S. Evan Townsend's Blog, page 128

I Don't Do Horror

My friend, Sare, often does this "Sunday Stealing" meme on her blog.  I don't because often the questions are too personal.  One this week was about horror movies and I thought, no, I don't do horror.

It's not that I mind gore or frights ( Aliens is one of my favorite movies, for instance and I had no problem with Saving Private Ryan , probably the goriest movie I've ever seen).  What I hate is the anticipation that something awful is going to happen.  This is what I cannot stand.  I call it the "Lassie syndrome."

You see, "Lassie" was a television show that was on when I was a kid (I always envision it in black and white so it must have been before we got a color TV in 1967).  The basic plot of every Lassie episode was (it seemed) Timmy and Lassie go out to play (happy music), heavy foreshadowing of something bad happening (scary music), something bad happens to Timmy (falls down a well).  Lassie runs back to Timmy's ranger father and barks a lot, and the father figures out that Timmy is in trouble and goes saves him.  But the problem cam from the foreshadowing of something bad.  When I watch a movie (or in life) anticipating something bad going to happen is to me is worse than it happening.  And horror movies always build up this anticipation so that they can scare the bejeesus out of you.

For instance, in the movie Walk the Line (about Johnny Cash), at the beginning his older brother is sawing wood with a huge circular saw and you just know that something bad is going to happen.  And I hated it.  I nearly turned off the movie at that point.  But I didn't.

So that's why I don't do horror.

RadCon After Action Report

So, I spent Friday and Saturday at RadCon science fiction and fantasy convention in Pasco, Washington.  I've never been to one before and this was pretty close to what I expected.  There were a lot of people in costume and some cosplay cuties but there were also just normal folk (and some women who desperately needed to wear more).  There was a lot of people wearing furry tails.  I asked one the significance (he was also wearing an Umbrella Corporation T-shirt) and he said the tail was just because it was cool.

I found it funny when the "Code of Conduct" started with "Don't be a pinhead" and then stated, "RadCon recommends that everyone follow the 3-2-1 rule. Everyday, aim to get three hours of sleep, 2 solid meals and 1 shower."

I also saw the biggest dog I've ever seen (an Irish Wolfhound that was probably almost four feet at the shoulders).  My childhood fear of large dogs was barely held in check.

I did a reading and was disappointed that only one person I didn't know (and my wife had recruited her) showed up.  That was Friday.  Saturday I was on three panels.  Now I assumed the people doing the panels were like me, a "Pro" (a writer who convinced the con organizers that he was worth letting in free and being on panels).  So I show up for my second panel about asteroid mining (since I wrote the book) and the two other panelists are scientists who actually know what the heck they are talking about (so glad I studied for that panel).  I think I may have had a deer-in-the-headlights look on my face.  But I think I held my own.

Then I go to my next panel on mixing genres.  Thought the other three panelists would be writers like me.  Well, one didn't show up, but the other two were best-selling fantasy author Tanya Huff and best-selling science fiction writer John Dalmas.  Talk about deer in the headlights!  Again, I think I held my own and Ms. Huff was very gracious to me and allowed me to promote and talk about my books.

I also handed out maybe a hundred bookmarks with my website on them.

All in all it was an amazing experience and I'm going back next year!  Ms. Huff said this is one of the biggest "cons" she goes to.  Also seems to be the easiest one locally to con into letting you be a pro.

Sunday Six: Constant Acceleration

Today's Sunday Six comes from Chapter Seven of Rock Killer :

The Kyushu was an old ship.  It was roughly bullet shaped, a hundred meters in diameter and 200 meters long.  About seven years before, she'd been one of the first ships with the constant acceleration drives.  The power source was a tokamak fusion reactor, cooled by vaporizing lithium.  The lithium plasma was used by an MHD generator to produce electricity that the Masuka drives turned into thrust.  Before the diminutive Dr. Masuka invented his drive, ships had to get around the solar system via painfully slow Hohmann "low energy" orbits.

Things That Would Make Life Easier

(This is my 100th post on this blog!)

My friend Sare occasionally does "Thursday Thirteen" on her blog.  So I thought I'd do "Thirteen things that would make life easier and better" in no particular order (or the order I think of them).

1) When I'm using the stopwatch on my iPhone, I don't want it to autolock after three minutes because often I'm timing things that last longer than three minutes.

2) There ought to be a way to wirelessly recharge your cell phone automatically. You walk into your house and even though the phone is still in your pocket, it recharges. Radio waves are energy so this energy could be used. I think Tesla had something like that for transmitting electricity. Of course you'd want to have it so it only recharged the phones in the house, not some random visitor (or a guy sitting at the curb in his car). So it could be secure like WiFi.

3) All cars should have solar panels on the roof to run a fan/cooling device so when you get in the car in the summer it's not a million degrees inside.  A thermostat can make sure this doesn't happen when temps are below, say 45 degrees F. (Although my old Camaro heats up even in cool weather if the sun is shining.)

4) Police cars engaged in speed/traffic enforcement should all be that ugly green color some fire departments paint their trucks.  Oh, and have a big flag on the top with a flashing light at the end.

5) All speed limits should be about 10 mph faster than they are now, except residential streets and school zones and maybe that road in Texas that's now at 80 mph.

6) DVRs should have a "catch up" feature where they play back the program at about 1.25 times normal speed, with sound, so you can catch up to live TV.  This would be helpful if you come in late to a sporting event.

7) Movie theaters should offer a "trailer-less" showing at least once a day.  Charge an extra buck for it.  (Last movie I went to they had 20 minutes of trailers and ads!)

8) Movie theaters should charge more for opening nights of big films.  This would reduce the number of people who want to see it on opening night and mean you don't have to wait in line for two hours to see a two hour movie.  (That two hour wait in is a cost the buyer pays but the seller doesn't recover.  It is an inefficiency in the economy.)

9) Amusement Parks should sell "Golden" passes that allow you to take a shorter line for the popular rides.  They can charge more for this than regular admission.  Some people would pay for this (I probably would).  (Disney's free "Fast Pass" system is pretty good, maybe they could sell a "Always Fast Pass" admission.)

10) Restaurants that are popular yet don't take reservations (like many casual dining restaurants) should institute a policy that if the waiting time is more than 10 minutes, customers have to pay $1 per minute of wait time.  This would increase the costs of waiting, perhaps making some people go somewhere else and thus reducing wait times ( doubt many people would shell out $40 to eat at Outback).  It would also make a little money for the restaurant (see #8).

11) Airlines should auction off empty first-class seats to coach customers.  They could set the minimum bid at the extra cost of serving a first-class customer.  An empty first-class seat is revenue lost and selling it for even $20 (on top of the price of a coach ticket) might be better than having it empty.  (Do you notice most of these are economic?)

12) We desperately need diet and exercise in a pill.  The wealth the inventor would earn would make Bill Gates look poor.

13) Speaking of pills, why can't our pills come in liquid form, so they are easily swallowed.  Might takes awful, but you could at least get them down without them dissolving on your tongue (and tasking awful in the process).

UPDATE: And 14) because I just thought of this: take a picture with your cell phone's camera of a written down or printed number (like on a business card) and then be able dial it, put it in contacts, etc. And addresses, be able to put in contacts or map/get directions to.

UPDATE2: And emails on #14!

Writing Lessons: Word Repetition

A while back we talked about using "power words and phrases" and adding adverbs and adjectives to nouns in order to paint a picture and/or to punch up your writing.

Today we're going to talk about a common mistake beginning writers often make: word repetition. 

Read the following not very interesting passage that I just made up:
 Tom got on his horse and rode the horse out of the town toward the sunset.  The horse was a strong horse and would take Tom to his next adventure in the next town where his horse would remain his faithful horse.
At this point you should be throwing things at the computer screen that passage is so poorly written.  So what's wrong with it (other than it's just dumb)?  Well, the word "horse" appears six times in forty-two words.  That's 14.2% of the words are "horse."  (Admittedly, I wrote that passage trying to put in references to the horse as often as I could.)

What you want to avoid is "word repetition" in your writing.  And that's where having a good vocabulary comes in.  So let's rewrite that passage and see if we can avoid word repetition as much as possible:

Tom got on his horse and rode the animal out of the town toward the sunset.  The horse was a strong beast and would take Tom to his next adventure in the next settlement where his pinto would remain his faithful steed.
Okay, we're down to two uses of "horse" and, in my opinion, both of them are needed.  The first one, you could say "Tom got on his pinto/steed/equine" (as long as the word referred to "horse") but I believe start from the simple "horse" and move to the more complex "steed".   But try to never have the same noun in one sentence.  (You could say "Tom got on his animal" if you were writing science fiction or fantasy and the animal was something other than a horse and you were stringing your reader along before revealing that Tom was indeed riding a thoat.)

Also, the second use of "horse" is the second sentence could be changed, perhaps to "mount" giving us only one use of the word "horse."

And, notice that "pinto" gives us more information about the horse.  Avoiding word repetition is a good chance to supply your reader with more detail.  And of course once you call it a "pinto" you can't later call it a "mustang."

One of the hardest scenes to write was in my novel (unpublished) Rock Killer where there was a shoot-out between the heroin and the bad guys at the same time a house was burning.  So I had the burning fire and guns firing.  It was a challenge.  I loved writing that scene.

Use your thesaurus (the one that comes with Word is fairly good) and your vocabulary to avoid word repetition.

Movie Review: Hit and Run

I rented Hit and Run from Netflix (is it really "renting" when it's from Netflix?) despite it's low Rotten Tomatoes score because, well, it had a Corvette in it.  (I thought it was a Z06 but it was a Grand Sport.)  It also had a very cool Caddilac CTS-V stationwagon.

And had I realized that one of the stars was also the writer, director, and editor, I might have backed off.  But I didn't discover that until the end credits rolled.

Hit and Run was sometimes funny, occasionally had a cool car chase, but overall was just too dumb to be believed.  The main romantic relationship was completely unbelievable.  The girl was a hyper-politically correct liberal with a doctorate in "non-violent conflict resolution" and drove a Prius.  The guy was a criminal in the witness protection program who had a 700 horsepower 1967 Lincoln Continental (Apparently the actor owns the car in real life) that was very cool (except for the really big wheels and low low profile tires)(when will this stupid fad for obnoxiously big wheels end?).  Tom Arnold (who I like for some reason) plays a bumbling federal marshal (is there such a thing?).  The only believable character was the villain who liked dogs (and drove the CTS-V).

If the movie had concentrated on car chases with these amazing vehicles it probably would have been better.  But instead it had to go for cheap laughs (twice people walk in on an old and fat people orgy) and try to have character development the actor/writer just couldn't handle.  And there is far far too much discussion about a guy getting raped in jail.  So, it's kinda fun, but I don't think the fun is worth the bad parts.

RadCon Schedule

This weekend is RadCon science fiction and fantasy convention in Tri-Cities, Washington.  It will be at the Red Lion Inn by the Pasco Airport (across the street from the community college).  I am a "visiting professional" and will be doing a reading and appearing on three panels, including one about asteroid mining (viz, Rock Killer ).

Here is my schedule of events:

Friday the 15th, 4:30 P.M. to 5:00 P.M., Small Press room: I'll be reading from my urban fantasy, Adept Series novels  Hammer of Thor and Book of Death .  I'll also be handing out swag.

Saturday the 16th: 1:00 P.M. to 2:00 P.M., Small Press room: "Working with a Small Press Publisher" panel.

Also Saturday: 2:00 P.M. to 3:00 P.M., Sage room: "What can we do with an asteroid?" panel.

And finally Saturday: 4:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M., Room 2205, "Mixing Genres" panel.

I hope to see you there.  Come up and say "Hi!"

Sunday Six: The Towel

Today's Sunday Six from Chapter Six of Rock Killer :

"Anxious about going back into space?" she asked, sitting at the small breakfast table in a sunny atrium just off the kitchen. 
Her towel almost fell off but she caught it and adjusted its tension.
He shrugged. "I guess." He dried his hands on a dishtowel and joined her at the table.   She’s damn sexy like this, he thought.

Another Earth Right Next Door

New research based on data from the Kepler space telescope's observations indicates that an Earth-like planet maybe right on our doorstep . . . astronomically speaking.

Keep in mind, the galaxy is huge.  It's 100,000 light years across.  And a light year is 5,878,499,814,276 miles.  So that's . . . a very big number.  Just call it 5.88 x 10^17 miles across the galaxy.  That's absolutely unfathomably huge.

So when scientist say an Earth-like planet could as close as 13 light years away, that's, well, right on our doorstep.  Only problem is getting there.  If you could (you can't) go the speed of light, it'd take 13 years to get there.  If you could fly a 737 there (you can't), it would take about 17.5 million years.  That's a long time in a coach seat.  If you could build a spaceship capable of going a million miles per hour it would take about 8,700 years.

Still, 13 light years away is, on the scale of the galaxy, right next door.

Research

Learn how doing research (and finding out I was wrong) improved my novel Book of Death at the Ask David blog.  And while you're there, leave your own review!