top of my game this week. I’m sure I’ll have something fun to talk about next time (Buckaroo Banzai, anyone? Mars Curiosity Rover? The extra-hilarious t-shirt I just got that says “Blogging Nerd: Because I Said So”?). Meanwhile, you should all watch this. It’s my current motivation. Sort of. A little. I’m going to go do the dishes.

“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.”

Posted on by
2

Ray Bradbury died. I’m not sure what to say about that. I mentioned him a couple of weeks ago in my blog about Neil Gaiman, said that there wasn’t better company that Gaiman could be in amongst the living. I feel really weird about that paragraph now. What a new and peculiar corner I’ve painted myself into. So, by way of a sort of posthumous retraction: There’s not better company one could be in. Period.

So of course I started thinking about the other greats that we’ve lost. My first brush with this sort of dead hero experience was when Freddie Mercury died. I know that seems weird. I was nine. But I had a really strange childhood and I knew every word to every Queen album. I just remember being sad about it and listening to A Night at the Opera on vinyl with my dad. More recently, when Hunter S. Thompson died I definitely had a little come-apart. I was in the car with my sisters when we heard it on the radio. I started bawling and the older sister said “You going to be ok?” in a non-sympathetic, non-fan kind of way. I nodded and sobbed. The younger sister said “Who’s Hunter S. Thompson?” And I sobbed some more. For completely different reasons.

But worse than that is thinking about the ones we will lose. Do you guys realize how old some of these people are? We are going to have to deal with the deaths of Stan Lee, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, Queen Elizabeth, Hugh Hefner, Woody Allen. And those are just the ones we can see coming. Nevermind some out-of-nowhere River Pheonix/Heath Ledger/Kurt Cobain shit.

Urgh. How depressing. Sorry I’m being a total downer, guys.

I don’t remember which was the first Bradbury book I read. I think it was Fahrenheit 451, which is still my favorite. I was going through a dystopian scifi phase at the time, but that one blew Brave New World and 1984 out of the water. And always will. I’m way more scared of books being banned than Big Brother taking over. (That’s already happened and I’m getting along just fine.) The thing about Bradbury that makes him stand out among the writers with whom he’s usually grouped is that his work doesn’t focus so much on whatever wacky shit is happening, but more on the people involved. The characters seem to take the weirdness as a matter of course, and we get lost in their reactions, in their humanity. There’s something really profound about a writer who can make the world just fall away, you know?

I was recently in the used bookstore in Arcata and I found a copy of Green Shadows, White Whale. I’d never heard of it. Bradbury’s one of those authors whose stuff has so permeated our culture that you think you know all of their work. So I bought it and was completely shocked that it wasn’t scifi. Not even close. It’s the most lovely and weird book about Ireland and Moby Dick, of all things. A great exploration of obsession, of culture, of writery pain and finding beauty where you thought there would be none. And fifteen years after becoming a fan I thought, Holy shit, Ray Bradbury. You, sir, are incredible. Because it doesn’t always have to be the odd or the alien that draws us in and makes us remember what we’re made of. As a rabid scifi/fantasy consumer I tend to forget that. I forget that there are things all around us all the time that can hold up a mirror and make us think about what we are, and drop us on our ass when we realize what we’re not. That seems important. Worth holding on to.

I’m just babbling now. I’m sad. When I’m sad I don’t articulate well. This doesn’t really seem like a good time for a review or a critique anyway. On the upside, I haven’t exhausted Bradbury’s catalogue yet. There are quite a few of his books I haven’t gotten around to. So I’m not left hanging in that horrible void of author love that exists in the space after the last book is finished. For now, that’s comforting.

Some quotes from Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). May you rest in peace.

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”

“You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

“Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.”

A perfectly valid reason to overuse the word “awesome.”

Posted on by
5

“Who is Neil Gaiman?” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to answer this question. It boggles my little nerdy mind. There seems to be a glitch in the awesomeness-to-famousness ratio matrix here. I recently answered the “Who’s Neil Gaiman?” question by saying that he’s the greatest living scifi/fantasy writer, having forgotten that Ray Bradbury and Terry Pratchett are both still with us. My sincerest apologies to those two elder statesmen, but to say that the three of them make up a triumvirate of badass is the highest form of flattery. That I can muster, anyway. I doubt there’s better company to be in amongst the living.

Here’s the thing about Neil Gaiman: the man can do anything. He writes comics, fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, kid’s books. A multifaceted ninja of the weird, this guy. Which is why it’s even more baffling that people don’t know who he is. Comic book geeks, literature geeks, movie geeks – all of these groups have a damn good reason to adore him, and in a sociological-Venn-diagram-of-normal-human-conversations kind of way, he should be a household name, right? You would think. Although to be fair, my love for Gaiman’s work mostly centers around his novels. Neverwhere blew my mind so completely when I read it. Fucking outstanding. I think I gave a copy to everyone I had to buy a birthday present for that year, which is saying a lot because I don’t normally give store-bought gifts. I could go into a lengthy, gushy review of all of his work, but it’s too much to take on. We’d be here for days.

So why bring him up, then? Well, because he made me cry the other day. (I’ve been talking about crying a lot on the blog lately. You should probably not read anything into that. I’m really ok, I promise.) He gave this year’s commencement speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, which was basically just some good advice for young artists from someone looking at them hopefully from the other end of a successful career. The sort of things I wish I’d been told ten or twelve years ago. You can watch and/or read the whole thing here. It’s about twenty minutes of awesome. He’s just so damn charming. One of those guys that you feel in your nerdy bones you’d like to hang out with some day, but you know you’re just not cool enough. Oh, well. One can dream.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what he said in that speech. I can’t imagine someone that talented ever struggling with the sorts of writery problems that schlubs like me deal with. The torture of syntax, the agony of the first draft, the heart palpitations when staring at a blank page. There’s a sort of hero-worshippy thing we do where we imagine those folks don’t sweat over their creations like us, the mere mortals. They just poop out perfect finished novels, don’t they? No, they don’t. Art is hard, but it should be fun. If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right. (Or, as my mother would say, “If it feels good, do it. If it feels bad, stop.”) I grapple with the idea of being a writer. Well, that’s not entirely true. I know I’m a writer. If I’m not here to write, I don’t know why the fuck I’m here, frankly. What gets me stuck on the hamster wheel is the word “successful.” What does that even mean, in the context of art? That one becomes rich? Famous? Well-known? Happy? I’m incredibly shy and nervous around people, and I hate money. So I’d like to say that happy is enough, that I can write for writing’s sake. And I do. If I don’t feed those ideas, get them out of my head, they just scream and scream and bounce around in there like angry demon children trapped in a ball pit. On the other hand, my brain is wired for words. I think about words probably more than I think about anything else. Putting them together, their sounds and harmonies, their meanings and implications when they’re strung along in a beautiful (or horrible) line. Thinking of them as little gears, clockwork in a bigger machine, and making that machine work properly – that’s heaven.

But to what end? So I can bitch about pop culture on the interwebs? Not really. Don’t get me wrong. This is tremendously fun, and I can’t even begin to express how much it means that you guys actually read this drivel. It keeps me writing; it keeps me thinking. But I look at my novel, sitting lonely in its sad little box, and I feel like I’ve ignored my child, forgotten to pick him up after school and he’s standing in the rain, waiting, trying not to cry. Would it be “success” for me to have it published and make my millions? At this point I’d be grateful to the universe if I could even finish it and be proud of the work. Robert Frost rewrote Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood ninety-two times before he would let it be published. Am I that much of a perfectionist? I really don’t know. But I would like the damn thing to someday see the light of day. To have someone say that they enjoyed it. That it made them think about something they’d never thought about before. That it made them happy. That whole process, the after-the-work-is-finished process? That’s the part that gives me nightmares. And I think that’s the most important part of Gaiman’s speech, that last bit about how the landscape of distribution of art is changing. This is all new territory. There’s no reason to wait for someone to discover you, or tell you your work is valuable. Just do it because you love it. And if it makes even one person happy, or makes even one person think they can do the thing they want or love to do, that’s got to be worth it. Doing it all yourself? We’re allowed to think that way now, and I’m kind of in that weird generation gap where that’s something I have to learn, something I was never taught. Hard to wrap my mind around, still.

I’m glad that there are folks out there like Neil Gaiman who, while they may not be household names, mean so much to the people who do know their work and take the time and the energy to share with us what they’ve learned. There’s something tremendously laudable about not just sitting in some high castle wallowing around in a pile of money, and instead choosing to come down to tell us how to be real artists because artists are important. That we are important, and that it’s up to us as much as it is to the people we admire to create good and beautiful things. So if you don’t know who Neil Gaiman is, I’m not going to try to explain him to you. My advice? Go pick up four books right now: The Absolute Sandman Volume One, American Gods, Graveyard Book, and Blueberry Girl. It’s an expensive but comprehensive overview of Gaiman’s…what?…I don’t know, but I can’t use “awesome” any more in this blog post or I’ll make myself ill. Check out all of his stuff and his wicked (haha! I didn’t say it!) blog at neilgaiman.com.

Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Stuff

Posted on by
4

I finally started watching Doctor Who. And then I didn’t stop for a solid week. It is totally obsession-worthy. Once again I’m pitifully behind the curve on the Doctor Who love. But there’s a good reason for it this time, I swear. I’ve wanted to watch it for a really long time, but I’m a hopeless perfectionist and wanted to start at the beginning. Almost impossible, let me tell you. The show is British, right? One of those quintessentially British things. They don’t number their episodes like we do, and their seasons run differently. Doctor Who also has special episodes between regular seasons that aren’t part of either season. All of which adds up to a huge, confusing mess, which is then further compounded by the DVDs being released out of order and taking a million years to come out here in the Colonies. And then there’s the extra added bonus fact that this show has been on since the sixties and half of the old episodes are not on DVD and are probably lost to time altogether (haha, time – get it?). It’s really daunting and frustrating. Putting all of that behind me, I bit the bullet and A) got Netflix and B) started with the new episodes. I can watch the classic ones later when I get a region-free DVD player.

Whovianism is relatively new in the US, pretty much blowing up with the new Doctors. Sure, we got some of the old ones on PBS back in the day, but I was just a kid back then and I checked out of PBS programming as soon as Fraggle Rock was over. I do remember watching a few of the Tom Baker (the 4th Doctor) episodes. But it’s practically been a religion in Britain since the get-go. And I can totally see why. It’s terribly funny. The writing is great. It’s cheesy, but not hard-to-watch cheesy. Hey-those-rubber-masked-aliens-are-super-fun kind of cheesy, which may just be because so many plot points had to carry over from an era of television that was camp before camp was camp. Most British scifi is as corny as Adam West’s Batman, but that accent makes it seem so much more sophisticated. Weird, that. But cheesy scifi is great, because the humor of it makes you love the characters, so then when something awful happens you have a genuine emotional response.

The space ship vs time machine convention of scifi is that usually the vessel is either one or the other, barring some horrible accident or unavoidable natural phenomenon. But the Doctor’s ship, the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space – a horrible acronym) is both! All the time! It’s fantastic. Which is probably the thing I love most about this show, honestly. That great big “fuck you” to the rules of scifi. He’s the Doctor. He does whatever he wants. So there. Take that, universe. And besides the occasional dark or serious moment, the Doctor himself seems to be having an absolute blast all the time. Almost reckless, his time-and-space-trotting fun. How can you not love that? So yeah. Now I’m hooked. I don’t know how long you have to have watched to say that you’re a huge fan of something, but I feel like I’ve definitely crossed that line. When you find yourself wondering which bills you can blow off so you’ll have the money to buy a t-shirt that says “The Angels Have the Phone Box”? That’s fan territory, for real. Also? I want a sonic screwdriver. I want one. I do. The 10th Doctor’s, though, not that weird pinchy one that the 11th Doctor has. I don’t care how over-the-top geeky that is.

I did have one pretty traumatic moment. There was a particular episode that made me sob and sob and sob. And this is selfish and somewhat unrelated to my otherwise pure enjoyment of the show. I was just going along, digging my marathon, cruising on a really great Doctor Who high, when all of a sudden this episode comes on and the first two minutes or so is (and I’m not even kidding) the entire fucking plot of my novel. My husband looks up at me and grabs my arm and he’s all bugeyed, not sure whether I’m going to cry or scream or what. I chose crying. It’s usually safer and more effective. That damned collective subconscious, man. I didn’t steal the idea from them, and obviously they couldn’t have stolen it from me. We probably all saw the same movies or read the same books and jumped to the same conclusions. Christ, that really hurt. I know I can still write it, the basic idea can still be used. But in the back of my head I’ll always wonder if people think I just copied that one episode of Doctor Who. They’ll call me a hack. They’ll say I have no original ideas. Let me tell you something, folks. There are no original ideas. Every single story that has ever been told by mankind is either a good-vs-evil story or a love story. That’s all we’ve got to work with. That is the human condition. All we are is our words. Make them good ones, right?