The Invisible Library

I’ve been back two weeks already and barely more than two posts. Sorry.

Every spare minute in the evenings has been spent working on my novel. I’m two thirds of the way through the first draft and making great headway. If I can manage to keep up an hour or two every evening for the next six weeks or so, I’ll be done! But that means posting will be light for a while. I’m sure I’ll get a wild hare and have to rant about something before long and as usual, cat pictures will appear as scheduled.

Ronald Moore at the BSG Blog comments on the Saprano’s finale kerfluffle:

For weeks, the speculation has centered around a simplistic black and white question for a show that revelled in never providing monochromatic answers: would Tony live or die? The prosaic nature of the question and its anticipated answer was itself was the most disappointing thing about the lead-up to the finale. Either Tony was going to get whacked, or he wouldn’t. “The Sopranos” would end with either the bitter little pill of the “bad” guy finally getting what he’s got coming or with the vaguely false relief of family affirmed and life goes on.

Instead, Chase managed to do the unthinkable, the unbelievable and the unprecedented: he yanked us out of their lives without any resolution whatsoever. We were torn away from Tony, Carmella, AJ, Meadow, Paulie, Sil and the all the rest without any idea what happens to them tomorrow or even later that same evening. In real life, when you lose contact with someone, you seldom if ever have the satisfaction of knowing how the myriad threads of their lives resolved themselves. They are removed from your circle of knowledge and yet their lives go on unbeknownst to you in ways you can only imagine. The Sopranos are gone from our lives, but their lives go on without resolution, much like ours. None of us have tidy, revelatory endings that are the culmination of our “story arcs” and neither will they.

Having never been a Saprano’s fan, I don’t have the emotional involvement in the finale that some people have. But I am invested in the outcome of Battlestar Galactica, because for us Sci-fi nerds, it’s our Saparano’s and I’m curious as to how Ronald Moore will end the series. Also, as a writer, I’m interested in how other writers handle the little technical details that come with storytelling. Endings are hard and deciding at what point to fade out, walk into the sunset or just cut to black is just as important as that first sentence or opening scene. I’m also a big fan of ambiguity and ambiguous endings.  Sometimes the horse throws a shoe, the hero and heroine loose interest in one another, and neither the empire nor the rebellion wins, they just keep on fighting. That’s life and art should reflect life whenever possible.

Sunday’s Episode of BSG wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected and even had a surprise or two that tied it into the main plot. No surprise that it was written by Jane Espenson, of Buffy/Angel credit. I was poking around on Television Without Pity and discovered that the writer of the episode that I hated,”The Woman King” also wrote the one where Saint Helo decides to kill the Infected Cylons in a fit of righteous indignation, thus preventing them being used as biological weapons. The guy seems to think BSG is the Helo show. I wonder if he’s ever sat down and watched any of the previous seasons? It would probably help his future scripts a little to know what show he’s writing for, rather then continuing to turn in episodes form the Universe Next Door, where BSG is just another Star Trek rip off, staring a cardboard cutout wearing Helo’s uniform. As to why Ronald Moore thought that episode was worth shooting rather than just burying is beyond me (which isn’t entirely true. I understand shooting budgets and you have an allotment of episodes that have to delivered by date X and you can’t do an instant rewrite and necessarily get something better. Even Ron Moore admits that the previous two episodes were Black Market week). Listening to the podcast, I get the notion that they had intended for there to be a sub-plot involving the Sagittarans but that it got dropped and added and drooped and added until it eventually backed into the script ass first, which is just clumsy. And I can see what they were shooting for with “Day In The Life,” but it didn’t come off well. which is fine. They can’t all be winners.

Meanwhile, Jane Espenson knows how to float a subplot and make it work. Chief got to play Cesar Chavez, we learned something interesting about Baltar (that may or may not be true– see, ambiguity works!) and it segways into the pending trial and overall thrust of the greater story, about people in horrible situations doing the best and worst they can for reasons that are not always ethical but are always human. Chief got to be a hero, but only after having his family threatened and he never once came off like a petulant super brat like Helo did two episodes back. That’s how to write a show!

So, when exactly did throwing people out of the airlock become the answer to everyone’s problems on Battlestar Galactica? Got an uppity Cylon who won’t talk? Airlock him. Traitor of humanity won’t tell you what you want to hear because his fractured mind is too busy coming undone? Threaten to put him in an airlock. Cally and Chief having marital problems? Throw them out the airlock and catch them in a Raptor. It’s like on Star Trek: The Next Generation, when the writers couldn’t figure out a real solution to the made up problem of the week and the catchall answer was to Reverse Polarity. Which sounded cool, until you realized that it meant putting the batteries in backwards. Throwing people out of an airlock is the post 9/11 polarity switch. It sounds hardcore, but accomplishes exactly nothing.

Somehow, the writers forgot what story they were telling. When we last saw a good episode of Battlestar Galactica, the fleet had just narrowly escaped the Algae Planet before the star went Nova. This gave them the clues that allowed them to discover the roadmap to Earth. Starbuck realized she’s been painting signs to Earth since she was little. They had the traitor of humanity and his Cylon Girlfriend in the brig. Helo and Athena had just committed a minor act of treason in order to rescue their magical cancer-curring hybrid baby. Baltar and Caprica Six faced the realization that they were well and truly frakked and being a Cylon, for all it’s cool immortality points, wasn’t going to spare either of them from some major retribution falling on their heads. Oh, and Lee and Kara were busy sabotaging their marriages.

By my count, that’s at least half a dozen solid episodes worth of material right there. Hell, on any other show, that would be about a season and a half. But this is BSG, not any other show. At least until last week’s, “Racism is Bad M’kay?” episode and this week’s, “Let’s Go Play In An Airlock and Talk To Our Dead Ex-Wife” episode. And next week’s “Labor Issues in Spaaaaace!” episode isn’t looking any better.

Seriously, Mr. Moore, did you and the other writers misplace your story notes? This is “Black Market” territory here.

For those not familiar with the episode (or who have mercifully blotted it out), “Black Market” was the one where Apollo tries to woo a hooker, and then rounds out his film noir resume by going into the seedy underbelly of the fleet’s Black Market to figure out who murdered Pegasus’ Captain of the Week. What qualifies a fighter pilot for detective work? Pretty much the same thing that qualifies him to head the legal committee the President wants him to form in order to have Baltar’s trial. So, to review: Apollo is not just a pilot and a daddy’s boy who wants to sleep with his best friend, he also is a detective and lawyer. In “Black Market,” as in “The Woman King” and “A Day In the life,” we met characters that apparently had been there all this time but had never been seen before (and have not been seen since) and learned that the Black Market is so big, bad and vital, that it hasn’t even been mentioned casually again. The writers were clearly bored that week and decided they wanted to work on their Blade Runner meets Homicide: SVU spec script. That’s what we have with these last few episodes.

“The Woman King” and “A Day In the life,” both introduce pivotal characters who have never even been mentioned. The fleet has a civilian Doctor? Who is pals with Col. Tigh? And was on New Caprica? Since when? We knew Admiral Adama had a wife, she was his ex (as conveniently mentioned in the recap, which had to call back all the way to the mini series to find that one) but why is the dead ex-wife now so much more important than, say, finding Earth? I know these are flawed characters but that’s narcissism on a level that truly staggers.

Honestly, are you telling me that Helo has nothing better to do then take on worthless causes like defending Christian Scientists from embittered doctors? Maybe he should be worrying about the fact that his wife can casually incite him to betray his friends. And since when does Helo get to be the righteous hero? Somehow, we are to believe that Admiral Adama has nothing more pressing on his mind than his dead ex-wife and flirting with the President. Never mind the genocidal cyborgs that have been chasing them for the last two years, or his mutinous crew. And what has Tom Zerak been doing for pretty much all of season two? Also, the Cylons, who apparently haven’t bothered the Colonials for 49 days, what are they doing? Last we saw them, they decided to put the entire D’Anna/Three model into deep freeze, which is the equivalent of the US Congress saying, “All you Mormons are a nuisance, what with your unconventional religious fervor, so we’re going to sedate the entire state of Utah indefinitely.” That might be worth some screen time.

Here’s an idea for an episode: While the Cylons deal with the ethical ramifications of boxing 1/7th of their collective soul, the Colonials discover a D’Anna model that escaped and has been hiding out in the fleet. She’s going crazy because she is cut off. She has no connection, no greater purpose. she’s just a person now and she can’t cope. Various people on Galactica just want to airlock her but Helo and Athena try to reason with them. In the end, D’Anna kills herself because she can’t handle being alone. It covers all the areas of the stand alone episodes: racism and survivor guilt but also throws in the existential theme of being separated from God/purpose and allows Helo to be a saint. It also has the added bonus of not introducing anyone new, while moving things forward plot wise. What’s not to love?

Instead, we get Saint Helo and a two dimensional doctor, stereotypical anti-science religious fanatics and the ghost of Mrs. Adama. And next week, it’s Chief doing his Cesar Chavez impression.

I hear in the episode after that, they find a planet full of sharks and haul one up to the ship just so they can throw it out of an airlock and jump it.

I don’t mean to pick apart what is, on the whole, an impeccable and well crafted show. I do it because I love the show, and don’t want to see it devolve into just another lazy sci-fi program. BSG has, since the miniseries, been fearless in its willingness to tackle some real cutting edge themes and ideas and using sci-fi tropes to do so. It’s rooted in the great tradition of speculative fiction, spinning What If scenarios and taking them to their logical conclusion, but transcends the need to do the racism episode, or the sexism episode. Those things are handled in the subtext anyway. All that these inferior story lines that have no relation to the main plot do spin our gears. If I want to see labor disputes and racism handled in a sci-fiish way, there’s a Star Trek rerun on, somewhere.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that season 4 will only be 13 episodes. The writers will have to stay on target and stick to the main themes in order to finish the story by episode 13. There won’t be any room for padding out episodes about standard and well worn sci-fi ideas. Until then, however, we’ll have to find a way to endure the next few episodes, until it’s time to leave us hanging over a cliff, again.

Harpers has a great essay up by Jonathan Lethem. It covers a wide range of topics from artistic appropriation to copyright law:

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called “versions.” The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.

[…] Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he’d himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.

This is something interesting. Art, all art, is quickly changing. This greybeard novelist strikes us as hoplessly outdated in his puritanism. But it wasn’t that long ago, just a few years, really that this was the law of the Arts. Andy Warhol is still cursed in some artistic circles, because he had the audacity to incorporate popular culture (pitewy!) into his painting! The nerve! Painting is reserved for alegorical murals depicting moral and religious themes, not soup cans and garish silk screen prints of mocie stars!

Today, we’re starting to see the first generation of people raised on pop art. We don’t fear the stigma of borrowing or quoting. We’ve internalized the idea that there’s nothing new and are setting out to explore the used. Pop art and highbrow met at at a party one night and fell in love, now their babies are making a mess of things. Isn’t it beautiful?

Lethem also has something interesting to say about copyright as well. Read it all and borrow the good parts.

My novel, The Machine of the World, is nearing completion! I have about fifty pages left to finish, then a little polishing up after that before it will be ready to send off to a publisher. I’m pondering the idea of putting a PDF of it up for people to download.

There’s some debate as to weather or not posting my unpublished novel will have positive or negative effects on getting it published. I’ve heard of cases where people were offered first time contracts to publish their serialized online novel and tales of woe from those who were told that gee, your novel is spiffy but too bad about putting it on your blog, ‘cus now it’s got Internet cooties.

Part of me wants to wait until it can be published and then offer a free download, like Corry Doctorow does with his books, but at the same time, I’m tempted to just post it online, maybe pay to have a few copies printed and bound and just move on to the next book. I would appreciate emails or comments for or against this. (This is me soliciting comments folks. This whole Blog thing is a two way street. Let me hear what you think! As long as you aren’t trying to sell me cheep Viagra or Thai Ladyboy Porn).

Adam Sternbergh has reached the same conclusion I did about shows like Lost:

Change the format, or at least reimagine it. When it so-called arc shows, we need something between a mini-series and an open-ended run. We need the TV equivalent of a novella: the limited-run show. Series driven by a central mystery (Twin Peaks, The X-Files) peter out precisely because they have indefinite life spans. The writers are forced to serve up red herrings until the shows choke on their own plot twists.

[…] Now let’s imagine an alternate reality in which, say, Lost was designed to run for only two seasons. Rather than getting an increasingly tedious shaggy-dog story, we’d get 48 episodes of tightly plotted, expertly interwoven suspense. Viewers would be both more willing to sign on at the beginning (knowing their investment will pay off) and more inclined to buy DVDs later (either as catch-up for newbies or as a satisfying boxed set). Sure, the show won’t syndicate well, but shows like Lost don’t syndicate well anyway. And the series finale would be huge—the kind of event TV network executives drool over.

Shows like Lost or The X-Files or Battlestar Galactica work because they are complex, challenging and, at their heart, have a mystery that can be solved. But it’s the refusal to solve anything that ultimately kills them. The X-Files should have ended in Season 5. They had a second chance in Season 7. When did it end? 3 years later with season 10, after replacing the main characters because the initial characters (and actors) that made the premise work were tired of never finding an answer. But the Executives and producers didn’t care. they just saw an opportunity to squeeze a few more bucks at the expense of the audience’s credulity. A mystery cannot go on forever. Stories need to end and in a timely manner.

Imagine if movies did the same thing. Indie never finds the Ark of the Covenant, just an endless parade of tombs and Nazis with increasingly ludicrous cliff hangers. The fellowship keeps walking up Mount Doom, but never gets to the top. There were people who complained that after the nine hours of the three movies, they just didn’t care anymore who won the blessed war or what happened to that damn hobbit and his ring. Now imagine that it kept going on for five more movies with no resolution.

This is what happened to the X-files and what is happening to Lost. They had a good idea but have let it flounder for too long. It no longer matters why the polar bear, or what the numbers mean. Two seasons equals roughly 20 hours (minus commercial breaks) of feignts, dodges and cliffhangers. That’s the equivalent of 10 movies. Imagine watching a 10 movie series and still having no idea what these people are doing or why any of this is happening. You wouldn’t because no studio in their right mind would green light a 10 picture series that never had even a momentary resolution.*

I’d really love to see the American networks switch to the BBC style of drama series. One season of 13 episodes to tell your story. if it’s popular, they’ll do another season, but each season has a story arc. Something is achieved in 13 episodes and it’s over, with a possibility of a continuation. Even the idea floated above, of a limit of two seasons, forces the writers to weed out the ideas that kinda work (but not really) and get to the stuff that shines. There’d be no silly one off episodes where everyone breaks into song. Just tight plotting and storytelling honed down to a razor’s edge.

For all the griping about Firefly being cancelled too soon, at least it didn’t peter out like Buffy did, turning to cheep gimmicks in season 7 to stay interesting. And my fondest hope is that Ronald Moore and the gang at Battlestar Galactica have an end planned for the rag tag fleet, and soon. I’d love it if they find Earth at the end of season 3, fight over it with the Cylons in season 4 and then call it the end. Because they have a wonderful, compelling drama with interesting characters, but if left to wander around the universe in their current state for five or six more seasons, the show will just become monotonous and uninteresting. And no one wants to see that.

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* I’m curious to see how many Spider Man films Sony will let Sam Raimi make. My guess is one more, but only if Spider Man 3 does really well.

Jane Espenson the great TV scriptwriter* makes an interesting point about writers and aspiring writers:

[Branko in Croatia] points out something I hadn’t consciously noticed, which is the tendency of aspiring television writers to get hyper-critical about television. Good point. This does happen. In order to acquire tv-writing skills, you have to start applying critical thinking to those shows you want to emulate. And the side effect of critical thinking is that you start thinking critically. You notice things: Hey! That important event happened off-screen! Hey! That moment sold out that character! Hey! That act break didn’t leave me wanting more!

Keeping Steve’s letter in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the same thing happens to writers of other kinds as well.

It very much does. Case in point: For the last week or so, I’ve been reading J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. Now, I was never a huge Salinger fan in High school. I tried reading Catcher in the Rye but I think I was too old (I was 17 and if you haven’t read it by the time you’re 15, don’t bother. Everything that strikes a 15 year old as startling and profound hits your jaded 17 year old like a sack of doorknobs. “Yeah, great, Holden, I figured that shit out a while ago.”) But lately, every writer I read about or story I find interesting circles back in some way to Salinger and his extra special Nine Stories. So I decide to try him on for size again. So far, I’ve read about half of them and they are hit or miss. My attitude is probably colored by my poor reception of his only previously perused work but I’m just finding these stories to be lacking something that other people claim to find there. Sure, the dialogue is decent (though dated) and he is a technically good writer. But still, something is missing. Most of the stories I’ve read so far start off week but build to an interesting if not altogether satisfying ending (except for, For Esme, With Love and Squalor, which goes in the oposite direction).

But perhaps this is just the over-analytical side of my writing getting the better of me. The stories work, most of the time and for your average reader, I’m sure they’re great (so long as you aren’t yet out of your early twenties. Salinger may have broken ground in the world of Serious Fiction 50 years ago, but today he would be a Young Adult Author).

of course, having said that, I’ve decided to borrow Salinger’s structure for my novel-in-progress and am writing it now as a series of interconnected stories. So he’s clearly doing something I like, it just isn’t telling a story a 29 year old can relate to.

So yeah. We aspiring writers can get hypercritical but it helps hone our craft. Maybe when I’m done with Nine Stories I’ll pick up The Martian Chronicles again. Ray Bradbury is the antidote to age and overanalysis.

Today is Ray Bradbury’s birthday.

Ray and I go back a long way. Not too long, he is 57 years older than me and we’ve never met, but still. When I read Farenheight 451, I knew I had to become a writer. 20 years later, I’m still working on it. And whenever I get down, I break out my copy of The Martian Chronicles and read a few pages (or chapters) and I get back on the horse. Here’s to another 86 years!

Discussion topic: What stories of his have managed to evoke something in you? Longing? Lust? What?

There are some truly excellent pieces by an astounding array of talented bloggers up at the 41st Skeptics Circle, hosted by Interverbal. And I’m not just saying that because I’m one of them.