S. Evan Townsend's Blog, page 124

Wither Cash?

A thought occurred to me today.

I have found this new app for my iPhone called Tabbedout.  With it, at bars and restaurants that use it (and there's two in my small town), you open the app, touch the name of the business you are at (it uses GPS to find near ones), touch "Open tab," show the code to the server/bartender, and order your food/drink.  Everything you order goes on your tab which you can see on your phone.  When you're ready to leave, you pick a tip rate (with a difficult to use slider; only thing I don't like), it calculates the tip, you hit "pay tab" and walk out.  This is very convenient for both the patron and the business.  The patron doesn't have to sit around waiting for a check or a tab tabulation.  The business doesn't need to have an employee spending a lot of time figuring out a tab or delivering a check, then going through the whole credit card or cash pay thing.  I hope more restaurants and bars start using this service.  Also (and I haven't done this yet so I'm not sure how it works) if you want separate checks (and everyone has Tabbedout), you set up one tab then somehow on the phone say who bought what and each person pays their own tab.

You put your credit card information into the app once so that the bill is charged to your card. But here's the thing: we pay our credit card online right out of our bank account.  And money enters our bank account mostly through direct deposit (except for my freelancing and royalty payments come as a check). Neither cash nor check are ever handled in this transaction.  And it's the same for my Starbuck card app that is "re-filled" from my credit card.

So how long until cash and/or check are obsolete and every transaction is handled electronically? And your wealth is just numbers in a computer (it pretty much just is now if you have money in a bank or a brokerage account)?

The downside I see is the government could easily track every bit of money you have coming in, so doing something "under the table" will be impossible.  It might make crime harder but it will make taxing way easier.  Whatever happens, it'll be interesting.

Research (Again)

I found myself thinking today about research for my writing.  Don't ask me why, my pshrink says I'm mildly ADD (or as I call it "ADOS": Attention Deficit--Ooooh, Shiny).  So here's what I've been thinking:

For Hammer of Thor I read all or parts of five books (2 fiction, 3 non-fiction), lots of internet research (planes, weapons, uniforms), plus because my father is a war movie nut I've probably seen every movie made about WWII.  And I watched a documentary about the Korean War.  (I also knew a lot about Korea from my time in the Army even though I was never stationed there.) 

For Agent of Artifice I read all or part of four books (all non-fiction), plus I spent a day in the Chicago library reading newspapers from that era (specifically, when my character was in Chicago).  I watched three movies (fiction) on the Cuban revolution (none of them very good).  I travelled to Seattle to visit the Space Needle and I even traveled to Key West to see what it looked like (I was in Miami on business).  Plus lots of internet research (the CIA, the Bay of Pigs invasion, weapons, Cuba before the revolution, mobsters in Chicago). And on a trip to San Francisco I walked by the Huntington Hotel (which forced me to re-write a few things in Hammer of Thor and re-write a whole scene in Agent of Artifice but it ended up being a great scene).

For Book of Death I read all or parts of two non-fiction books, communicated through email with a Romanian who immigrated to America (she wrote one of the books I read), and lots of internet research (Romania, Vlad the Impaler, and more).  I also watched two documentaries on San Francisco in the late '60s.

However, for Rock Killer I did very little research.  But it was science fiction so I had to do no historical research like on the Adept Series books (the three listed above). I did a little internet research on space life-support systems but most everything else in the book either I knew from college courses or it was science fiction (I tried to make Rock Killer as scientifically accurate as I could).  I found someone who spoke Arabic and they gave me some background on culture and politics of the Middle East.

Then comes my latest almost-finished book, the last book in the Adept Series (unless I write another) called Gods of Strife.  I read zero books and everything was done on the internet.  I watched no movies or documentaries (unless Argo counts but I didn't learn anything from it).  I did travel to Seattle to walk through the Concorde at the Museum of Flight.

And here's the thing: Rock Killer, my least researched novel, is my best-reviewed book (sometimes I think the Adept Series is too unique for a lot of people).  So the amount of research I put into a book does not necessarily correlate at all to how good people think the book is.

Gods of Strife I think is a really good book (but I think all my books are really good) and it has almost no research.  I think I spent more time researching a Lamborghini Countach than anything else.  So how much research I put into a book doesn't seem to make it better or worse.

My thoughts on research are that you can't do too much unless you lived through what you're writing about. But what you can (and shouldn't do) is show off how much research you did by putting in some cool thing you learned that isn't germane to your narrative.

Not Just Different or Weird

Having a brain somewhat afflicted of ADD can be both a blessing and a curse.  Sometimes I'll find myself thinking about something off the wall and wonder how the heck that happened. Or I'll be humming a song I haven't heard or thought about in decades.  So I was wondering earlier today what made me think of the move, The Fifth Element .  Then I realized it was a text conversation I had a few days ago with my friend Sare (who has shut down her blog).  Since we live on different coasts (and she in Canada) we almost exclusively communicate by texting (iMessaging, to be exact, other wise each text would cost me $0.50) with the occasional email thrown in.  But there I go being ADD again.

So here's the conversation we had:

 That clip is here. So that got me thinking about The Fifth Element.  This movie is sorta so bad it's good.  The best part is (who I'd watch reading out of the telephone book) and Leeloo Dallas Multipass.  It's a guilty pleasure for me but I really wish the whole Chris Tucker part had been cut.  Not that it gives me nightmares, I just hate it.  It's incredibly annoying and just brings the movie to a screaming, thudding halt. Okay, so now I'm going to get to my point.  The Fifth Element was co-written and totally directed by who's this French guy who has directed some pretty good moves including La Femme Nikita and Leon: The Professional (with a very young Natalie Portman).  According to the Internet Movie Database he's produced 118 movies.  But among all his credits there's only one science fiction move: The Fifth Element. A lot of people in the entertainment industry seem to think that to make something "science fiction" you just set it in the future, throw in some technology, come up with a nice special effects budget, and bam, you've got science fiction. I'm going to get really obscure here.  In 1995 there was a "science fiction" TV movie called "White Dwarf."  Now all us astronomy geeks know that a white dwarf is a kind of very old star.  But that T.V. movie was the epitome of science fiction written by people who don't understand science fiction.  First of all, the science was just wrong on so many levels.  It was really more of a space fantasy.  And then they just threw in some weird things and called it "science fiction."  Near the beginning one character refers to something being the size of a "volleyball."  Okay, we're how far in the future and on an alien planet and we're talking about volleyballs?  Oh, and the movie had nothing to do with a white dwarf, star or otherwise. Man, this is getting long so I'll cut to the chase: science fiction is about exploring the human condition in conditions no human has seen.  You can't just have a neat setting and some high tech or weird things, you have to have a reason to have the story (which is generally true of all fiction from high literature to pulp science fiction).  So while I kind of enjoy The Fifth Element for its visuals, humor, Gary Oldman's quirky performance, and Milla Jovovich running around scantily clad, it's not good science fiction nor really a good movie. And I think that's sort of what George Lucas forgot in the Star Wars prequels (at least the first two). It's not the visuals, it's not the strange stuff, it's the humans, the people.

Movie Review: Oz the Great and Powerful

The other night I watched Oz the Great and Powerful on Blu-ray.  And I liked it.  I gave it three stars on Netflix and would have given 3.5 if that were an option.

I didn't realize until the opening credits that it was directed by Sam Raimi (although I was wondering that when I saw Bruce Campbell's name in the credits). I wonder if this is the first move Raimi has directed not to have the 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 in it.  I have liked the movies I've seen directed by Raimi, mostly the first Spider-Man movies (I have seen Army of Darkness, too).  And in Oz he gave us a film both visually beautiful and full of wonder, with plenty of humor thrown in.  The filmmakers used their CGI to great effect.  I often found myself thinking, "That's gotta be CGI but I believe what I'm seeing is real."  And for a lot of the movie I just stopped worrying what was CGI and what was real.  The hot air balloon in the tornado was an exception.  I thought "That's CGI and it looks fake, like the balloons in Spider-Man 2."

The opening scenes are in 1903 (if I remember right) Kansas and are done in black and white (almost sepia tone) and 4:3 aspect ratio.  When Oz (a nick name for Oscar Diggs) arrived in Oz (the place) the screen went wide (2.4:1? There were letterboxes on the top of bottom of my 16:9 television screen) and the scene melted into color.  It was artistically done and I backed up to watch it again to take it all in.  But while the film was visually stunning, somehow I was left feeling empty.  Oz's transformation from a con artist/magician to a man who could take on the two wicked witches didn't seem genuine.  You never saw the moment that changed him.  Just suddenly, he was a good guy.  All the actors did fairly good jobs in their roles and there were some unexpected twists. But some "twists" were predictable, too.

But, it's still a very good and very pretty movie and fun to watch.  Like I said: 3.5 stars.

Special Effects

I was reading an article in my print edition of Car and Driver about the making of a chase scene for the movie Fast and Furious 6 .  What struck me was the amount of computer generated images (CGI) that were being used in something as mundane as a car chase.  But the filmmakers were able to use CGI to enhance reality.  For example, the scene was set in London but was filmed in Liverpool.  To get the right look they used CGI to put in appropriate-looking buildings along the street.

Pretty much anything can be shown on a movie screen with CGI.  Probably the best CGI is when the audience says "That was CGI?"  Like the 6,000 Riders of Rohan in the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (a 10-year-old film, by the way).  Of course, if there's something on the screen that doesn't happen in real life, everyone will know it's CGI (like the trolls in the LOTR movies).

So here's the challenge for filmmakers: use CGI to enhance their story telling, not dominate it.  Remember Star Trek: The Motion Picture ?  Awful movie.  What happened was the director thought he was making a The Sound of Music in space and his beautiful special effects (which in the pre-CGI world probably cost a bunch of money) would hold the movie together like the lovely images and sounds of singing children in Salzburg.  At least that's my opinion.  And yes, they were both directed by the
So the lesson to take away is, yes, you have amazing special effects these days.  But you still need to tell a story that entertains.  And for writers, maybe you can write beautifully, but you still need to entertain your audience.  Either that or write poetry.  It's not the mechanics of writing (or filmmaking) that will hold an audience, it's the story, characters they can believe in and love, and a quest they want to see taken to the end.

Accidental Research

Last night I was reading Tom Clancy's latest over-thick book, Dead or Alive .  My mother gave it to me for Christmas either this year or last year.  I'm about 1/3 the way through.  Like most of Tom's tomes it deals with the CIA.  In the book they mention the CIA Memorial Wall in the headquarters at Langley and say that the stars are gold.

When I was writing Gods of Strife, my almost, just about completed, fourth book in the Adept Series, my hero, Peter Branton, visits CIA headquarters on his trail of an assassin.  He notices the memorial wall and its black stars and wonders what it is.  But as I was reading Dead or Alive the book says the stars are gold.  So I picked up my phone and Googled it.  I found this picture:
In that picture the stars look black to me (although they could be gold and inset in the marble so in shadow they look black).

And then last night I noticed the inscription above the stars which somehow I missed before.  That's a problem because here's the passage from Gods of Strife:

To the right was a display with multiple black stars and two flags: an American flag and what I presumed was the CIA flag.  I wondered what the whole display represented.

Well, with the inscription above the letters it's obvious what it is.

Guess it's time for more rewriting again.

This is why I emphasis that you can't do too much research.  Even if you lived it you might get some small detail wrong.  But what you can do (and shouldn't do) is show off how much research you did by putting in details that are germane to the story.  (Yes, Branton noticing the Memorial Wall has purpose in the story.)

Beta Number Two

Over the weekend I got back my second "beta" where someone read my work in progress (WIP) and made suggestions.  This person (another published author) had a very good comment about my violating a character's character.  And she was right.  So this involved some re-writing and revising and now the novel is an amazing 88,000 words long.  That makes it the third longest novel I've written after Hammer of Thor (about 129,000 words) and an as-of-yet unpublished novel (100,000 words).  And to be honest, Thor was two novels I mashed together.

She pointed out that something that made me realize I had an inconsistency in this novel with something that happened in Hammer of Thor.  So I had to fix that, too.

She also pointed out I tend to use passive voice more than is recommended for fiction writing but that it seems to be part of my distinct voice" (as she called it) and she usually didn't notice unless it was glaring.

So I'm finding this beta process useful.  She also found a couple of errors, said some encouraging things, and said overall she really liked it.  One more beta to go.  He told me Friday I need to nag him every few days.  I already did once so I'll wait until tomorrow to do it again.

Movie Reviews: Jack Reacher and Gangster Squad

Last night I watched Gangster Squad on Blu-ray.  On Tuesday I watched Jack Reacher (it's a two-movie week per my method of keeping Netflix from "throttling" me).

Both movies were crime dramas but they were vastly different films.

Jack Reacher is set in modern times.  It has twists and turns and is well made and well written (I understand it's based on a book).  It stars Tom Cruise who also produced.  The biggest problem I had was Tom Cruise being an amazing hand-to-hand fighter.  He's a small guy and doesn't come off as being that tough.  He suits his Mission Impossible role better (smart guy, tough enough when needed).  But in this film his character fights off five guys at one point.  I was starting to get a little unhappy with the plot as it was starting to look like "evil corporation" but instead it was evil guy doing his bad stuff through a corporation.  Yes, there's a difference. And Reacher's backstory as explained in the movie is a bit incredible. On Netflix I gave it three stars.  I would have given it 3.5 but there's no option for that.  I understand there's more books so there may be more movies.

(And I like Tom Cruise and have ever since Risky Business.  I don't know why people give him so much crap and say he's gay. I don't care if he's gay but I doubt he got all those beautiful women to marry him being gay.)

Despite its low Rotten Tomatoes score, I also got Gangster Squad.  Mostly because it looked fun (and I like Emma Stone).  And I love 1940s women's fashions and Stone looked amazing in this movie.  But the focus of the movie was action.  It's set in Los Angeles in 1949 when the chief of police had a cop set up a squad to go after a mobster.  Lots of gunfights, actions, explosions, a bit of gratuitous blood (it was rated R, Jack Reacher, the better movie, was rated PG-13).

The problem with Gangster Squad was some stilted dialogue, implausible events, and almost no character development.  It was like eye candy (or watching Emma Stone in that red dress), fun but not ultimately satisfying.  I gave it three starts on Netflix but I would have given it 2.5 but that's not an option.

At the beginning of Gangster Squad it says "Inspired by true events" and then according to the "goofs" section of the Internet Movie Database page on the movie, it pretty much got nothing right except the names and dates.  By that standard I could say Hammer of Thor is "inspired by true events" because World War II actually happened.

And I decided Ryan Gosling could play Michael Vaughan, the hero of Agent of Artifice , in the movie version.  If there ever is a movie version.

Movie Reveiws: Jack Reacher and Gangster Squad

Last night I watched Gangster Squad on Blu-ray.  On Tuesday I watched Jack Reacher (it's a two-movie week per my method of keeping Netflix from "throttling" me).

Both movies were crime dramas but they were vastly different films.

Jack Reacher is set in modern times.  It has twists and turns and is well made and well written (I understand it's based on a book).  It stars Tom Cruise who also produced.  The biggest problem I had was Tom Cruise being an amazing hand-to-hand fighter.  He's a small guy and doesn't come off as being that tough.  He suits his Mission Impossible role better (smart guy, tough enough when needed).  But in this film his character fights off five guys at one point.  I was starting to get a little unhappy with the plot as it was starting to look like "evil corporation" but instead it was evil guy doing his bad stuff through a corporation.  Yes, there's a difference. And Reacher's backstory as explained in the movie is a bit incredible. On Netflix I gave it three stars.  I would have given it 3.5 but there's no option for that.  I understand there's more books so there may be more movies.

(And I like Tom Cruise and have ever since Risky Business.  I don't know why people give him so much crap and say he's gay. I don't care if he's gay but I doubt he got all those beautiful women to marry him being gay.)

Despite its low Rotten Tomatoes score, I also got Gangster Squad.  Mostly because it looked fun (and I like Emma Stone).  And I love 1940s women's fashions and Stone looked amazing in this movie.  But the focus of the movie was action.  It's set in Los Angeles in 1949 when the chief of police had a cop set up a squad to go after a mobster.  Lots of gunfights, actions, explosions, a bit of gratuitous blood (it was rated R, Jack Reacher, the better movie, was rated PG-13).

The problem with Gangster Squad was some stilted dialogue, implausible events, and almost no character development.  It was like eye candy (or watching Emma Stone in that red dress), fun but not ultimately satisfying.  I gave it three starts on Netflix but I would have given it 2.5 but that's not an option.

At the beginning of Gangster Squad it says "Inspired by true events" and then according to the "goofs" section of the Internet Movie Database page on the movie, it pretty much got nothing right except the names and dates.  By that standard I could say Hammer of Thor is "inspired by true events" because World War II actually happened.

And I decided Ryan Gosling could play Michael Vaughan, the hero of Agent of Artifice , in the movie version.  If there ever is a movie version.

Radio Interview

Today at 7:30 P.M. EDT (4:30 P.M. PDT) I will be interviewed on Bab's Book Bistro on Blog Talk Radio.  I'm going to be talking about writing and my books and whatever else comes up.  So tune in and call in if you have a question.  It's going to be fun!