A. Lee Martinez's Blog, page 40

Endings and Beginnings

As you have no doubt detected from the melancholy tendency of my latest blog posts, I’ve been going through some personal stuff.  Nothing terrible or tragic, thank The Mighty Robot King, but irksome, nonetheless.  One of those things is something I feel comfortable talking about now.

Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest will be my last novel with Orbit Books.  I’m parting ways with my current publisher.  That’s not so troubling.  I’ve ended relationships with a publisher before (Tor), and just as in that case, I harbor no ill will toward Orbit.  It’s just a question of whether they thought my next book worth publishing, and they made a judgment call.  It wasn’t honestly all that surprising, but still, disappointing.  Orbit was a fine publisher (as was Tor before), and I wish the company well with all their future endeavors.

Right now, I’m between publishers, though there are promising developments on the horizon.  I’m cautiously optimistic, and things are looking up.  I’m currently working on a new project, and, yes, it’s my first trilogy.  I’ve tried this standalone thing, and I know it’s made me a stronger writer.  But it hasn’t been all that great for my career.  People like series.  A writer has to be realistic.  I don’t plan on doing an open-ended series.  This will be a trilogy.  Not an endless series of adventures in an ongoing universe.  It won’t be based on anything I’ve previously written.  And that’s about all I can say about it at this point.

I know this trilogy will be good, and I’m looking forward to it.  I’ve been stuck for a long time as a writer, and while I’d like to believe this will be the thing that takes me to the next level, I really have no way of knowing.  There’s no way of gauging the audience.  You put stuff out there, and you hope for the best.

That’s why series are so popular among publishers and filmmakers.  It’s impossible to know what people will like, but if you start with something people already like, you’ve got something somewhat reliable.  The new Amazing Spider-Man movie might be great.  It might stink.  It doesn’t matter.  People will see it, and from a business perspective, it’s only sensible to make it.  Hell, it even makes sense from an artistic perspective.  As a writer, I’ve been discouraged at how much great stuff (as I see it) I’ve written and how little notice it gets outside of a handful of people.  That’s not about ego.  If I could find one guy who paid me a million dollars a book, I wouldn’t give a damn if anybody else ever read them.  Outside of that possibility, I have to play the numbers game.  I need to expand my audience, and series are a good way of doing that.  Seems like the only way at times.

Lest you think I’m just doing this because I feel I HAVE to, I want to be clear that this was my idea.  It’s not much different than what I’ve always sought to do in my career.  Something different.  I’ve written enough standalone novels (and if you haven’t read them all yet, you really should because they’re all awesome) that writing a trilogy is actually a nice change of pace.  It’s a challenge, and that’s invigorating.  Will I end up loving at as much as standalone novels?  Who can say?

But it’s something to try.  We’ll see if it finally vaults me to heights of novelology superstardom or merely gives me a nudge in the right direction.

The future is waiting, Action Force.

I’ll meet you there.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

Easy Road to Conflict

I try very hard not to be the guy telling anyone they’re doing it wrong.  Who am I to determine what works and what doesn’t?  I’m just one writer, and not a very successful one at that.  I get by, and I’ve written enough that I feel comfortable sharing my opinions on writing.  But it’s all just so much random chatter in the end.  Nobody knows what works, and if they tell you they do, they’re lying to you and probably themselves as well.  Nevertheless, I’ve grown sick by the number of people, artists and audience, who simply lack the imagination to write interesting stories that defy expectations.

Lack of imagination is exactly the problem.

Storytelling is an art, and all too often, it’s easy to stick with what works.  Sometimes, it’s because a writer doesn’t care enough to try anything differently.  More often, it’s a byproduct of an accepted “truth” about the nature of storytelling.  In any case, it’s always comes down to the idea that certain characters and situations are “boring” and the only way they work is by having artificial melodrama thrust upon them.  Yes, I get it.  Most stories thrive on conflict, and a lot of situations make conflict more difficult.  I’m not expecting every writer to have the ability to tell a story that breaks the rules, but I do expect some writers to try every so often.

Perhaps the most common pet peeve I have at this point is that having a couple in any kind of stable relationship is a drama killer.  It doesn’t seem to matter if the couple is married or dating, if characters are in a relationship of any sort in a story, you can expect it will be in trouble.  And if it isn’t in trouble, then you can expect one of them to be kidnapped or endangered to motivate the other.  But a pair of adults in any kind of ongoing relationship is always going to demand too much of most writers, who have been trained to see it as an opportunity for conflict.

When I wrote Divine Misfortune (my seventh book.  Yes, I write books, and you should read them because they’re good), I deliberately featured a married couple among the protagonists.  Their marriage isn’t in trouble, and I very much wanted them to be in a solid relationship.  Even as their world is getting screwed up by the gods they’ve become entwined with, they never turn on each other.  They always rely on each other.  At the end, one attempts to make a sacrifice for the other, but in the end, it’s shown to be a silly, needless gesture.  Their marriage isn’t a source of drama.  It’s important to the plot, but it isn’t there to create problems.  Far from it.  Yes, it’s harder to write that kind of relationship.  That was kind of the point.

Yet over and over again, we’re reminded that people in stable relationships are boring, but I say a good couple isn’t boring.  A bad writer is bad at making happy people interesting.

It doesn’t stop there.  We live in a world where unambiguous heroes are considered dull and unrealistic.  Even Superman, an empowerment fantasy about being able to save the world, has devolved into a mopey guy who lets his father die and watches half of Metropolis crumble.  Sure, he saves the day, but he makes sure to remind you he feels bad about it too.  And he can’t do so without killing a guy because if there’s anything that would make Superman more interesting, it’s a disregard for life.

(Don’t tell me he feels bad about killing a guy either.  He’s perfectly content to kiss Lois Lane atop a thousand buried corpses a few minutes later.)

I’m not against ambiguity, and a lot of great stories are built on crumbling relationships.  I enjoy many a conflicted hero, and I know that not every character can be happily married (nor should they be).  But I can’t help but feel that so there is a genuine lack of imagination when we so often resort to artificial conflict.  Life is complicated, and if one part of it is working out all right, that doesn’t mean the whole thing is without drama.

I liked Spider-Man as a married man, even when I wasn’t married, because I didn’t give a damn about watching Spider-Man in the singles scene.  There was something unique about a working class superhero with working class problems, who still had a caring wife to go home to.  Yes, she was a supermodel, and it was a bit weird as a story conceit, but these are stories about a guy who was bitten by a radioactive spider and gained super strength.  So I was on board.

The same is often said of Mr. Fantastic and The Invisible Woman.  Writers can’t wait to put their marriage through the ringer on the assumption that being superhero adventurers isn’t enough drama.  John McClaine’s marriage in the Die Hard series depends entirely on what is easiest for the story at the moment, i.e. whatever brings the most conflict to the table.  The list goes on and on, and each entry on it says characters are not allowed to have any stability and be interesting.

I don’t expect that will change anytime soon.  I blame the audience and the creators, both of whom are too often guilty of taking the easy road to conflict.  It’s only when the audience starts demanding more and the creators dare challenge their own expectations of where drama is found that we’ll ever break out of it.  We can do better, and there is nothing wrong with expecting more.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

Just Playing

Playing is severely underrated.  The therapeutic effects of just playing, no pressure, no requirements, are so important that I don’t know if anyone would really argue with that.  That’s why I find it so frustrating at how little playing we’re allowed to do.

True, we have plenty of games we can play.  Video games, both online and off, are more popular than ever, and my own personal obsession of tabletop gaming is experiencing a boom of its own with a few famous advocates for the hobby.  But I’m still struck at how often these experiences have been transformed from moments of play to serious work.  I enjoy League of Legends, but I dislike the whole culture that has robbed the game of much of its fun.  I feel the same way about Magic: the Gathering and pretty much any other game that has a formalized ranking system that players strive to climb.

I’m not against such systems.  For many players, there is a real motivation to advance and anything that provides that sense of accomplishment is worthwhile.  But when I played Magic, over a decade ago I grant you, I was never part of the official league rankings.  I might play a local tournament, and the prize was perhaps a gift certificate to the local comic book store, which I would almost always end up spending on Magic cards or to enter next week’s tournament.  In any case, the stakes weren’t very high, and if I came in third out of twenty, I felt like I’d accomplished something worthwhile.  My goal was never to be the best Magic player.  It was just to be a good one and maybe win a little prize while I was at it.

I don’t see that very much anymore.

There was a time when kids would just get together for an impromptu game of baseball.  These were informal affairs, and the games would just as often fall apart as play to the end.  Nobody was winning anything long term.  Everybody was just playing.  Now it’s all leagues and organized play, and while I get why that happened, it also inevitably led to a culture of excessive competition and a loss of the joy of the moment.  This is a broad statement, and I’m sure there are plenty of parents and their children who simply enjoy the game for the chance to play.  But that this even needs to be noted bothers me immensely.

I love tabletop games, as anyone who follows this blog has no doubt figured out by now.  And I love learning and improving on games.  Whether I’m playing Twilight Imperium or Warhammer: Diskwars, my goal is to get better.  But it’s just as important to have a good game, to be with people I enjoy, and to have a good time.  I’m happy when I get a great vanquish streak in Garden Warfare, but I’m also happy if it’s a fun game at all.  Nobody likes to lose all the time, but I don’t mind losing if the game is good and the company worthwhile.

When I played World of Warcraft, I wasn’t focused on getting the best gear, becoming the most powerful character.  Raiding rarely interested me.  Not because it wasn’t intriguing.  But because it was too easy to suddenly become work.  Not in a good way either.  All it takes is one person who decides having fun is counterproductive to throw a wrench in the works.  Then play becomes a job, and not a very enjoyable job either.

That’s the danger of ranking, and that danger is even worse when you consider the sheer number of competitors we’re competing against.  With some work, I might be able to be the best League of Legends player among my friends, but odds are good that I’ll never be the best in the world.  Or even in the top 1000.  I was a solid Magic player on a local level.  I can’t fool myself into thinking I’d ever be nationals material.  And while I was never much into sports, I wouldn’t mind an informal game of soccer or basketball.

Perhaps it’s just the nature of the U.S.  We have always been a competitive nation, and for better or worse, we love pitting ourselves against each other.  Many games have a competitive element, and that’s cool.  I like competition.  I like facing unpredictable opponents.  I like winning when I can, and I enjoy losing if the game is fun and challenging, and I learned something.  But I don’t like the notion of being ranked all the time.  Not in games.  Nor in anything else.

It’s why even movies and books have turned into a weird competition, where average people are sitting around discussing how much money the latest blockbuster movie made and what place a favored book is on the NYT Bestseller List.  As if these rankings should actually mean something to us.  As if there’s a validation of things we like achieving popularity.  Even as a writer, I hate the idea that I am in a weird sort of competition with anyone who is considered among my genre.  I have no strong opinions on Christopher Moore, Terry Pratchett, or Neil Gaiman, all of whom seem like decent fellows.  I’ve even met Gaiman, and he was a cool guy.  I didn’t get a sense of competition from him.  So why do readers so often feel that need?

It’s not the end of the world, but it’s frustrating that so often we’re told to not enjoy playing.  I genuinely enjoy League of Legends and would love to actually play more PVP games, but 9 times out of 10, it devolves into name-calling and “serious business”.  Even if the game isn’t ranked because even unranked games are seen as practice for “real” matches, and if you’re not here to win and are guilty of being a “noob”, then you’re seen as a fool who shouldn’t even be there.  And every time someone tries to talk me into getting back into Magic, I picture a room full of people, all deadly serious, playing a game where they use cards to summon monsters and cast spells and not having a good time doing it.

We should play more.  It’s worth doing, and if the only reason something is worth doing is because it’ll help you move up on some ranking chart, then maybe it’s not worth doing at all.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

Relatively Grim

Everything is relative.  Humans do not measure in terms of absolutes.  Instead, we measure by comparison.  Probably my favorite example of this is found in the wonderful book Predictably Irrational by Daniel Ariely.  People were asked the following question:

You go to a store to buy a suit for $300.  When you arrive at the store, you discover the suit is actually priced $312 dollars.  Do you buy it here, or go to the store inconveniently across town that has it cheaper?

Most people buy the more expensive suit.  Then comes the next question:

You go to a store to buy a special pen for $5.  When you arrive at the store, you discover the pen is actually priced at $17.  Do you buy it here, or go to the store inconveniently across town that has it cheaper?

Most people decide the inconvenience is worth saving a few extra bucks.

But here’s the thing.  Both cases are entirely identical in terms of the amount of extra money being spent.  In either case, it’s a question of whether you want to spend $12 more for a little convenience or not.  Yet there is something innately distasteful about spending $17 dollars when we planned on spending $5 and only mildly annoying when we were planning on spending $300.

That’s how humans think, and it isn’t limited to money.

Having been a published author for about a decade now, I have seen the shift in cultural perceptions.  While shifts are natural, even expected, they have not been in my favor.  While I don’t mind the grimdarking of our culture because things change and that’s the way it works, I do admit that it’s put my own books in a strange place.  I’ve always struggled a bit to be accepted by an adult audience, but as we’ve moved toward a world where our definition of sophisticated content is found in books like A Song of Fire and Ice (or A Game of Thrones, as you non-hipsters like to call it) and TV shows like, well, A Game of Thrones, the stories I want to write are considered more and more fluff.

I’m not making excuses.  There are a lot of other factors at work, and no doubt, my lack of a series is one of those factors.  Another is that while I don’t consider myself a humor fantasy writer, I’m undeniably writing funny stuff nonetheless.  That means that for a lot of people my books are either too silly and not silly enough, and it can be confusing to a lot of potential readers.  But the grimdarking of our culture is also a big factor, and it’s the one I think I have the hardest time overcoming.

I can write sillier books.  I can write more serious books.  But the elements of sophistication as they stand at the moment are sex, violence, brutality, despicable characters, and generally unpleasant situations.  As I’ve said before, I can’t get into A Song of Fire and Ice for exactly the reasons everyone else seems to love it.  I find it gruesome and off-putting, and I could probably get around that if there were more dragons and wizards, but those things are noticeably spare intentionally.  Nothing wrong with that.  I’m all for variety in our media, and if someone finds satisfaction in stories about serial killers and drug dealers, good on them.  That’s their thing, and I find nothing wrong with people indulging those emotional needs in the media they consume.

Yet I have no interest in writing a rape scene.  I don’t want to write a fantasy novel where people randomly die in terrible ways to shock the reader.  And I like happy endings.  Not syrupy, everyone lives happily ever after happy endings.  But honest happy endings where the characters have learned from their experience and come out the other side, if not perfectly content, better people for the journey.  I want heroes I can look up to, and villains I can admire because they have sensible goals and are only a little bit overzealous in achieving those goals.  I want to explore what it means to be human, but not just the most extreme elements of humanity.  The quiet moments.  The times when the world isn’t exploding, but we’re still trying to determine who we are and how can we make this thing called life work.  And I want to do it while writing about space squids and moon-eating monster gods.

It’s easy to feel frustrated by this shift, and I know I’ve spent a lot of time bemoaning this change of late.  I still haven’t gotten over the grimdarking of Superman.  That’s still an open wound I will be carrying with me for a very, very long time.  But it’s not all negative.

I enjoyed the heck out of The Winter Soldier, and a big reason I did is just how apologetically old-fashioned it is in a lot of ways.  Captain America is an admirable hero who believes in fighting for what’s right.  The bad guys are certainly bad, but they also have a consistent logic behind their plans.  And The Falcon . . .

Holy heck, the Falcon was awesome.

I’ve also found encouragement in all-ages entertainment.  The Lego Movie and Mr. Peabody & Sherman were both thoughtful, fun films that had a lot of interesting things to say while also being absurd fantasy romps.  Yet I’ve never intended to write YA fiction.  Rather, I’ve never sought to limit my audience to young adults.  I’m perfectly happy if young adults (or anyone of any age) reads my books, and I’ve grown increasingly fond of all-ages media because of its ability to tell sophisticated stories while avoiding the pitfalls of grimdark for grimdark’s sake.

Perhaps that’s the real lesson to learn from this.  While I started out in adult fantasy, perhaps the genre and I have become incompatible.  That’s not such a bad thing, though I don’t relish the idea of starting out in a new sub-genre.  Then again, I’ve always kind of been there, so maybe I’m second guessing myself for no other reason than human nature.

Just some stuff on my mind, Action Force.  Thanks for listening.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

Action Force Mailbag: Plot vs Everything Else

Been a while since we’ve dipped into the ol’ A. Lee Martinez Action Force mailbag.  I don’t actually get much fanmail.  You can reach me on Twitter (@aleemartinez), Facebook (A. Lee Martinez), or even via e-mail (hipstercthulhu@hotmail.com).  Drop a line, if you have a few minutes to kill.  Or don’t.  We’ve all got lives to live.

Today’s letter comes from Tibor Kovac:

Do you care about story structure? Do your first start with character development and then head on to creating the storyline? Or do you just sit down with an idea and start writing without worrying too much? In fact I noticed that Lucky’s intervention with all the gods in the end is indeed a ‘deus ex machina’, although you charmingly covered it as a normal event in regard to the context of your story, which is about gods dealing with humans and vice versa. I myself have plenty of crazy ideas (mostly stupid, but maybe also brilliant ones) but I think I’m just too jaundiced with all the formal writing stuff they teach me at university.

 

First of all, thanks for the letter, Tibor, and thanks for the question.  This is a complicated one.  Let’s get to it.

My creative process varies by story, so there’s no default way I start a story.  Sometimes, I have a character or a setting in mind and not much else.  Other times, I have the bones of a story in mind, although in the end, that rarely winds up being the story I tell.  Plotting is a complex issue, and whenever I talk about it, I accept that I’m flirting with controversy.  I have a nuanced relationship with plotting, believe it or not, but in the broadest stroke, I think it’s safe to say that plotting just isn’t that important.

And there arises a collective gasp from everybody who takes writing Seriously!  Capital S!  Flowcharts and graphs and index cards pinned to the wall scribbled with notes types faint.  Somewhere, an innocent baby cries out in shock.

Note that I qualified that with the phrase “Broad Strokes”.  It means that while I don’t think plotting is the most important element to writing a story (or even the fourth or fifth most important thing), it is still pretty damned important.  Most good stories must have some sort of plot, and that plot should be tied to the characters and themes within the story.  Plot is a series of events that must connect, that should make sense when tied together, and should lead the characters and the audience toward a meaningful resolution.

So plot is important.  I will repeat that several more times so that people don’t make the mistake of thinking I don’t believe that.

Plot is important.

PLOT is important.

Plot IS important.

Plot is IMPORTANT.

PLOT IS IMPORTANT.

There.  Don’t come charging at me with rebuttals saying that I’m a fool and a hack for dismissing the importance of plot because, one more time, PLOT IS IMPORTANT.

But on the spectrum of important elements, it’s probably the lowest.  I’m sure there are many successful writers who would disagree with me, and they can all make good cases.  But for me, I’d much rather focus on character, setting, conflict, and character arcs, and when you get right down to it, all those things are what make up the plot, so it’s perhaps a paradox to think of them as separate from plotting.  So why do I consider them more important than plot?

It’s all about emotional investment.  When you boil down plot, it is little more than a series of events.  Plotting is the most mechanical aspect of telling a story, and while it still takes time and skill to write a good plot, imbuing your characters, setting, and conflict with emotional heft is usually a hell of a lot harder.

In the end, every story has been told before.  Millions of times.  The human race could stop writing fiction today, and there would be no shortage of stories to tell and share until we’re finally enslaved by benevolent dinobot overlords.  Every story I’ve ever written, every story you’ve ever read, is merely a retelling of an older one.  Yes, even the classics are simply reruns of older tales.

It’s the emotional weight that makes stories worth telling, and it’s that same emotional weight that compels us to recreate those stories again for ourselves.  And emotional resonance almost NEVER comes from plotting.  It comes from compelling characters, interesting settings, intriguing character arcs, and memorable moments.  You could argue that this is good plotting, but I’d argue that, of all the elements new writers screw up, it isn’t plotting.  It’s emotional resonance.

Or maybe it’s all semantics.  Maybe all this dissection of storytelling is pointless and silly.  What matters is if a story speaks to the audience, and how it manages to do that is a mystery that no one can truly claim to have solved.

What’s interesting to me is that when people do talk about plotting, they tend to talk about it in terms of story expectations, not the actual plot itself.  A lot of the complaints about my own plotting often stem from a dislike of straying from the expected formula, as if by choosing to swerve from the expected ending is an unintentional, amateurish mistake.  Divine Misfortune does indeed have a deus ex machina ending (of a sort), and part of that is because it is a story about gods.  But the other part is the recurring theme, mentioned over and over again, that the old school gods like Gorgoz are basically criminals who only continue to exist because they hide from the other gods.  Gorgoz’s downfall comes because he forgets that, and because Lucky is smart enough to call the proper authorities.

It’s weird because we’re so used to our heroes being cut off from proper help that they can’t simply ring up the cops, but this is an intentional subversion.  The subversion of Divine Misfortune is that it isn’t really an adventure story.  It is the least like an adventure story of all the books I’ve written.  So our protagonist calls the cops, and that solves the problem.  This is only strange if you assume the plot of the story is centered on Lucky beating Gorgoz.

And this is where plotting gets tricky because that’s not the story of Divine Misfortune at all.  It’s not about heroism, adventure, or even magic.  It’s about personal responsibility.  And so, when Lucky steps up and calls the god cops (for lack of a better term) when he could just as easily walk away, he’s showing real personal growth.  Gorgoz might be flashy.  He might be the bad guy.  But he is not the foe Lucky must slay.  He’s an obstacle, but he is not the center of Lucky’s character arc.

Whether this works for you depends a lot on whether you can see past the expected plot to the central theme of the novel.  Theme is also another stumbling block because people do the same thing with theme as plot.  They create expectations before reading a word, and when those expectations are not met, they are often displeased with the results.  Divine Misfortune, my story of gods, isn’t about many of the things people expect stories about gods to be about.  It’s not about faith or power or mysticism.  It’s about being a good person, even when you don’t have to be a good person.  It’s about being better than you need to be.  That’s built into the setting, the characters, and nearly ever scene in the book.  If you want to get technical about it, that’s the plot.

But when I sat down to write the book, I didn’t think of it in those terms.  I instead thought of the characters and how they related to each other, how they would change during the story, and why anyone should invest in their story at all.  And I can honestly say, it never occurred to me that it would be because “On Page 14, Lucky goes to a Chuck E. Cheese.”

As for the “crazy ideas”, I have some mixed feelings about that as well.  I don’t write anything to be weird.  I write fantasy.  Unapologetic, unafraid fantasy.  I’ve little interest in convincing anyone that robot detectives or minotaur women are cool, and I believe that, in a more perfect universe, we’d be less concerned with putting things in nice little boxes and instead, use our fiction to explore the many facets of our emotional existence.  I tend to do that with space squids and vampires, but whatever works.

My advice (if you were wondering when I’d get to it) is that you aren’t going to learn a heck of a lot about writing in a university environment.  I am not against further education, and I’m sure there are many good writing classes and teachers out there.  But I also know that writing fiction is a creative process, and it’s less about following a formula than creating a story that works.  Not everyone understands that.  Many people have defined a rather narrow definition of what makes fiction work, and a lot of those people are teachers sadly.

DISCLAIMER:  Keep in mind that I have no formal education in writing, so my thoughts on this are probably skewed from the amount of horror stories I’ve heard.  Nobody tells you about all the good stuff they learned in writing class, but everyone can’t wait to tell you about that one writing teacher who made their life miserable.

I’m a big believer in doing what works.  Some writers swear by plotting, and they write perfectly good stories.  Many of those writers are much more successful than I am too, which is worth noting.  So you have to find what works for you.  That’s what makes creativity so difficult because for ever rule, there’s an exception, but those rules are there for a reason too.  Knowing when to follow them and when to break them is the tricky part.

If I can get right down to my point, I think it’s almost all splitting hairs.  If a story is good, if it has emotional weight, then people will give credit to whatever element they liked most.  For some, that’ll be the plotting.  For others, the characters or the dialogue.  My true advice is not to focus on those labels but concentrate on making something worth reading.  Learn from those who have something to offer.  Worry less about any particular aspect.  Concern yourself with the overall picture.  Do your best to assess your strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller, and always strive to improve.  Be strong in your convictions, but be open to criticism.

But, above all, write if you want to write, and do your best to become better in every way.

Good luck.  I’m rooting for you.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

The Neutral List

It is surprisingly difficult to be neutral on anything.

I loved Frozen.  So did a lot of other people.  As far as I can tell, not many people hated the movie with the exception of a few nutjobs who decided it had some secret homosexual and / or witchcraft agenda, but those people hardly count.  Some people, however, were not as impressed by it, and there’s almost a defensive nature to their response.

I kind of get that.  I’m neutral on a lot of things.  I neither love nor hate Breaking Bad, A Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Lord of the Rings (books and movie), and a great many other things. Some of these are because I haven’t been interested enough to even give them a glance, and some, I would probably actively dislike if I cared enough to try and watch / read it.  But I don’t.  I know myself well enough that it’s highly unlikely a show about an amoral, murdering evil genius is unlikely to win me over, so I never watched Breaking Bad.  And I watched a few episodes of Game of Thrones because I thought I should as a fantasy writer.  It wasn’t for me, as I already suspected, but I’m not particularly negative about it.

It’s human nature to shove things into neat little categories, and the broadest categories are GOOD and BAD, but it seems like another false choice.  I don’t enjoy A Game of Thrones.  I don’t care for the books, and the TV show leaves me cold.  Which is fine.  It’s not a slight to it or to anyone who does like it.  We’re all different people, and we’re all looking for different things in our entertainment.  I won’t hold someone’s love of A Game of Thrones against them if they don’t hold my love of Guyver 2: Dark Hero against me.

Yet neutrality is often the most difficult position to maintain because if you love or hate something, you can always find someone who agrees or disagrees with you.  You can always have a discussion.  You can jump onto the right message boards and easily chat with people who share your opinion.  But when your opinion is a great, big MEH, there’s not really much left to say.  A discussion with a bunch of indifferent people is not, generally, terribly engaging.

In the spirit of neutrality, I offer an incomplete list of things I am neutral on:

The Color Yellow

Fish as Pets

Tattoos

The West Wing

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Taylor Swift

Any Award Show

The Saw Movies

Unicorns

Tom Cruise

By no means, an exhaustive list, but one that I feel quite comfortable with.  The list is always changing.  Things are added and removed on a continual basis.  Our opinions are complex and evolving.  Or at least they should be.  But if you can’t put a minimum of five things on your own list, you probably need to consider how often you’ve adopted strong opinions because society demanded it of you.  Or not.  I’m not your boss.  Do what you want.

I’m pretty neutral on that too.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

 

The Grimdark Games

I read an article recently discussing things fantasy and science fiction could really use more of.  At the top of that list was “A sense of fun.”

Yeah, you could definitely say that’s missing.

In my most recent interview (check out #sffwrtcht on Twitter if you’re interested in giving it a glance) I mentioned that my strongest writing influences are Walt Simonson’s epic run on Marvel Comic’s Thor series, Duck Tales, and Darkwing Duck.  You could also throw in monster movies, and, though I only discovered them after I’d been writing for a while, the pulp adventure stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  I’m no longer self-conscious about admitting that because those are worthy influences, and they’ve made me a better writer.

It’s a topic I return to quite regularly on this blog, but I’m not a fan of a lot of modern fantasy.  Not because it’s badly written.  It’s not.  But because I just can’t take all the grimdark.  We live in a culture where Superman watches Metropolis crumble and where movies based on a line of toy robots are full of brutal robotic disembowelment.  The reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles isn’t out yet, and I have no strong opinions on it.  But damnit, those character redesigns look so harsh and humorless that, ironically, I have a hard time taking them seriously.

The original TMNT comic was violent and brutal, but the turtles were still intentionally goofy looking and there were many peculiar elements to their universe.  Their chief ally is a guy who beats up crime with sports equipment.  They’ve gone into space and fought against an alien dinosaur empire.  Time travel, ninjas, mobsters, and supervillains.  It’s a weird mishmash chosen as much for the fun of it as for any sense of realism and the unapologetic nature of it was what I found so charming about the original comic books.

I’m not saying the fantasy I grew up on was better because it wasn’t.  But it was more fun and optimistic.  It wasn’t trying to convince me it was “grown up”.  It was cool, first and foremost, and if it happened to transcend that now and then, it was a happy byproduct.  Transformers: The Animated Movie remains one of my favorite films, and the plot is little more than a bunch of cobbled together set pieces, explosions, laser gun battles, and 80′s hair metal.  But damn if it doesn’t manage to be a compelling adventure with both incredibly dark moments and, yet, with a heart of optimism beneath it all.  The movie actually ended the Cybertronian War storyline that was at the heart of the series.  The Autobots take back their homeworld, and as a kid, that left a big impression on me.  There was always new conflict be had, but at their darkest moment, the Autobots saved the day and reclaimed Cybertron.

Nowadays, Cybertron seems have become another casualty in the name of maturity.  The otherwise excellent Fall of Cybertron video game is built upon the premise that Cybertron has been used up by the endless war, and the Transformers have no choice but to leave it behind, a hollow husk.  That isn’t far-fetched, and I don’t object to it as a story point.  But it’s still kind of sad to see it sacrificed like that.  Some might call it realism, but this is a story about giant robots from space that change into cars, jets, and dinosaurs.  Realism shouldn’t necessarily be the goal.

The trend isn’t going anywhere soon.  Stuff like the relentlessly bloody and gruesome A Game of Thrones and our cultural obsession with dystopian futures are here to stay.  I get the appeal of those stories, though I do wonder at why anyone would want to play out their own version of The Hunger Games, which at its heart is basically a horror story about having to murder one another for the amusement of cruel overlords.  But it is dramatic.  I’ll give it that.

It is why when I read fiction, I tend to pick up the older stuff.  I’d attribute it to nostalgia (as is often the case), except a lot of it was only things I discovered when I was already well into adulthood.  Tarzan remains my favorite literary character, and I read my first Tarzan story when I was 32.  At the time, it seemed both incredibly bold and violent.  Tarzan kills a lot of beasts and people on his adventures.  But in the end, he’s still a guy with a wife he loves, friends he cares about, and a unique sense of morality that makes him compelling.  Some might see that as a cop out, and they aren’t entirely wrong.  But they aren’t entirely right either.

I just wish we could see drama as more than just brutality, loss, and sacrifice.  The human story is one of ups and downs.  Triumphs can be worthy stories.  Some might call it escapism, but that’s such a childish simplification.  As if the only real things are pain and suffering, and everything else is a lie we tell children to make them feel better for as long as they can remain innocent.  Things aren’t black and white, and while I won’t deny the grimdark has a place in fantasy storytelling, it’d be nice if we could have a little more hope now and then.  It’d be even nicer if that wasn’t automatically dismissed as fluffy emptiness.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Funtastic

I’ve been playing the heck out of Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare.  As should hardly be surprising at this point, I rather like weird games where things (killer plants) fight other things (zombies).  Garden Warfare is an online third-person shooter video game, and it’s simply charming.  I know that most hardcore gamers will balk at the colorful, cartoony graphics, but at its heart, this is a brutal battle where no quarter is asked nor given.

I like the game for a lot of reasons.  Not the least of which is that I’ve grown somewhat uncomfortable with brutal first person shooters of late.  Not that I was very fond of them to begin with.  FPS have always struck me as claustrophobic, and war games based on any realistic design aesthetic run the risk of making war look like fun.  I’m not going to say they glorify war or violence, but there’s little point in denying an aggressive, macho undercurrent running through these military shooters.  They’re just games, and I don’t want to be seen as someone who is going to say video games are too violent OR that they cause violence.  They don’t.  But they just aren’t my bag, and a big part of that is that they all kind of feel the same to me.

Garden Warfare doesn’t feel like any other video game.  The closest equivalents that come to mind are Team Fortress 2 and Monday Night Combat.  Both those games are very bright and toonish with a sly sense of humor and an absurd design.  In both those games, the violence is so exaggerated and goofy that it’s more slapstick than anything else, and, yes, it’s still violent and based on killing your opposition, but it just doesn’t feel so gruesome.  Garden Warfare ups the ante even more, by being about cartoon plants and zombies.

But what really attracts me to Garden Warfare is what attracts me to fantasy in general.  In a traditional military shooter, players are given a standard assortment of real-life weapons and truly strange abilities are off the table.  But in Garden Warfare, players can take on the roles of a walking sunflower who harnesses solar energy into a laser deathray or become a mad scientist zombie who teleports across the battlefield.  By diving into absurdity, the game has created its own unique feel.  This is a game where I can be a giant, man-eating plant that burrows in the earth and swallows zombies whole.  If you’re surprised that might appeal to me, you probably haven’t read very many of my books.

It’s why I’ve always loved fantasy.  It opens doors.  I love exploring different protagonists with different abilities against different obstacles.  My heroes tend to run the gamut from high-powered brawlers (Duke the werewolf) to sensible organizers (Nessy the kobold) to manipulative geniuses (Emperor Mollusk).  They face all-powerful monster gods, secret alien conspiracies, and their own inner demons.  Fantasy allows me to tell all kinds of stories, and while that’s true of any genre, no genre is quite so flexible in this regard as fantasy.  It’s why fantasy is such a constant element in video games in general and why it’s the driving force behind Garden Warfare.  And why I am enjoying waging the endless battle between plants and zombies.

Plus, did I mention I can be a plant who devours zombies whole?  Because I really, really like doing that.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Mr. Peabody & Sherman (a movie review)

Mr. Peabody & Sherman was probably one of those properties that was least requiring any kind of full-length movie adaptation.  The original Peabody’s Improbably Histories (featured on The Bullwinkle Show) was, intentionally, a slight confection.  Fractured Fairy Tales versions of history.  Classics, for certain, but it’s difficult to imagine anyone building them into something else.  DWA’s Mr. Peabody & Sherman, by necessity, is required to take the concept places it wasn’t originally meant to go, and while it could go very wrong, it ends up creating a rather charming tale of adventure and what makes a family.  That it does so without straying too far from the source material is a worthy accomplishment, and one that shouldn’t be readily dismissed.

To begin with, there’s Mr. Peabody himself.  Peabody is a genius dog who is never nonplussed, always on top of the situation, and always ready to take action.  Here, he’s a little less dry than in the original shorts, but still, incredibly competent and rarely raises his voice.  He has his moments of emotional displays, which in lesser hands might weaken his original characterization.  Somehow, the film manages to imbue him with more psychological depths without robbing him of his level-headed genius qualities.  This is quite an accomplishment in itself.

Peabody has always been a favorite of mine.  Probably because he is the closest animated equivalent to those pulp men of action of old.  If Doc Savage was a dog with a time machine, he’d be Mr. Peabody.  The movie doesn’t remove Peabody’s competence.  It emphasizes it.  This is a dog who is good at EVERYTHING.  In the course of the film, he cooks gourmet meals, hypnotizes people, plays dozens of musical instruments, engages in swordplay, breaks time, and fixes it.  He exhibits a flawless mastery of everything he does, and that’s cool.

More importantly, the film doesn’t break Peabody’s demeanor in favor of pratfalls and silly pop culture references.  I don’t think Peabody cracks a single joke in the film.  His one moment of clumsiness is genuinely cute as he attempts to make Mona Lisa smile with an overly complicated analysis of a pratfall.  He does exhibit his affection for bad puns that capped the original shorts, and it works.  It’s another intriguing choice, and one that I have to praise.

As for his dogness (for lack of a better word), it’s something of a plot point.  In some of the advertisements for the film, he demonstrates several dog tendencies, exploited for an easy laugh.  I am pleased to say that none of those scenes actually ended up in the final film.  It’s not that I’m against those jokes.  It’s simply that the contradict the original characterization, where Peabody never acted like a dog, aside from a tendency to sit on all fours.  The film’s plot does hinge on him being a dog in two ways, but both points work precisely because of how un-doglike he is.

You might think I’m overanalyzing Peabody, but I’ve never seen the point in licensing an original property if you’re going to throw aside much of what made the original unique.  And Peabody chasing sticks isn’t terrible, but it certainly is imposing generic characterization in favor of a quick laugh.

None of this would matter if the movie wasn’t interesting beyond Peabody.  Though it was never the original shorts’ intention to explore the idea of a dog adopting a boy, the film has placed this conflict at the center of its interpersonal relationships.  It’s nice to see an adopted family in film.  That the father and son are two different species is a gentle way of approaching the idea of interracial families, and I can see a lot of people from similar backgrounds relating to the struggles of Peabody and Sherman.  Yeah, I know it’s a silly movie about a time-traveling dog and his boy, but, damnit, there are moments when the bonds between our heroes, the obstacles they face from within and from without, and the struggles they face came across as relatable and real.

Heck, if you were prone to overanalysis (not that I am, mind you), you could even view Peabody as a character who embodies the struggle of our selves versus the expectations of the world.  Yes, he is a brilliant dog, but he is still a dog.  Some people will never see past that, despite his many great accomplishments.  This wasn’t something the original shorts were trying to discuss, but it’s a natural avenue of exploration for a longer story like this.

Ultimately, the film lives or dies by its relationships, and this one succeeds.  It doesn’t sacrifice the original’s weird look at history in the process, and our heroes visit a few of the more standard moments in history (this is an all-ages film, after all), have some strange adventures, and end up becoming a stronger family for it.  That’s laudable for a film based on shorts designed to last five minutes and get a quick laugh.

I love that the ancient Eqyptians are brown.  And the montage of Peabody raising Sherman simultaneously through history’s greatest hits is both cute and emotionally touching.

It’s a good film.  Enjoyable, brisk, well-animated, and funny, too.  There’s heart here.  Younger viewers might laugh at the silly characters, but adults will find a lot to enjoy her too.  Including silly characters.  It reminds me of Looney Tunes: Back in Action, a film that forced me to view the relationship dynamic between Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in a whole new light.  It might sound absurd, but it’s a worthy feat.  I’ll never look at a dog and his boy in quite the same way, and that’s a good thing.

Final Recommendation:  Worth Seeing.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

 

Meanwhile, Sherman is easier.  He’s an enthusiastic kid, and it’s not difficult to translate that into an interesting film character.

The Capitals (A Board Game Review)

Time for another board game review, Action Force.

Today’s game is The Capitals from Mercury Games (http://www.mercurygames.com/index.php...).  Mercury Games is a company I don’t know much about, but they produced the very cool Infamy, a board game about becoming the criminal overlord of a space colony.  That’s fun too, and I’ll get around to reviewing it too but The Capitals is the one I’ve played most recently and freshest in my mind.

The Capitals is a city building and management game.  Gameplay revolves around drafting various building tiles, placing them in your city, and managing several different tracks measuring the various statuses of your town.

Okay, so it doesn’t sound like the most exciting premise, but stick with me here.

At its most basic level, The Capitals is a game about management and planning.  Every building you incorporate into your city will have some effect, often including buildings around it.  Place a doctor’s office near a housing building for maximum effect.  Build a business consulting complex in your business district.  Put down the museum of industry in your industrial-themed city.  And so on and so on.

As you build up your town, you’re also managing several tracks.  There are benefits to having the highest culture level (and penalties for having the lowest).  You can’t have more employment on the employment track than you have population, but if your population is higher than your employment, you end up losing prestige points (the object of the game).  You can’t neglect your city’s budget.  Or its growing power needs.  Or its need for solid public works.  And in the end, the player who manages to build the most prestigious city wins the game.

If it sounds like a lot to keep track of, it certainly can be.  However, The Capitals overcomes this by being very user friendly.  A key part of this is due to the consistent iconography.  Within a turn or two, a glance is often all that’s required to know what every building does, and the status tracks allow players to know how well they’re doing in comparison to other players without resorting to guesswork or complex calculations.

Turns are quick, and the game has a suggested playing time of 90 minutes.  It’ll probably take longer than that for your first game or two, and I expect a full game of five player would probably take longer.  But for a complex game, The Capitals succeeds in being rewarding without bogging itself down.

About the only complaint some players might have with the game is that there isn’t a lot of direct competition between players.  There will be times when you lose a building because another player gets to grab it first, and the culture track ensures that players will be fighting for valuable tourists.  But cities don’t affect each other directly, and for more competitive players, this might be a negative.  Personally, I’ve never had a problem with games like this, but I’m not a dominator-type player who only really feels as if he’s winning if he’s overpowering the player across the table.

Also, there are a few typos and timing issues in the player’s aid.  Not a deal breaker, but a bit annoying.

I don’t own a lot of these types of games because they tend to be too dry for my liking, but The Capitals is a solid game that has appeal to players who aren’t looking to blast aliens or conquer nations.  If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that almost any theme can make a good game.  Seriously, I own a game based on trying to be the most popular kid in high school and another game about selling real estate (and they’re both good).

So The Capitals gets a Thumbs Up from me.

Lee