Jay Kristoff's Blog, page 23

Two Minutes Hate: Remakes

Dear Hollywood,

Why do you keep taking the properties I loved as a child and sodomizing remaking them for the Halo Fratboy crowd modern audiences? The first Conan did the job. It's a revenge story about a guy with pecs bigger than your average Norwegian, who hacks people to pieces with an enormous metal penis substitute. How will this tale be improved with shit-tonnes of cgi? What gold do you suspect remains unmined between Conan's muscular buttocks?

WTF is with this trailer? How many cigarettes did you make that voice over guy smoke before he laid down the track? I can HEAR the fucking cancer in the poor bastard's voice. And is this honestly the best snippet of dialogue your new pretty-boy Conan spouts in this film? "I live, I love, I slay"? Hell, the orginal Conan was no Shakespeare in the script dept, but at least Arnie had a funny accent.

If this film were to stand before Crom, he would laugh at it and cast it out of Valhalla.

STOP IT.

A Day in the Life

As far as being very busy goes, I can't really remember a point in my life where things were quite this frantic. I'm essentially working two jobs atm – one regular salary type deal to feed my nerd habits pay my mortgage, and one super-awesome, so-much-fun-it-doesn't-feel-like-work (but actually, it really is) second job that I do in the spare time I used to have.

An average day:

7.00am – Woken by alarm. Turn off alarm, go back to sleep.

7.15am – Get up, eat, watch half hour of whatever series I'm ploughing through this week (rewatching Spartacus atm), drive to work.

9.00am – Slave like zombie. Waste time Tweeting complete bollocks or blogging about shit no-one cares about because I can't think of anything better to write about this week.

1.00pm – Eat.

1.05pm – Grab laptop and spare meeting room. Write/edit novel for 55 minutes.

2.00pm – Brrrrrrains.

5.00pm – Drive home.

6.00pm – Walk dog. (I'm one of those people who refuses to pick up my animal's fecal matter from the bushes he leaves it in. If you think this makes me a bad person,  hatemail and computer viruses can be sent to misterkristoff-AT-gmail.com.)

7.00pm – Eat. Watch 1 hour of couple-friendly TV series with wife-unit (The Walking Dead atm – yes, we are an odd couple)

8.30pm – Write.

11.30pm – Read.

12 or 1am - Sleep.

Repeat. Every day for the foreseeable future.

Thing is, it doesn't feel like work (well, nothing except the wageslave gig). It feels grand. It feels like I'm doing one of the coolest things I will ever do in my entire life. But it does take up a metric fuck-tonne of my time. So if I don't return your emails super-quick, or forget to call you back, apologies in advance.

I still wuv youuuuuu!

State of the World Address

A few things are happening on the trilogy front, so I thought I'd update y'all with the skinny.

1) My trilogy sold to French publishers Bragelonne (who amongst other SF/F luminaries,  publish NYT #1 bestseller [huge grats] Pat Rothfuss). Bragelonne offered on books 2 & 3 sight unseen, which makes me feel pretty good about book #1. So yeah, I'll officially be published in a non-English speaking country. It'll be interesting translating my psuedo Jap-lish into French (I only know how to swear in French).

2) My editor's notes have come back on STORMDANCER, and I'm plunging back into the breach this weekend. The vast majority of suggestions were of the "GIVE US MOARR" variety – more detail, more world-building. I chopped a bunch of detail out of the ms in order to get to a certain pivotal point in the narrative by page 50 (mainly for the benefits of literary agents, who often request the first 50) and it feels nice to be told "leave nothing on the editing room floor". So yeah, really looking forward to getting back into this sandbox I've made and building a few more castles

3) Book 2 is naturally on hold until STORMDANCER is complete, but I'm sitting about 80k and almost at the end of Act 2. It's feeling really good, but it'll be helpful to spend a month off from it, finish STORMDANCER and then come back with fresh eyes. My beautiful bride, as always, is serving as Beta-in-Chief and Culler of All Things Lamesauce.

4) Still trying to think of a series title. It's hard. Harder than resisting the urge to finish this post with a witticism about other hard things…

…Jesus, mind out of the gutter, peoples.

Of Outlines and Merkins

A couple of people have been asking me about "the writing process" lately – the mechanics of actually sitting down and writing a book. Let me clarify something: If I was teaching a writing class, you probably wouldn't want to attend it. Seriously, I'd just stand up the front looking confused, then start talking about how "Spartacus: Blood and Sand" is actually a brilliantly written and conceived series, once you get past all the merkins and blood-porn.

I'm probably the last person you should ask for advice about how to write. However, I'll give out one nugget of wisdom, which may only be true for me, and it is this:

Novel outlines are sunless alleys where great stories are dragged and quietly strangled.

Yes, I realise this is tantamount to heresy in some circles. I know of authors who write 30 page novel outlines, with each chapter planned out in meticulous detail. And this obviously works for them. I'm not knocking it, it's just not for me.

I don't write an outline in anything but the roughest, most bare-bones sense (usually four of five chapters in advance, and only towards the middle of the book). My problem with outlines is that they tend to take the spontaneity out of the writing process. It's lovely to never have to sit down in front of a blank page and ask "So what happens now?" But the best twists and turns I've thought of in my books literally sprang into my head as I was writing the scene. ( Either that, or just bouncing ideas off my lovely bride). They are not planned. They are tiny, joyous little surprises, like finding that rumpled fifty in the back pocket of an old pair of jeans.

This is where I get my biggest writing kicks  – the moments where I surprise myself. And the problem with writing a novel outline, especially the kind that are minutely detailed, is that you don't leave any room for that spontaneity – those "OMG, wouldn't it be cool if…" moments.

(Besides which, if halfway through your book, you think of an awesome twist that totally changes the direction of the plot, all the effort you put into your meticulous plan has to be scrapped, because your book is headed in a direction you never anticipated.)

The best (and worst) moments in life are the ones you probably didn't expect. If a turn in your novel surprises you, you can be damn sure it will surprise your readers too. And nobody is getting surprised if they have every inch of the journey planned out in some spiffy piece of writing software, color-coded and quantified like some Rimmer-eque revision chart.

You don't need a map to go exploring. You just need a rough idea of where you want to end up, and a willingness to take wrong turns get hopelessly lost. But hopefully along the way, you'll also find yourself in amazing places you never would have discovered if you set out with a shiny compass and a crisp set of directions and an exact idea of what your destination will be. And hopefully you'll have some fun in there too.

Anyway, it works for me. But again, merkins and blood porn, so yeah…

Grain of salt, peoples. Grain of salt.

Bill Hicks: Another Dead Hero

17 years ago last Saturday, we lost a man who I believe was one of the few true heroes of this age. It wasn't that he was funny (he was), and it wasn't because he pointed his finger at society and showed us what was truly important, or how ridiculous most of our lives truly are (he did). It was that he did both at the same time, with his finger raised high in the air at corporate power dons and a conservative establishment that tried to censor and mute him constantly.

Comedians like Dane Cook make me sad. Not because he riffs about puerile shit like a five-year-old off his Ritalin. It's because he's so extraordinarily popular. It staggers me that he's held up as some kind of comedy icon, while a guy like Bill Hick suffered in obscurity for most of his tragically short life. It's even worse when you consider that Bill has been dead for nearly 20 years and the stuff he talked about is still 100% relevant today. You think the same can be said of Mr Cook and his ilk?

Bill Hicks was a visionary, and a poet, and purveyor of hard truths. And I think about the fact that we don't have him anymore, now when we so desperately need him, and it makes me want to cry. So I leave you with his closing words from the Revelations tour, in case you were ever wondering: What is the point to life?

Two Minutes Hate: Dropcrotch jeans

Dear Jeans Manufacturers,

What the is the deal with "drop-crotch" jeans?  What appeal can be found in having a foot-deep crotch and legs thinner than the plot of a Michael Bay movie? Just because my gusset is big enough to park a smegging Volvo inside, doesn't mean a member of the fairer sex will be fooled into taking a peek. I tried that shit on my wife and it doesn't work.

Are you trying to come up with a fashion trend more ridiculous than one-piece bellbottom jumpsuits? Or is it that you just enjoy making me look like a deadshit when I try to run?

STOP IT.

The end is (still) nigh

So stories about the end of the days have been hip since Orson Wells was a drunken fumble in the back of his father's jalopy (or whatever the hell you fumbled your lady in the back seat of back in 1915), but never, it seems, so much as now.

Whether you're talking the staggering (har, har) Rise of the Zombie in popular fictions/videogames/film/television, the annual big-budget shitty disaster film, the increasing popularity of dystopian themes in literary circles or even (enormously popular) YA literature, everyone seems to enjoy savoring the notion of "the end of the world".

Or, more accurately, the end of humanity. Because let's face it folks, the world is going to get on just fine without us.

So why do we seem ever more in love with the notion of mass extinction and the collapse of this construct we've named society? Why has the ending of it remained a constant in our entertainment over the past thirty years and beyond? Since the setting of my book (STORMDANCER, out in spring 2012 through Thomas Dunne & Tor Uk plugplugplug) could be accurately described as dystopian, I've been having a think about the possibilities. Here's my thoughts, for what they're worth:

Everybody wants to be a hero. In the world we live, most people aren't in love with their lives. They work jobs they hate to pay the credit card bills they racked up buying shit they don't need. If they're lucky, they enjoy fifteen minutes of fame in a world that consumes flavors of the month in moments. You're never going to be a rock god or a movie star. You're never going to beat the bad guy and get the pretty girl. Why? Because you're ordinary, son.

But in dystopia, the ordinary folks are the heroes. In a zombie apocalypse, the only pre-requisite to play the part of "hero" is to be standing among the ranks of the "not yet eaten". Post nuclear war? Still alive? Hot damn kiddo, welcome to the role of protagonist. Doesn't matter if you were an accountant in your former life. Doesn't matter if you've never kissed a pretty boy before, because there's one standing right there, and you're the only girl with a pulse or an aversion to eating human flesh for miles around. You are SO IN.

The Culture of Fear. Threat is a great motivator – advertisers have known that for decades. You sell screen doors? You just need to convince the world there's a bad guy outside who wants in. You sell life insurance? You just need to convince people they're gonna die. A culture of a fear is a culture of consumption – consuming to both alleviate the fear through goods and services to protect/deflect, and to numb/escape the fears that can't actually be deal with in any real sense.

But I genuinely believe that enough of that threat has soaked into the zeitgeist that it needs to manifest in ways that we can deal with it mentally, albeit indirectly. We see the mainstream media whipped into a frenzy over SARS, AIDS, anthrax attacks. So we create dystopias born of viruses to help us push the real fear into the realm of "make-believe". We have melting polar caps, rising global temperatures, flood and drought. So we make the big budget disasterpieces where Mother Nature herself turns against us. We have fear of gods, fear of war, fear of outsiders, fear of each other. And we turn that fear into entertainment, either as a means to actually deal with it, or to marginalize it, or to laugh at it. I have no idea which. Maybe all three.

Fear as a Drug. Let's face it – people like being scared (if we didn't, Stephen King would be a squintillionaire). We like to imagine "what would it be like?" We like to feel our pulses race and our breath come faster. We like to be horrified. As a culture, we're in love with that endorphin rush, that moment of adrenaline kicking in, coupled with that overarching knowledge that it's "not real", that it's all "pretend".

It's all pretend, right?

Pessimism. This is where I come in. I think a lot of the people in western society can sense there's something deeply wrong with the world we've crafted for ourselves. While polar ice caps are melting, people spend vast amounts of time an energy arguing (and even killing each other) over what flavor of flying spaghetti monster they believe in, or the gender of the consenting adult they would like to get busy with. 90% of our wealth is controlled by 10% of our population. Somewhere between 30 – 150 species are rendered extinct every day as a result of human activity. A soup of plastic particles the size of the continental United States is floating in the northern pacific Gyre. One and a half acres of rainforest are chopped down every second. And deep down, all of us feel it in our bones.

There is something wrong with this picture.

In dystopia, the bad guys get what they deserve. It's up to the common man/woman/child to find the new way, to forge the new path, setting aside the crimes of the past to make a better tomorrow. All the wealth and power of the neo-aristos means nothing in the face of zombie-geddon or virulent plague or neutron holocaust. Armageddon is the great equalizer – the eraser that wipes the slate clean and gives regular "good' people that chance to build something better.

And finally Optimism. because in the realm of fantasy, it's a rare story indeed that doesn't end with the good guys winning. Sure the planet might be FUBAR'ed, and society in ruins, but there are still honest everymen/women left behind to build something out of the ashes. In almost every dystopian setting I've ever seen, humanity survives. In the bleakest scenarios being proposed by modern-day scientists (not fiction writers, mind), humanity doesn't, and old Mother Earth is left with a dirty slate in which to craft the ascendancy of her next favored species.

And that's an epilogue most of us can't bear to imagine, so we fool ourselves by writing our own.

Feeling better?!

Tunes

The inimitable Ms Lindsay Ribar has demanded "a blog post on music and how it makes writers write better. Because it is true facts". Far be it from me to deny the lass who plucked me from slush hell. I march like a robot zombie to obey her commands. Robot zombies are twice as cool, ok?

A note before we begin: Music is one of my top 5 reasons for living. I don't go a day without listening to the bands I love. I sort my CDs alphabetically and chronologically on my shelves (ie, oldest album left, newest album on the right – yes, I know, I know…), and take more pride in them than my books. I'm a married man on the rough side of 30, and I still sleep out for concert tickets and call in sick to work so I can get good spots in line the day of the gig. If you don't listen to music, I do not understand you. You are "an other". If you like the same kind of music I do, chances are I can ignore pretty much ignore all of your other personality defects, including the fact that you cooked and ate your own mum (if you like the same kind of music I do, chances are good that you actually did this).

But how does listening to tunes make you a better writer (because I firmly believe it does) ?

I've been thinking about this a lot for the last week, and I've come up with the following thoughts, for whatever they're worth:

Brevity = Power: Novelists are lucky in some respects. We get 90, 000+ words to weave our stories and show off our chops. Lyricists have to bring arenas to their feet with maybe 100 – 150 words, total. Song lyrics show us the power of brevity; how a single phrase, or even a single word in the right context and place can say more than an entire novel ever could. How a notion as complex as love, or hatred or lust can be summarised with a handful of syllables. Unless you're the kind to write 2,500 word sentences about a cup of chamomile tea, I've been told quicker and simpler is usually better when it comes to writing.

Consider, if you will:

"I do formally and wholeheartedly refuse to comply with your command, good sir, and would furthermore like to give insult of the most profound sort, which I, being a gentleman, am naturally loathe to utter aloud."

vs

"Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."

Rhythm and structure: To riff off the mighty Bruce "Boards don't hit back" Lee, good writing is like water. It can flow, or creep, or drip, or crash. Understanding concepts like rhythm - not only in a musical, but also a lyrical sense - helps you build mood simply through the pacing and structures of your words, let alone the actual words themselves.

This notion of "flow" might not be something you don't consciously think about (I certainly don't). But I know how sentences and paragraphs feel when I read them, what kind of structures illicit certain responses. How short. And sharp. Means threat. How a really long sentence with no punctuation can help to evoke a sense of pace or need because you don't give your reader time to think or reflect or even breathe because our minds read words the way we'd speak them aloud. How inserting a comma (pause) can change the tone of a sentence. How repetition can re-enforce a point,  how repetition can re-enforce a point and how repetition can re-enforce a point. Oh, snap.

Emotional content: Riffing on Bruce Lee hard today, it seems. Good lyrics are essentially poetry. Good lyrics can be steeped in metaphor and simile, or can be straight up reportage, but they can speak volumes about concepts like "love" or "loss' without ever actually using those words at all. (I'm talking about good lyrics here, not Beibershite). Understanding how good lyrics do this is a good step towards being able to do it yourself.

The most profound imagery I've read is in song lyrics. To put it another way, how many lines from books can you quote that make the hairs on your arms stand on end? Now how many lyrics can you quote that do the same? And yes, this is partially due to the fact that you listen to your favourite songs all the time, and read your favourite book maybe twice/three times in your life. But there goes that "power of repetition" thing I was talking about in point 2.

Rules?: The best music is always the music that takes an existing paradigm and kicks it in the teeth. If the constant evolution of music (and again, I'm not talking about pop here) teaches us one thing, it's that there are very few rules worth complying with. That the people who do something truly beyond the norm, with a little bit of luck and talent, are the people who do something truly special. Good musicians make you look at the world differently, whether it's a different way of playing (drop-A tuning, or 22/7 timing, or whatever) or just a different take on the notion of the construct itself. Time was when everyone thought a rock band was a singer, drummer, guitarist and bass player. And then you get bands like the Dresden Dolls or the Decemberists who just flip that notion the bird.

Take a notion like "the good guys always win" or "the hero always gets the girl/guy/tentacle beast" or "my protagonist must, under no circumstances, be a fucking twat that my readers will want to stab" and flip it off. You'll wind up with something a damn sight more interesting than you probably would have. Sure, it might not be good, but it'll be something different at least. "Good" is where talent and hard work and a whole lot of luck come in. But "different" is a damn good start.

Broader horizons: Good music can challenge your world view, make you think about  stuff outside your microcosm. Whether it's an alternate take on drugs, sexuality, or relationships, or shooting you a strange word like "intifada" or "Zapatista" (which you then wiki and holy shit, you learned something), good music, like a good film or book, challenges you. And afterwards, the world always looks a little bit different than the moment before you heard it.

Thinking different. Learning stuff. I hear they're good for you as a person, whether you're a writer or not.

The subliminal: There's something visceral here. It's a truth that's hard to define. It lives somewhere in that place between the PA system and the crowd, in that split second between the end of the intro music and the first chord. It's primal, and it's unspoken and it's something that lives inside everyone, even if some people refuse to listen to it.

Music transcends the limitations of language, overcomes the artificial barriers that humans have constructed to keep ourselves apart from one another. There's something in the language of the music we love that lets us know we're alive, conscious of the breath in our lungs and the blood in our veins. An understanding.

Writers are communicators. We tell stories, we send messages to our readers for them to absorb and understand and take away what they will. Consider that, and then consider the first messages ever sent from one human being to another was probably on the drums.

Then turn that shit up loud.

"And everything owes its existence,

Solely and completely to sound.

Sound is a factor which holds us together.

Sound is the basis of form and shape.

Put that into the modern idiom, and say;

Into the great voids of space came a sound,

and matter took shape."