Scott B. Pruden's Blog, page 11

For Today’s Funky Friday, Don’t Be Afraid to Shake It!

My son and I had a conversation the other day that went like this:

Him: “Dad, I don’t understand how some people can listen to music on their earbuds and stay perfectly still.”

Me: “Me, either. Sometimes when I’m listening to music on the train I worry that I’ll be unable to control myself and leap into the aisle dancing like a maniac.”

Him: (Gut-busting laughter)

“I would move rhythmically, but if only if it was being done ironically.”

The big, honkin’ headphones – from 1970s necessity to 21st century hipster affectation.

Granted, the sight of me dressed for “legitimate” work and suddenly busting a move on the commuter express into Philadelphia is pretty funny, but that’s not really an exaggeration. Despite the near ubiquity of earbuds (discrete, once considered cool) or those giant headphones I remember bumming off my dad to make mixtapes (now inconvenient, burdensome and therefore hipster cool), you see very few people publicly responding to the music they’re listening to.

I’m a little biased. I’m the guy you pull up next to on the road who’s singing at the top of his lungs in the car. I’m the guy on the train who simply can’t restrain some little form of rhythmic movement, whether it’s a finger tap or a head bob. God help me if I was a hardcore Rush fan, because I’d either careen off the road or injure my seatmate on the train during the drum solo for “Tom Sawyer.”

Even at live shows it’s unusual these days to see folks really getting into music. Exuberance seems to now be placed alongside social disfunction or mental illness. Honestly, I’d much rather be the crazy guy at the front of the stage dancing and singing the lyrics to every single song than the self-important turd standing in the middle of the room displaying no response whatsoever – no head bop, no finger pop, no air guitar … nothing.

Is that really how you enjoy music? If so, I’m revoking your music card, because you’re obviously not worthy of it.

I’m not going to call for you to dance like no one is watching, A) because that’s been said so many times it now only belongs on lame motivational posters, and B) because someone is always watching. But I will say this. Remember to feel the music once in a while. Tap a foot, play bass on your thigh, or break down and push your pelvis.

So for those about to shake your groove thangs, I salute you.

 

It’s My Birthday, So You Get the Presents (Spoiler – It’s FREE EBOOKS!)

Hi, yes … that fateful day has arrived. Today I turn 45.

Given the new realities of the lifespan of healthy humans (and the fact that genetics are working in my favor here), unless I do something (else) monumentally stupid, I fully intend to live at least until the age of 90.

That puts me squarely at the doorstep of midlife. Half my life down, half yet to go.

For lots of folks (particularly men), this is a time of re-evaluation. To paraphrase Edna Mode in The Incredibles, men this age are often … unstable.

Me at 45 – A TSFW (Totally Safe for Work) Selfie in Brown

Well, hopefully no more unstable than on any other day. I won’t be going out shopping for a red Porsche Boxter convertible in which I’ll install a significantly younger woman. I married a significantly younger woman, and if there’s any toodling around in exotic sports cars to be done, it will most certainly be done with her.

And any instability anyone might notice was, honestly, probably there already. Folks working with a full deck rarely go into writing for a living, and they certainly don’t become newspaper reporters or novelists.

So, there’s that.

What I do have, however, is a pretty decent sense of accomplishment. I noted in this space not long ago that Stan Lee, dean of Marvel Comics and the creator of most of its characters, didn’t create cornerstone superhero Spider Man until he after he turned 40. Stan is now 90 years old, which means he’s spent the last 50 years not as Stan Lee, but as STAN-friggin’-LEE!!!, who still runs a media empire, hosts a TV show or two and maintains a busy schedule of sci-fi and comic book convention appearances.

That carries a lot of weight with me because I admire late bloomers. I never aspired to be one of those pain-in-the-ass writers who busts out of the gate at 25 with a Pulitzer Prize-winner (mainly because what those sort of writers produce is usually self-absorbed, whiny crap, but that’s another blog posting).

As someone who got carded for booze up until his 32nd birthday and took 20 years to write his first book, I realized it might take me a while to grow into this whole novelist thing. But once I managed to give birth to that 300+ page baby at the (entirely appropriate, given my genre) age of 42, there’s been no looking back. If I never write anything again, I can rest assured knowing that I have added my own little piece of original creativity to the universe.

And there are other, perhaps more significant, accomplishments, too. I have amazing friends, cultivated over decades, who remain the sort of people I can talk now exactly the way we did when we were in high school or our early jobs. They provide me with a constant source of encouragement and inspiration and I am in awe of a great many of them every day. I can only hope I send back to them just a fraction of the love, support and laughter they send my way.

And most importantly, I have an amazing family – a beautiful wife who supports me with warmth, patience and love through all the ups and downs of this writing life and frequently jumps in to help with a needed dose of reality, and two spectacularly smart, funny and kindhearted children who are always proud to tell their friends and teachers that their daddy is a writer.

But wait a minute. Let’s put the brakes on the sentimentality. Weren’t you promised presents?

Indeed you were.

Without you, the readers, my family and friends would still be with me, my work would still get done and my book – and those I still hope to write – would still be out there. But without readers, a book is only words on a page.

Once you – a stranger – pick it up and begin that first chapter, you become a willing participant in a reality that another has created. It’s like telepathy in a way. I’m putting my thoughts into your head, and in the midst of the trance-state we call “reading,” those thoughts are manifested in your own mind as an alternate reality. Other than unconditional love, I believe it’s the closest thing to magic any of us will ever really experience.

So as my gift to you, starting today I’m offering the Kindle version of Immaculate Deception free for three days through Amazon, in the hope that if you enjoyed it, you’ll be inclined to let others know that they can, as well – and with minimum risk. Other than individually shaking your hands or giving you big, wet kisses, it’s the best I can do.

Really, thank you ever so much. And here’s to another 45 years.

Today’s Funky Friday Brought to You by The Roots and … Elvis Costello? (A Rumination on Genre Busting)

OK, lemme ‘splain.

Anyone who’s read this blog … you know – ever – has a pretty good idea that I’m an Elvis Costello fan from way back, and there’s a good reason: I consider my discovery of Costello on par with my initiation into a musical world that included the Beatles as its foundation.

But I’ve never really explained why.

Better than why, I’ll explain when. It was 1983, and I was 15, riding with my dad in his tiny Chevy pickup truck to help him out with a rehearsal for a play he was directing at the Chapel Street Playhouse, a tiny but very active community theater in Newark, Del. As we got closer to the theater, this song came on the radio – likely longstanding Wilmington, Del., Top 40 station WSTW. Something about the opening piano chords with the bass guitar right up front grabbed me, then the singer’s falsetto kicked in, followed by a more normal register, and the sound of the female background singers.

That’s about 20 seconds into the song. And man, I was hooked. I did something I rarely did. I asked my dad to just sit there in the parking lot and leave the radio on while I listened to the rest of the song, which turned out to be about a lovelorn writer using literary imagery to explain the ups and downs of a romantic relationship.

OK, I thought. You got me. I’m done. Who is this guy?

But the DJ didn’t say. Because this was the Stone Ages, when there was no handy digital display to tell you the artist if the DJ neglected to, I was in the dark. When I got home, I was doubly in the dark, because my family had no cable TV, and thus no MTV. That might have been the last time I heard it on the radio.

Sadly, even though the song was on the 1983 album Punch the Clock, it took me until 1985 to actually own the song with the release of The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions in 1985. It contained the single I had heard – “Every Day I Write the Book” – as well as enough cuts from his back catalog to make me want to investigate further.

What I found was not a gold mine but a friggin’ platinum mine. Here’s this skinny dork (hello, 115-pound theater nerd 11th-grader) who not only rocks with this weird amalgam of new wave pop and pissed-off punk, but who is obviously literate. His songs, dense with words and metaphor and cross references, were like novellas in themselves.

Since then I’ve been a permanent fan, and pretty much anyone who knows me well is aware of this. Example: When I met up for lunch with a former college girlfriend a few years after graduation, one of her first questions as we made awkward smalltalk was, “Still like Elvis Costello?”

I wanted to say, “Yes, because he A) Didn’t break up with me, and B) Writes great brokenhearted nerd songs that helped me get over you.”

But it was more than that. I admired not only the literary quality of the songs, but the fact that his style was all over the map. One minute he was channeling pop-punk rage, while the other he was crooning a country song or paying homage to the sweet harmonies of Motown.

It was that ability to adapt and cross genres that, in the end, kept me as a fan. And, as it turns out, those same qualities are frequently what I look for in the authors I read and the ones I try to apply to my own writing.

As much as I love science fiction in books, film and TV, it’s the work that is able to admit that it’s other things that really grabs me. For instance, one of my favorite authors is Christopher Moore. If you’ve ever read his work, you know he’s hard to pin down as far as genre. Does he write humorous fantasy? Fantastic humor? Is it horror? Scifi? Occult? Why does he say the F-word so much?

Exactly! You never really know where he’s going – only that along the way you will be taken on an absurd and ultimately sweet adventure. Whether it’s a Pacific Island cargo cult, a pesky Native American trickster spirit or a rumination on what happened during the “lost” years in the life of Jesus, you will laugh and you will encounter elements of the weird, fantastic, science-fictional and – occasionally – the kinky and naughty.

Another example: I just watched the movie Safety Not Guaranteed, about a team of magazine writers pursuing a story about the guy behind a classified ad seeking a time travel companion.

Is it science fiction because there’s the prospect – real or imagined – of time travel? I say yes. But what makes it great is that around that conceit is a deep story of real people trying to recapture lost time or bygone days. The emotions are true and the situations believable, even if, at the center of things, is a concept that goes back to the earliest science fiction novels. The same could be said for films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

So, how does this all relate back to the funk mentioned in this post’s title?

In his latest collaboration, Elvis Costello has teamed with perhaps The Best Band in the World, The Roots (hailing from my adopted metro area of Philadelphia), working together to fuse The Roots’ particular brand of neo-soul, funk, hip hop and R&B to Costello’s dense storytelling. It’s what makes me love Costello still, repackaged and re-purposed with a funky back beat, a driving horn section and a noir feel that he hasn’t inhabited in years.

There’s no fear as both he and The Roots venture into uncharted waters of creativity, and the result, as it frequently is when fear is cast aside and new frontiers are explored, are extraordinary.

 

A Little Something To Keep In Mind for Your Weekend

The Monorail – Getting from Here to There the Science Fiction Way

One of the early criticisms of Immaculate Deception (from a friend and former newspaper colleague who had not yet read the book, incidentally) was that there would be no way that anytime in the near future the United States could agree to build any sort of high-speed rail system, let alone the extensive maglev network I describe in the novel.

Had he known they were present in the narrative, he probably would also have pooh-poohed the presence of the aircar, loosely based on the designs of the Moller Skycar, which is an actual thing.

Granted, when it seems difficult for some in politics and punditry (the real in which my skeptical friend now dwells) to wrap their brains around better, cooler trains. The fact that people in urban areas (particularly along the Northeast Corridor of the U.S., where I live) actually like to use trains and would like to see more of them seems antithetical to the the current widespread belief that investments in forward-thinking infrastructure are silly. Honestly, it’s so much easier to spend all that money on fighting spurious foreign conflicts and letting bridges rot, right? But that’s another blog posting…

Suffice it to say that whether they’ll every really happen in the U.S., high-tech public transportation systems like maglevs (beyond the one at Disney World, of course) are an integral part of science fiction literature and film. There are even a few musical references – my favorite being “IGY” by Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagan.

And it’s not just a current (pipe?) dream – it’s one that’s apparently been around a very long time. Here’s a great story from the website io9 talking about the monorail concept through history.

All aboard!

After This Weekend, I’m Renaming Monday “Napday”

This weekend flew, with the usual basket full of chores and fun topped off with a last-minute, quick turnaround editing assignment from the West Coast that didn’t wrap up until 2 a.m. today. So it’s not that I really need any instruction on this, but it’s good to have some reference material to make sure I’m doing it right.

When You Think You Have It Bad, Be Glad You’re Not In a Job Interview for the End of the World

In other horrible sci-fi-themed office pranks, we present the end of everything you know taking place while you’re applying for a job you’re probably going to hate anyway.

For the Love of the Mix Tape

Some of you might actually be old enough to remember making good, old-fashioned mix tapes (if you do you’ll know the significance of the picture above).

Maybe. But since I have no way to track the demographics of this blog other than by geography, for all I know every one of you could be 8-year-olds sneaking a peek behind your third-grade teacher’s back.

But I’ll assume that if some of you might not be able to remember making a mix tape, you’re at least old enough to be familiar with the concept.

Let me be clear – we’re talking about a mix TAPE here. Not a burned CD. Not an iPod or online playlist.

It’s a tape. That you mix. Yourself.

If you’ve never done this, here’s a short tutorial, compliments of one Mr. Cusack.

Yes, there are indeed rules – rules that you can only learn by doing exactly what John is doing in that clip, which is sitting in front of a stereo system with stacks of records and tapes and CDs and hand selecting the songs you are going to painstakingly record onto a compact cassette of magnetic tape over the course of several hours.

It is an act of artistic devotion. An expression of love. A declaration to the universe and every person that ever rummages through your music collection that this – THIS – is what you believe is music that deserves to be listened to over and over again.

Yes, iPod playlists or other digital media accomplish basically the same thing, Actually, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about musical mixology. In working on Immaculate Deception, I went so far as to create a custom-mixed “soundtrack” for the novel – an album-length collection of music that complemented and/or inspired the narrative. Early readers of the novel got custom burned CDs as little hand-crafted thank-you gifts.

But actual mix tapes were beautiful for one very important reason: whether intended  or not, they became artifacts of specific times, places and emotions.

Want to know what songs you compiled to accompany that last minute road trip to the beach the summer before college? There it is, sitting in a long-overlooked box, in its sturdy plastic case, the ball-point lettering on the song list long faded.

Want to know what songs you put together for that desperate first love? Ha! Too bad! Chances are you can’t (unless you married your first love) because you gave it to her as a token of your deep affection and she either threw it away in disgust over your cheating/boring/politically untenable nature or has treasured it always as a symbol of something dear and true she once had.

How about the mix for that Michael Bey-scale epic kegger your junior year? Ha! That’s lost, too, purloined by a friend or random guest who lifted it from the stereo after everyone else had passed out or retired to a corner or their room for less musical (but more rhythmic) activities. But somewhere that person might still have that tape.

And even if it ends up in a landfill, when the aliens come to excavate a dead Earth thousands of years from now, Flmbrg, commander of the interstellar expedition, might dig it up and consider it on par with the cryptic cave paintings of Neanderthals.

And in essence, that’s what a real mix tape is – something that serves as a musical complement to something in life, whether it’s a love affair, break up, an epic party or just … hell, I don’t know, Monday morning.

Your Monday (No, Wait … Tuesday) Morning Motivation. You’re Welcome.

It’s a Massive Science Fiction Convention Convergence Weekend! Behave Yourselves!

Wow is right. God bless the Power Girls and Supergirls out there hitting the two major science fiction conventions happening this weekend – DragonCon in HOT-Lanta, Ga.; and LoneStarCon, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio, Texas.

Not just because you, as attractive female cosplayers and convention attendees, have upped the legitimacy of these events by your very presence, but also because you’ve had to put up with a lot of crap. That crap stems mainly from two things.

First, for a long, long time, science fiction, comics and horror conventions were the purview of – how can I put this delicately? – inadequately socialized men. And these men were used to a nerd/geek hierarchy that has developed over many years in which he who knew the most won.

Notice the pronoun there – he. Were there women in fandom? Sure. But it was assumed for a very long time that women were lower in this hierarchy because there was no way the could ever know as much about this stuff as guys. They just weren’t as interested, right?

Meanwhile, images of females – particularly in comics – tended to be exaggerated and hypersexualized per the cleavage-abundant Power Girl model.

But here’s the second bit – a funny thing happened. Somewhere along the way, little girls started checking out the comics and the classic science fiction movies and the horror books. And they dug it.

Then, roundabout the last 15 years or so, as you little girls who felt free to bust out of your pink Barbie prisons became grown women, you arrived at conventions in droves. Some in civilian garb. Some dressed in costume. Some dressed as Power Girl. You were smart (as sci-fi and comic fans tend to be) and engaged. You knew the movies, the novels, the TV shows and the comic backstories. And (perhaps most importantly) you threatened the entrenched fan power structure (male) on its own turf while being – gasp! – attractive and smelling nice and sometimes scantily costumed.

What happened next seems like it has been an ongoing problem that’s been only recently addressed. Some of those poorly socialized men forgot that you costumed women were fellow fans and made some inappropriate comments, then got a little handsy, then made more comments.

Not cool.

Seems they forgot that those fellow fans – regardless of the fact that they were in sexy costume – where there to be entertained, not be the entertainment. Granted, as a guy I can certainly appreciate the aesthetics in play, but this was an example of the grownups forgetting their kindergarten lessons: keep your hands to yourselves and if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything.

It was so not cool that author John Scalzi, who attends a lot more of these events than I do, recently mounted a vigorous campaign to get all genre conventions to sign an agreement stating that they wouldn’t tolerate any sort of sexual harassment and would pursue legal action in cases of assault at conventions. Here’s the story of what inspired him to take action.

Personally, I love the idea of female fans, both as a fan myself and as an author. You bring a vibrant dynamic to events and make them something much more than what they once were. And who, really, can complain about more Power Girl?

But don’t lose yourself in the imagery, guys. The woman in that costume has a job, is capable of vigorous independent thought and is not there simply for your amusement, so don’t treat her as such.

Treat her with the respect, the admiration, the acknowledgement of physical boundaries and the sense of camaraderie that you would treat your male friends.

Treat her like a fellow fan.