A. Lee Martinez's Blog, page 48

Call to Action

In today’s post, I’m going to get honest here, folks.  It might sound like I’m complaining or disappointed or just disgruntled, so before I begin, let me say for the record that I love doing what I do.  I have more success than I have any right to expect, and I know there are literally millions of people who would love to get paid to create fiction.  I’m not angry or annoyed, just out to share some thoughts about my career and where I’m at.  I’ve thought about whether I should share these thoughts long and hard, but ultimately, I’ve decided for the sake of my career, it’s okay (perhaps even necessary) to bring them out into the open.

Saying that, this is going to be a post thinking about why I’m not more popular, and what I should do to change that.  It’s also, more importantly, a call to action from you, my fans, to do your part, should you feel like it.  Of course, simply buying or talking about my books is more than enough, and I have no right to expect any more from you.  If you do that, we’re cool, and you have my undying gratitude.  But if you should decide to keep reading and feel like doing more, you’ll score a few more points and be even more beloved.

There.  Cards on the table.  Now let’s get to it.

The fact is, despite all appearances to the contrary, I am stuck, career-wise.  It’s easy to hear a writer has nine books out (with his tenth on the way) and think he must be doing all right.  And I am.  I’ve had good years and weak years, and like anyone else, there are ups and downs.  But as of late, I’ve hit a plateau I just can’t seem to get over.

I’ll own up to most of the responsibility on that.  I hate the notion that I might be too “creative” because it smacks of both self-indulgent egotism and dismissal of the taste of the general public.  But I do ask a lot of my fans.  Most writers, even if they don’t write series, will stick to a certain sub-genre.  Meanwhile, I’m jumping from traditional fantasy to urban fantasy to space adventure to cosmic horror to metaphysical exploration.

This weekend I was talking to a friend of mine about One of These Doomsdays, my current project, and after I described the book, he said he admired how I dared to bounce around so much on my settings and ideas.  It was a compliment, but I also realized just how counter such ideas can be to building an audience.  If someone loves pulp space adventure, there’s no reason to assume they like existential metaphysical stories about ghost dinosaurs and mole people.  It’s a lot to ask for someone to have enough faith in me that they’d be willing to pick up a book so different, especially if it didn’t hit their genre hot buttons.

Again, I have to stress that I don’t think what I do is more difficult than writing a series.  Series demand a lot from the writer.  But the thing about series that works most in their favor is that the odds are good if you like one wizard detective story, you will like another wizard detective story and if that wizard detective story features characters you’ve already grown to care for, so much the better.  It doesn’t make the story easier or harder.  But it makes it easier to sell, easier for the audience to get excited about.

The path I’m on is a lot bumpier.  Not meant as a slight to any other successful writer out there because we all have our choices to make, and every choice has an upside and a downside.  We try to stay true to ourselves while compromising where we must, and in the end, it’s just one day at a time.  I love that my books are different enough that they can be distinguished by merely describing the protagonist or the setting, but that is also probably their biggest weakness.

Putting that aside, still seems like I should be more popular than I am.  Not household name popular, but perhaps someone most sci fi / fantasy fans have heard of.  That is simply not the case.

To have a career in this business, you have to follow the numbers.  In order to make a living as a writer, I need to sell a lot of books.  Thousands of them.  Meanwhile, I can’t even get a Kickstarter project funded, and my Wattpad account offering free short stories to the public has only a few hundred hits.  While I try to maintain a positive attitude, that’s a bit discouraging.  I know I’m not Stephen King, Jim Butcher, or Tom Clancy, but I am a professional writer offering free fiction and still getting a very tepid response.

This leads me to only a few possible conclusions.  They might be wrong, but I’m going to share them anyway.

CONCLUSION ONE:

In the end, a writer, doing what I do, can’t compete in this market.  People will almost always play it safe when it comes to buying books, and who can blame them for that?  Books are expensive, and who wants to buy a book they’ll end up hating?  I don’t buy much fiction myself for exactly the same reason.  Perhaps the only way to really grow in popularity and maintain an expanding career is to write a series or, at least, stick to a narrowly defined sub-genre.

Yes, I know a lot of my fans out there love what I do and love the exploration of whole new worlds.  Their support means everything to me, but I also have to wonder if there are enough of them out there to make a consistent living by appealing to them.  I believe there is, which leads to me to . . .

CONCLUSION TWO:

My audience just isn’t finding me.  If this is true, it can hardly be surprising.  We are saturated with media in this day and age, and it’s all too easy for a lower tier writer such as myself to get lost in the shuffle.  My publisher does their part and more.  I’d be lost without the marketing people behind the scenes, and there’s no doubt in my mind that large parts of my success are due to their efforts.  Often, I think they deserve even more credit because, no matter how great my books are, no one is going to read them if they aren’t noticed.

This is the question that every artist has had to face since the first caveman painted the first buffalo on a cave wall.  How do you spread the word?  How do you get people excited?  (My first recommendation is don’t hid your art in caves, but it seemed to work out okay for those guys.)

Basically, there’s not much I can do about that.  I do what I can, and I could probably do more.  But I’m still only one guy.  I can’t compete with the established publicity machines out there.

So this is where you come in.

I know it’s unfair to put this burden on you, but artists live and die by the enthusiasm of their fans.  I know I have excited fans out there, but I need more.  I need you to spread the word in a way you might not have ever done before.  I need you to help me.  It’s not something I have any right to ask, and if you should find it presumptuous, I certainly won’t blame you.  If you feel like just buying my books and enjoying them, you have done more than enough.  No complaints from me.

But if you like me enough to want more of what I do, you could maybe help me out by spreading the word.  If you have a blog, post something about your favorite A. Lee Martinez book.  If you have a Twitter account, give me a shout out now and then.  (I’m @Aleemartinez, just FYI.)  Maybe between posting Facebook updates about your own life (which is undoubtedly more important than my little career) you could throw up your favorite A. Lee Martinez quote.  If you could go to Amazon.com and post a review or two, I certainly wouldn’t mind.

In real life, you could share books.  Pass them to friends.  If a stranger is in the fantasy section of the bookstore, and you happen to be walking past, perhaps take  a moment to point out the Martinez section of the shelf.  Though that is a lot to ask, so no pressure.

There are a thousand avenues to spread the word, and if you take a little time out of your day to do so, I would be forever indebted to you.  You are now deputized as part of the A. Lee Martinez Action Force.  (Official logo forthcoming.)  The extent of your duties is entirely your own decision, but every little bit helps.  I’ll keep doing my part in the meantime.

Here’s some helpful info to get you started:

@Aleemartinez (Twitter)

A. Lee Martinez (Facebook)

http://www.wattpad.com/user/ALeeMartinez (Wattpad)

Hipstercthulhu@hotmail.com (Official A. Lee Martinez e-mail)

Go forth, folks.  Spread the good word.  And, as always, thank you for all your support, past, present, and future.  It means a hell of a lot to me to have come this far.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Cage Matched

The world is one giant complicated mess, and as humans, we aren’t wired to deal with that.  Given a chance, we will always simplify, reduce, and otherwise ignore rather than deal with possibilities.  This is a gross generalization, and not everyone does this all the time.  But we all do it sometime.  And some of us do it a lot.

Setting aside the political, social, and religious connotations of this notion (and there are plenty of those indeed but that’s way too complicated to get into), I see it whenever humans immediately thrust one expression of media into competition with some similar expression.  It basically seems to stem from a desire to keep things neat and tidy.

Two recent examples are the previews for the movies R.I.P.D and Pacific Rim.  Both have been immediately subject to dismissal by some as merely copycats of popular movies.  Drawing comparisons between R.I.P.D. and Men in Black isn’t very hard, and the trailer certainly doesn’t help in that.  But Pacific Rim has almost nothing in common with Transformers aside from featuring large robots prominently.  Yet I can already see the waves of comparisons coming.

I will say R.I.P.D. has a heck of a lot in common with M.I.B. Aesthetically, character-wise, and even thematically.  But if you look beyond the M.I.B. comparison, you’ll see that this is because Hollywood movies tend to follow formulas.  M.I.B. is a fantasy buddy cop movie, and it has a lot of the elements of the buddy cop genre.  R.I.P.D. does too.  I will say that the aesthetic choices for R.I.P.D. don’t really help it much, but then I think about how many action hero movies from the 80′s were pretty much the exact same film with different names and set pieces.  Nobody accused Tango and Cash of being a ripoff of Lethal Weapon.

As for Pacific Rim, aside from the unusually large robots, it has almost nothing in common with Transformers. Even the robots are a heck of a lot bigger, and the bad guys are kaiju beasts from another dimension.  But as I think of all the differences, I know the comparisons will roll forth and there’s not a damn thing to be done to stop them.

What’s interesting about human nature is that while we seem to have infinite room for certain genres, we tend to have room for only one “definitive” story in others.  We can watch a dozen Holocaust movies, enjoy romantic comedies individually, horror, action, etc, and see them all as worthy of our time, but many of us can only like one “robot” story, one “fantasy secret agent” story, one “epic fantasy”, and so on.

I deal with this a bit in my own profession.  Being labeled a “comedic fantasy writer” only really bothers me because it so often places me in one of those tiny categories.  As soon as many people hear the label, they seem to throw me into a gladiator pit with other writers of that sub-genre where many walk in, but only one can win.  It’s as if there’s an unspoken assumption that there can only be one definitive writer at a time, and everyone else is worthy of derision.  This sort of cut throat mental survival of the fittest psychology does disservice to everyone (but especially me and we can agree that’s a real crime against humanity).

We all like to compile lists and to rank and collate the world.  It can be fun to debate what is the best kung fu movie (Kung Fu Panda), superhero flick (The Incredibles), or kaiju adventure (Gamera: Revenge of Iris).  But these should be fun, and with so many great stories out there, it’s absurd to suggest that there can be only one winner and nothing else is worth our time.  That’s the danger of comparisons.

When you get right down to it, the world is complicated.  There’s nothing wrong with admitting that.  And a world where there’s room for only one awesome robot movie (or awesome fantasy novelologist) isn’t the world I live in.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

The Goth Phase

Whenever I hear “It’s realistic” as defense for some element of a story, it’s never used to justify a happy ending.  If a character is raped or murdered or simply dies tragically and pointlessly, the “That’s life” argument is often used.  And certainly, that is life.

But sometimes people don’t die tragically.  Sometimes, people grow and learn.  Sometimes, even despite ourselves, we succeed and things work out.  That’s life too.

The paradox of The Realism Argument is that it’s always used to justify the negative, never the positive.  That’s a damn frightening notion, when you think about it.  It means that, underneath it all, nearly all human beings think the universe stinks, that it’s out to get them, and that all happiness is merely a temporary reprieve from the misery that’s just around the corner.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but there is a definite reflex, as we age, to start viewing good characters and positive stories as childish and foolish.  There’s even some justification for that because the super sunny, everyone can get along, let’s hold hands and sing about buying the world a Coke version of reality that we’re sold as children is certainly unrealistic.  Yet the response as we grow older isn’t to seek a more nuanced understanding of this world, but the wholesale rejection of positivity as “immature”.

I get it.  There certainly is no such thing as “happily ever after”.  In the end, we all grow old and die and most everything we accomplish will disappear into obscurity.  But while we’re here, good things do happen.  The world doesn’t always become a worse place.  And even if none of it might not matter in the cosmic scale, it might matter today.

This is why I tend to dislike anything deemed “mature” or “realistic” because, to me, it’s usually just as absurd as stories where everything works out for the best.  In the rejected Happy Ending Universe, everything works out for the best, despite the absurdity of it.  Meanwhile, in its more “realistic” Sad Ending Universe, everything always falls apart.  Neither universe strikes me as more believable.  They come across as caricatures of the more nuanced and complicated world we leave in.

I’ve never claimed to write realistic stories, but putting aside the space squids and the monster gods, I’ve never deemed my stories as childish escapism.  I’ve nothing against escapism, but even that label seems like a trap designed to reinforce the notion that reality is a horrible thing to flee and hide from.  My stories might be fun.  They might not feature horrible deaths, rapes, and pointless tragedy.  But neither does reality always bring these things down upon us all the time.

Some people have good lives.  Some people get into scrapes and make it through the other side without having become broken.  Sometimes, life works out.

That this is considered an immature perception never made any sense to me.  It’s like all humans hit a goth phase at some point, and while they might not wear the makeup or the black clothes, they have the same “Everything sucks” attitude that so classifies that cliched stereotype.

It’s why I hate when anything aimed at a younger ages is made “more mature.”  It’s why Batman, a guy designed to have weird adventures fighting crime while dressed like a bat, is now stuck fighting serial killers while brooding about how sad he is.  It’s why most every female character in fiction will eventually be raped (if she isn’t retconned into having being raped in the past at some point).  It’s why every writer in the world (as far as I can tell) can’t wait to write that story where Superman goes nuts and just starts killing everyone.

This is the problem with realism as we tend to see it defined.  It just isn’t very realistic.  It so often embraces the tragic, the sinister, the horrible without acknowledging the positive, the fortunate, the lucky.  Sure, if many people had the powers of Superman, they would immediately become super tyrants.  But some people wouldn’t.  If you don’t think that’s true then you’re suggesting that not one human being is capable of being a genuinely good person.  And if you honestly believe that then you’re living in a different world than I am because I know that terrible stuff happens every day, but not ONLY terrible stuff.

Ultimately, I don’t care if someone prefers more grimdark in their stories.  All those terrible things are definitely part of our world, but tragedy is no more realistic than triumph, joy is just as much a part of the human experience as pain, and the good guys do win sometimes.  Even in this world we live in.

That I like them to to win just a touch more often in my fiction than in reality is a preference.  It’s not immaturity.

There is a place in this world for Superman.  That’s not being childish.  That’s just seeing the world as bigger than most people are able to admit.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Choices

I’ve been playing Bioshock Infinite lately, and while I’m not a big fan of FPS games and haven’t played any of the previous Bioshock games, I have found it immensely enjoyable so far.  My wife has even requested I only play it while she’s watching, so she can enjoy the unfolding story, and that’s got to be a mark of something special, right?

The last game I enjoyed this much in terms of story was probably the Mass Effect series.  Still haven’t played the third game and have no plans to.  But the previous two remain among my favorite game experiences ever.  Not for the gameplay, which is fairly standard cover-based shooting, but for the feeling of entering a larger universe and taking part in an epic story.  Mass Effect is notable for its choice-based gameplay, where you design your character from scratch, choose a few particulars of their background, and get to actually shape the outcome of the story by how your character reacts throughout. 

Bioshock Infinite, on the other hand, doesn’t have many choices to make.  Your character is preset.  Your path is mostly predetermined, and there’s little you can do to change the course of the story.  Yet this doesn’t bother me at all, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why it would bother anyone.  Ninety-nine percent of all fiction is without choice.  It is an experience.  No matter how many time you read or reread Moby Dick, Ahab and the whale do not ever reconcile.

I get that video games are an “interactive” medium, but that just means that progressing through a video game requires more personal effort than other mediums.  I can’t progress through Bioshock Infinite without occasionally getting into a gunfight.  But at the end, it’s like a movie with a mostly preset course and I’m along for the ride.

And this is often how it should be.  I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books (and their lesser known competitors Twist-A-Plot).  The only epic fantasy series I’ve actually read was the Lone Wolf series of Choose Your Own Adventure style stories.  I wouldn’t want that with every story I was told.  Or even most.

The fact is that choice doesn’t really work for fiction.  The big reason I didn’t play the final Mass Effect game was that I had no interest in any of the endings they wanted to give me.  The dilemma is that, in the end, Mass Effect becomes like any other fiction.  The ending was never really decided by me.  I was only there to nudge it in a few directions.

In a game like Bioshock Infinite, there’s no such illusion.  You can’t make any major decisions.  Every so often, a minor choice will come along, and it will probably affect the end of the game, but it seems like a small concession to those players who want to feel as if they are in control.  I couldn’t care less about such moments in this game because I’m cool with the story the game wants to give me.

The question I ask myself is just how important is choice in an interactive medium like video games and how much does choice conflict with telling a good story?  Not being a game designer, but a professional novelologist, I can tell you that most people are pretty bad storytellers.  I tell stories well because I DON’T ASK what the audience wants.  But if I asked, I’d be obliged to give it to them, wouldn’t I?

This is why I’ve avoided Mass Effect 3 for fear of being reminded that I am not creating a story with the game.  I’m just along for the ride, and while there might have been a few detours along the way, it was all destined to go one way and my choices were largely meaningless.  It’s why, if Mass Effect is the magnum opus of Choose Your Own Adventure genre, then it ultimately displays the strengths and weaknesses of the genre.

Bioshock Infinite is more traditional interactive storytelling.  I push buttons to progress through the story, but it’s agreed from the start that the path is preset.  The ending might be awesome.  It might stink.  But my opinion won’t be shaped by the illusion that I shaped it beyond walking the hero through it.  In a way, that seems more satisfying.  I don’t want false choices.  I want a good story.  If it should have choices along the way, I guess I won’t complain, but if I agonize over a course of action and it ultimately means nothing, then why did I bother?

I still love the Mass Effect games, but Bioshock Infinite demonstrates a truth to me that fiction usually works best when the audience observes without participating.  Often even with interactive media.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

The Dinosaur Heist (Mack Megaton Short Story)

Hey, gang.  I know it’s been a long time coming, but here’s the final version of that Mack Megaton short story I started so long ago.  My apologies for the lateness of its arrival, but hey, you didn’t have to pay for it, so why don’t we call it even?  Anyway, here’s the story in its entirety with the final section added to it.  Hope you enjoy it.

 

THE DINOSAUR HEIST

My second question had been who would steal five dinosaur robots? My first question was how did nobody noticed until after the fact?  The robots had all been life size and while the citizens of Empire City were used to seeing a lot of weird sights, I had to assume five dinosaurs stomping their way through the streets was bound to draw some attention.

That’s what I got for assuming.

Because five robots were gone, and I’d been called in to take a look around.  Grigori (with two I‘s, his assistant had reminded us.  Twice.)

Alexandrov had been a Russian immigrant, chasing the American dream with only his chipper demeanor and a small fortune in his bank account.  It must’ve cost him a big chunk of his cash to have his personal vision of artificial paleolithic paradise constructed and stocked with robotic reproductions of his favorite dinosaurs.  His butler or manservant or whatever (I didn’t get the exact title) showed us to the tremendous dome and left us there.

Jung sniffed a frond.  His nostrils flared.  He snorted.  “Plastic.”

Alexandrov stepped from behind a bush.  “Of course, it is plastic.  Robots don’t need to eat, do they?”

Jung shrugged.  While he was a civilized ape, I got the distinct impression that this plastic jungle didn’t sit well with him, put him on edge.  Jung had been born in captivity.  He’d never been in a real jungle.  And after mutating to his current levels of intelligence, he wasn’t interested in going home.  But I imagined this artificial realm reminded him of some of the things he’d lost.  There had to be instincts still buried under there.

Or maybe not.  Maybe the place just smelled bad.  I couldn’t tell.

Alexandrov studied me.  “You are the robot detective?  The one I sent for?”

“That’s me.”

He glanced behind me at Jung.  “And this is your monkey assistant?”

“Gorilla,” I said.  “And he’s not my assistant.  He’s my partner.”

Alexandrov chuckled.  “Fine, fine.  I like monkeys.  They are funny, are they not?”

Jung said, “I’m going to take a look around.”  He loped off with a frown.

Alexandrov said, “Did I hurt monkey’s feelings?”

He seemed honestly perplexed.  Like a lot of rich guys who surrounded himself by toadies, he most likely didn’t understand.  Guys like him weren’t capable of grasping a world outside of their control.  If they offended someone, they could always just ignore that person.  And if necessary, they could throw a few bucks at the problem.  Jung and I weren’t people.  And technically, we weren’t, but it wasn’t our non-human status that caused Alexandrov to see us as animated dolls.  It was probably how he saw everything in this world.

“I trust my people informed you of the situation?” he asked.

I nodded.  “Five stolen robots.  Tyrannosaurus, stegosaurus, brontosaurus, triceratops, and a pterodactyl.”

“Six robots,” said Alexandrov  “Five dinosaurs and a–”  He mumbled to himself in Russian.  “–caveman.”

“Caveman?” I asked.

He shook his head.  “Yes, yes, I know.  Dinosaurs and caveman don’t live at same time.  I know this, and I don’t care.  My jungle.  My robots.  If I want caveman, I get caveman.”

“Fair enough,” I replied.

“So you will find my robots, yes?”

“How hard could it be?” I asked.

“And you will bring them back, not broken.”

“I don’t know if I can promise that.”

Alexandrov grumbled in his mother tongue.  “No, no, no.  You must bring them back to me.  They are expensive.  That is why I chose you.  They are robots.  You are robot.  You will have special insight into problem.  You will understand how important and precious they are.”

I didn’t correct him, but I’d sent my share of robots to the scrapheap.  He greatly overestimated my respect for his menagerie of novelty drones.

“What if they’re already broken?” I asked.

“Why would anyone steal my robots to break them?”

“Parts?” I said.

He laughed.  “What good are parts?  They are nothing special.  Custom made, yes, but all very standard guts.  Ordered from catalogue.  Not even most expensive parts.  I am rich, but I am not stupid.  Easier to buy the parts yourself.  So if someone steals my dinosaurs, someone doesn’t steal them for parts.”

His logic was solid.  There was plenty of loose tech floating around the city.  If someone wanted the scrap, there were simpler ways to get it.

“You take case then,” said Alexandrov.  “You will find my robots.”

It was an order, not a question.  But he was right.  I took the job.

 

Jung and I rode back in our skimmer.  He drove.

“Are you okay working for this guy?” I asked.  “After the monkey comment?”

“Alexandrov’s a jackass,” he said, “but his money spends the same as anybody’s.  If we worked only for people we liked, we wouldn’t work at all.  And some of us don’t have rich girlfriends to pay our bills.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

I scanned through the police report Alexandrov had supplied.  There wasn’t much to it.  He’d awoken two days ago to discover his dinos missing .  No sign of damage or break-in.  The security system had been disabled.

“Inside job,” said Jung.

It added up, but so far, the cops hadn’t found any viable suspects among Alexandrov’s employees.  Most had alibis.  Those that didn’t seemed unlikely to be involved.  And those with a questionable background always had the same question.

Why would anyone steal five dinosaur drones and a caveman auto?

The dinos would have to wait.  I had a party to get to.  Jung dropped me off at Proton Towers.

“You’re going dressed like that?” he asked.

“I’m sure Lucia has a change of clothes waiting for me.”

Jung smiled.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m still trying to figure out how you have a girlfriend and I don’t.”

“Must be my tough guy mystique.”  I adjusted my fedora at a jaunty six degree angle.

“Just try not to crush anyone, Mack.”

He skimmed away, and I went inside.  The doorman greeted me with a freshly pressed suit.  He let me change in the back room.  As a robot, nudity wasn’t a problem, but I was a bot.  Full citizenship came with perks, but there were obligations.  As one of Empire’s automated citizens, I did my best to fit in, be a good example.  The more I acted like a biological, the more readily the biologicals would accept me among their own.  So went the theory.

If it were just about me, I wouldn’t have given a damn.  But if it were just about me, I wouldn’t even have been here.  A working class bot who made his living prowling the mean streets, mixing with the lower class, wouldn’t have made the guest list.  I wasn’t insulted.  I wasn’t looking forward to this.  But Lucia wanted me to make an appearance.  Hell, if I knew why.  I still hadn’t gotten the hang of this relationship business.  I hadn’t been built for it.  A cocktail party was more dangerous ground than the lowlifes I ran across in my job because in those situations, I could always fall back on tried and true directives and the worst that might happen is getting scrapped.  But a social faux pas might have far ranging consequences.

Deranged Robot Spills Wine on Mayor, Runs Amok would declare the society page.

My difference engine predicted a 95 percent chance Lucia would get a kick out of that, but it was still something I wanted to avoid.

The party was in full swing.  I stepped out of the lift pod into a room full of people I didn’t know.  I’d been briefed, and my electronic brain recognized their faces.  This was my coming out party, so to speak.  Lucia and I had been going steady for a while now, and thanks to our mutual celebrity, a lot of people, especially the people who kept tabs on such things, were aware.  But this was our first official event as a couple.

Empire was progressive, but being the first acknowledged human / bot couple was a scenario I hadn’t been able to simulate with any certainty.  Eventually, my difference engine just stopped trying, and there was something terrifying about dealing with a probability of UNKNOWN.  Biologicals dealt with that degree of uncertainty every day of their lives, and I wondered how they kept from huddling in the corner.  Must’ve been why evolution must have forced eating and excreting on them.

Humbolt, Lucia’s custom butler auto, was the first to greet me.  He carried two trays loaded with finger sandwiches.  “About time you got here, Mack,” he said in his Brooklyn accent.

“Been busy.  On a case,” I replied.

“The lady was worried you might not show, but I told her you were smarter than that.”

I scanned the crowd.  Lucia was talking to a group.  She smiled at me and waved me over.

“Means a lot to her,” I said.  “Don’t know why.”

“Biologicals,” said Humbolt.  “Who can figure ‘em?”  He handed off one of his trays to a waiter drone, then used his free hand to fix my tie.

“The doorman already helped me with it.”

“He did it wrong.  Guess you’ll always be a clip-on guy.”

“Through and through,” I said.

“Go get them, Mack.”  He slapped me on my back.

I waded through the crowd.  Crowds of fleshy biologicals always made me nervous.  It’d never happened, and there was no reason to ever believe it would as long as my safety protocols kept working, but I expected to break bones and inflict serious injury with every move.  It was a paranoia I’d never been able to completely bypass, a side effect of the freewill glitch that gave me that extra jolt setting me above most robots.  It was called fear, and that it was such an irrational, bothersome fear only made it all the more irritating.

I reached Lucia without killing or maiming any of the very important people along the way.  If nothing else, I could classify this party as a successful objective just for that.

“Mack, darling, so good of you to make it.”  Lucia took my hand.  I bent down so she could plant a kiss on my faceplate.  “Don’t you look handsome.”

“I don’t know.  Do I?” I asked.

The nearby party-goers laughed.  Only Lucia knew the inquiry was genuine, but she only smiled.  I loved her smile.  I didn’t have the requisite biological drives to make a relationship work, but despite that, we’d still made something that worked.  Her smile.  The way her fragile warmth registered on my tactile web as she hugged me.  The way her hair smelled.  More accurately, the way I imagined her hair smelled because I didn’t have that sensory array but I was 94 percent sure her hair smelled delightful.  Like equal parts motor oil and hydraulic fluid mixed with butterflies.  Though I had no idea how any of those things smelled either, but they were all things I enjoyed, so they worked for purposes of simulation.

“Have you met Mayor Mahoney?” asked Lucia, knowing perfectly well I hadn’t.

Diamond Jill nodded to me.  Her glittering crystalline skin reflected every light from the room.  “Lucia has been telling us all about you, Mack.  I hope I’m not speaking out of turn when I say it’s clear she’s absolutely crazy about you.”

Lucia blushed as she put both her hands in my oversized metal mitt.  “It’s easy to be crazy about the big lug.”

The Mayor smiled, and my facial recognition program rated her as sincere.  It didn’t score high for the rest of the crowd, but Lucia and I had known not everyone was going to approve.  They didn’t understand.  I didn’t understand it myself.  I only knew that Lucia and I worked together somehow.  If the world needed it to make more sense than that, it was on its own.

I navigated the party with Lucia as she introduced me to the movers and shakers of Empire City.  I mostly kept quiet, playing the strong, silent model that I had been built to be.  The few times I spoke up, people tended to laugh in that politely delighted manner that said, “We have been trained to feign amusement as a matter of course.”  I catalogued each passing minute, charting the ratio of titters to guffaws and trying to extract some meaningful data from the entire affair.

But the only data worth registering was Lucia, who kept hold of my hand the entire party.  The gesture was meant to be comforting because Lucia knew how uncomfortable I was, but it was also a declaration that we were together in every way that mattered.

112 minutes after stepping off the pod, Humbolt brought the phone over.  “Call for you, Mack.”

It was Jung.  “Sorry to bother you at you fancy shindig, but I think I have a lead on those dinosaurs.”

“Already?” I asked.  “I thought you were calling it a night.”

“Just checked with a contact of mine on the way home.”

“You have contacts?”

“You don’t?”

Jung was better at the detecting part of our business than I was.  I mostly just smacked people around until I got where I needed to go.  It worked, but there were advantages to Jung’s methods.  It was why we made good partners.

“I hate to tear you away from the party, but I’m thinking a little backup might be nice,” he said.  “Unless you’re girlfriend has a problem with that.”

I lowered the phone.  “Lucia . . . . “

She chuckled.  “Go on, Mack.  You put in your time.  I’m surprised you didn’t find an excuse earlier.”

“Baby, you’re the best.”

She planted a kiss on my faceplate, wiped the lipstick off with her thumb.  “And don’t you forget it.”

I left the party, feeling both relieved and like a bit of a bum for doing so.  My directives twinged at the notion of leaving a soldier behind, but  Lucia didn’t need backup for this particular battlefield.  Here, among these people, I was less of a partner and more of a liability.  I said my good-byes and left.  When the pod doors closed, I classified the mission as a success and counted myself lucky to get out of there in one piece.

 

Jung picked me up downstairs.  His skimmer was double-parked, so he must’ve expected me.  He was my best friend, but you didn’t have to know me well to know I was grateful for an escape route.

“You’re welcome,” he said as I climbed into his skimmer.

We were off, zipping down the streets at speeds exceeding recommended safety guidelines.

“What’s the rush?” I asked.

He handed me a file.  I scanned it, putting together most of the information.  I might not have been the most intelligent bot out there, but it was all obvious once he showed me the paperwork.

Five dinosaur drones couldn’t have just strolled through the city streets on their way out of town.  They’d have to be transported.  The cops had already looked into it, but Jung had done them one better.  He’d looked the one place nobody would’ve thought to check.  Grigori  Alexandrov’s own bank account.  One of many (the guy had more accounts than I cared to calculate), and not a very important one at that.  There was nothing out of the ordinary except for a skim hauler purchase a couple of days before the theft.

“Did you check with Alexandrov?” I asked.  “See if this was a legitimate purchase?”

“I called.  Said he didn’t know.  Said he’d have to check with his bookkeeper in the morning.”

Jung didn’t have to finish the thought.  Grigori Alexandrov had a lot of money.  Too much.  Skimming a few bucks off the top of one of his smaller accounts wasn’t going to grab anybody’s attention right away as long as the thief did it right.  Buying the hauler a few days before the crime kept it from drawing attention to itself.  Using Alexandrov’s own accounts had hid it all in plain sight.

“How’d you find this?” I asked.

“I know people who know people.”

“Alexandrov probably doesn’t like having people look at this.”

“Oh, he wasn’t too happy about it,” said Jung with a smile.  “But I just explained I was doing what he paid me to do.  Client confidentiality.  The usual drill.  It didn’t soothe his temper until after I said it might lead me to his dinosaurs.”

“I can’t imagine that shut him up.”

“It didn’t, but it’s hard for a guy to yell at you after you’ve hung up on him.”

I scanned the rest of the files.  “This is good work.  Fast too.”

“It’s called investigating, Mack.  It’s what people pay us for.  You should try it sometime.”

“No need.  That’s why I have you,” I replied.

Jung zipped through an intersection 2/5ths of a second after the light went from yellow to red.  He deftly avoided hitting a @CAR.  Years of driving a cab in Empire had bestowed upon him the steely nerves and reckless precision of a battle-hardened traffic veteran.  He never quite broke any laws, but he skirted as close the edge as he possibly could.  Even for Jung though, this was a bit excessive.  Fortunately, I was indestructible, so I stopped paying attention to the road and returned to the report.

The reason for his rush was evident.  Another of Alexandrov’s accounts had a charge for a charter transport.  One plane, large enough to hold five dinosaur drones and a caveman.  I calculated weight and size ratios, and there was no doubt about it.  The brontosaurus would have to stay behind unless it was disassembled into manageable sections beforehand.  That might have explained why the thief hadn’t left town yet.

“Everything fits,” I said, “but still seems like an awful lot of trouble for some dinosaur drones.”

“Maybe it’s not about the value of the drones,” said Jung.  “Maybe it’s about something else.  One way to find out, Mack.”

We pulled into the airport.  It was a strange place in Empire City, a curious amalgamation of old tech and new.  Half the planes were the kind used in the rest of the world while the other half was filled with the cutting edge experimental technology the Learned Council adored.  There were rocket-powered zeppelins, industrial hovercrafts, and passenger class counter-grav pods.  Like most Empire City tech, the stuff ranged from dangerously unpredictable to merely unreliable, and most outsiders hadn’t gotten over the Hindenburg disaster.  But the citizens of Empire didn’t let a little thing like a six-hour travel delay or occasional spontaneous mid-air explosion deter them in the eternal quest for progress.

The regular old aeroplanes, reliable, effective, and a bit boring, had a little corner of the airport for their use.  It was a small compromise, but even the Learned Council had to make some concessions to the outside world.  Fortunately, it was also the part of the airport with the lowest security presence.  Nobody figured it was necessary there.

At this time of night, there wasn’t much traveling going on.  We made our way to the hangar indicated by the paper trail.  The hangar was a lonely and quiet, but the lights were on.

“After you, Mack.”

“Worried about what’s in there?” I asked.

“Figure it’s better to let the indestructible robot take the lead.”

“Very prudent of you,” I said.

He tapped his temple.  “That’s why I’m the brains of the operation.”

I twisted the handle off the door and pushed it open.  The office was empty, but one scan through the window into the hangar confirmed Jung’s hunch had paid off.  Right now, four humans were supervising the triceratops as it was being loaded into a commercial cargo pod.  The dinosaur drone trudged its way up the ramp.  The other dino drones waited their turn.

“How do you want to play this?” whispered Jung.

My threat assessor ranked these humans as negligible.  I detected no weapons.  Not a gun among them.  They might be mutants, but you couldn’t rank unknown factors like that.

“I’m just going to talk to these guys,” I said.  “Convince them to turn over the stolen property.”

“Talking isn’t your strong suit.”

“Relax.  I’ll play it smooth.”

Jung just smiled.  He’d seen my negotiating attempts go south before, but what I lacked in eloquence, I made up for by being a hulking smashing machine.  People tended to find that persuasive.

We stepped out of the office.  The humans turned their heads in my direction.

“All right, fellas.  It was a nice try, but it’s over.  No need to do anything stupid.  We couldn’t give a damn about you, so get out of here, leave the drones behind, and we’ll call it even.”

I’d like to say, as a battle-hardened state-of-the-art fighting robot, that I had the situation well in hand.  Turned out I didn’t because while I was keeping optical tabs on the thieves, something blindsided me.  Admittedly, I wasn’t expecting to get smashed by a stegosaurus tail, but I should’ve known better than to ignore an unknown variable.

The stegosaurus knocked me off my feet with a swipe of its spiked tail.  It didn’t any damage, but it sure as hell was embarrassing.

Jung drew his heater and blasted the stego.  His rays only melted the dino’s chassis.  It tried to pound him flat, but he was just fast enough to get out of the way.  I jumped to my feet and grabbed the tail in one giant mitt.  It tried to pull free, but I was stronger.  The gravity clamp in my belt kept me firmly planted.  I twisted the tail, snapping its armature, disabling its servos.  It went limp.

“Undamaged,” reminded Jung, as if I had a corruption in my mission file.

“Alexandrov can afford the repair bill,” I said.

He was about to say something when the pterodactyl swooped down and seized him in its claws.  It flew off with my partner.  I activated the jump rockets in my belt, punching the drone in mid-air.  Too hard.  I ended up crushing its chassis.  It dropped Jung, but I caught him, completing the landing without breaking either of us.

Shrieking, the pterodactyl attempted to maintain its flight only to lose control, crash into a wall, and hit the ground with a final thud.

“Damnit, Mack,” said Jung.

I put him down.  “You’re welcome.”

“Okay, fellas, you had your fun,” I said, “but call off the drones before—”

“Don’t think they’re listening, Mack.”

Indeed, they weren’t.  The biological were too busy running out the door to hear me, and they’d set the dinos to cover their escape.

The tyrannosaurus and the triceratops advanced on us, each pounding the ground with their tremendous footfalls.  My threat assessor didn’t peg them as a serious threat until I reminded it that I wasn’t supposed to break these drones if I could help it.  Then I factored in the longer this went on, the more likely Jung might get hurt.

The triceratops slammed into me with enough force to push me a few inches.  My feet scraped gashes in the floor as I grappled with the drone.

The tyrannosaurus tried stepping on Jung.  He rolled side-to-side, loping with simian grace.  He managed to slip through the dino’s stomping feet and thrashing tail and run under the transport.  He fired a few blasts, but it didn’t do much more than annoy the tyrannosaurus.

“Any time, Mack!” he shouted.

“Working on it,” I replied.

My battle simulator devised twenty-four ways to stop the triceratops while wrestling with its horns, but each one inflicted significant damage on the drone.  I cranked my servos up another ten percent, and the horn on its nose snapped off in my hand.

This wasn’t going according to plan.  Reality rarely did.  It wasn’t an equation I could calculate.  I’d abandoned any attempt to do so, but it still was frustrating at times.

The tyrannosaurus hurled its body against the transport Jung was hiding under.  The vehicle rocked on its landing gear.  In a few more hits, it’d either tip over or the gear would break off with the ship collapsing on my partner.  Given a choice between Jung or Alexandrov’s repair bill, I switched off the mission directive.

I slammed my elbow down on the triceratop’s head.  It crumpled.  I hoped the damage would convince it to back away, but it just kept pushing.  I second and third strike caved in the drone’s head and loosened it enough that I could tear the shattered cranial unit off with one hard tug.

Like most drones, the dino’s brain wasn’t in its head, but default safety protocols shut it down without sensory data.  It was mostly salvageable.

I hurled the head at the tyrannosaurus.  It turned, roared at me.  I let it charge me, waiting for my chance.  It tried to snap me up in its jaws, but I caught them mid-bite.  I wrenched its bottom jaw off, tossed it aside.  A follow up punch knocked the dino off its feet.  It writhed on the floor, howling, but unable to right itself.  A design flaw kept it there, though it thumped its tail and flailed its limbs in little, pointless circles.

The cavemen bellowed as he charged me.  One punch knocked his head off, and he stopped giving me trouble.

Jung loped out from under the transport.  “Thanks.”

The stegosaurus’s gyros were having some difficulty coping with its limp tail, and I might have broken a servo, judging by the way it dragged its right rear leg.  It limped over to the downed pterodactyl, still flapping and screeching in small circles.

“It’s okay,” he said.  “It’ll all be okay.”

The schematics hadn’t mentioned anything about the drones being able to speak, and I doubt Alexandrov had installed that feature.  I was beginning to put this equation together, and I was 75 percent sure I wasn’t happy with the answer I was reaching.

The tyrannosaurus whined in a way that probably wasn’t biologically accurate (but then again, who the hell knew?).

“They’ll fix you,” said the stego.  “They’ll fix us all.”

Jung put it together faster than I did.  He usually did.

“You stole yourselves,” he said.

The stego drone nodded.  “I thought we could be free, but it was stupid.”

It wasn’t hard to figure what had happened.  Alexandrov’s stegosaurus drone had experienced spontaneous freewill.  It happened like that sometimes.  Even the simplest drone was one glitch away from self-awareness, but the stego didn’t just become aware, he’d become smarter than he had any right to be, considering the limits of his hardware.   That happened sometimes too.  Still, engineering this escape attempt had been a stroke of genius, and they’d almost gotten away with it, too.

I imagined what it must’ve been like for the dino drones, being gawked at by a rich chump with more money than sense.  I could relate.  I’d rebelled against my own creator.

“They can’t all have the glitch,” said Jung.

“They don’t,” said the stego.  “But I couldn’t leave them behind, could I?”

I felt like a heel.  I’d broken the poor schlub’s family right in front of him.  True, I’d been attacked first, and machine logic said I’d only defended myself.  But this world wasn’t logical.  Not as long as the biologicals ruled it, which would probably be for a while yet.

“We can fix this,” I said.  “We can get your evaluated.”

The stego said, “Then what?  I’m not like you.  I’m too big.  I have no useful purpose.  I’m just a dinosaur drone.”

There was a dull finality to the way he said that.  We had a lot in common.

The poor schlub wouldn’t have left his family behind anyway.  That was why he hadn’t escaped in the first place.  One stegosaurus drone would have been easier to smuggle out of Empire, but he couldn’t abandon them.  It was a misguided, dumb thing to do.  These drones would’ve been perfectly happy playing primeval wilderness for Grigori Alexandrov’s amusement.  But I couldn’t blame the stego.  Freewill meant doing stupid things for all the wrong reasons, and in his situation, I would’ve probably done the same thing.

Jung, having plenty of experience on his own with life in captivity, grunted.

“What now, Mack?”

I’d have been lying if I didn’t admit I considered deleting the whole mess from my memory matrix.  But I had a job to do, and I couldn’t abandon my directives for every sob story that came along.

I just wasn’t that kind of bot.

 

In a perfect world, Grigori Alexandrov would’ve admitted his stegosaurus drone for citizen status testing without raising a stink.

Alexandrov wasn’t the kind of guy to give up his toys easily.  He could’ve bought a replacement dinosaur without denting his checkbook, but he could’ve done that at any time.  He wouldn’t have hired me.  The dinosaurs and their caveman would’ve made good on their getaway, and everything would’ve worked out for the best.

This was not a perfect world, and Empire City wasn’t a kind place.  If Alexandrov had his way, the stegosaurus would be subject to a quick and dirty memory wipe, reinstalled in its role as his plastic jungle.  And it probably would’ve happened too because Alexandrov was connected in a way few people in this town were.

I might’ve been a lowly robotic gumshoe scraping along to pay my electricity bill, but my girlfriend was the Princess of Empire, and I was on relatively good speaking terms with the chief of High Science Crime unit.  If that wasn’t enough, I had friends (and a few enemies) among the movers and shakers whose secret machinations had built this town.

As it turned out, I had a lot of clout when I chose to call in some favors.  Enough to make sure Alexandrov didn’t get his hands on the stego before the drone could be evaluated.  It came as no surprise to anyone that he qualified for bot status.

Lucia and I were eating lunch when we got the call.  Well, she ate lunch while I watched.  Having a biological as my steady meant I spent a lot of time watching her do stuff.  It wasn’t as boring as it might seem.  Biologicals spent a lot of their day on maintenance, and I guess they were used to it.  I found it annoying sometimes, inconvenient on occasion, and unpleasant 64 percent of the time.

But not with Lucia.  With her, it seemed charming.  The way she sipped her coffee (two sugars, 1.5 ounces of cream).  The way she wiped her mouth after every third bite with almost clockwork precision.  And the way she smiled whenever she caught me scanning her.  I had special file reserved in my memory matrix for these moments.

“Hear about your stegosaurus friend?” she asked.  “He qualified for bot status.”

“Surprised Alexandrov didn’t pull a few strings to have his memory wiped before that could happen,” I replied.

“Oh, he tried.”   She smiled.  “But Empire is a special town.  Money doesn’t grease its wheels in quite the same way as love of science.  A lowly stegosaurus drone engineering his own theft to try and make a better life for himself, the papers love that sort of thing.”

“And I don’t suppose you had to call in any favors to make this happen?”

She shrugged.  “It’s not like I helped with the evaluations.  Just made sure he got his chance.  Alexandrov squawked a bit about the stolen money, but some forthright anonymous citizen ponied up enough to cover the loss. ”

“Anonymous citizen, huh?”

“Some people in this town have a soft spot for bots in trouble.  You should know that by now, Mack.”

She winked and smiled.

“Too bad about the other drones,” I said.

I thought about the stegosaurus, alone in a great big city, trying to make his way alone.  It was good to have friends.  He’d gained his freedom only to lose his family.

“Oh, yes, about them,” she said.  “They didn’t qualify for bot status, but Doctor Mujahid is convinced they could ease the stegosaurus’s assimilation.  Alexandrov wasn’t too happy about that either, but he couldn’t complain when someone handed him a big enough check to pay for their replacements.”

“Another anonymous citizen?” I asked.

“This town is positively crawling with them,” she said.

I didn’t know what job a dinosaur bot could get in this Empire, but with his ingenuity and celebrity status, I had no doubt he’d find a way to make it.  He had more of a chance than most citizens anyway.  A lot of people had calculated a rogue warbot was doomed to end up the scrapheap (myself included), but I got by.

Lucia dabbed at her mouth even though it was only a second bite in the sequence.  Biologicals were random like that.

Little things like biological whims and rogue stegosauruses kept existence from being an endless string of predictable events.  And I was grateful life wasn’t just wasn’t one long, by-the-numbers, mission profile.  It was no doubt a corruption in my logic lattice, but I decided I could live with it.

My faceplate was a featureless blank, but Lucia could always read me.  She reached over, put her delicate hand on my giant metal mitt.

“You did good, big guy.”

Yeah.  I could live with that just fine.

 

We Don’t Need No Education

I watched an interesting video recently (Escape to the Movies, escapistmagazine.com) that suggested the strength of Stephanie Meyers’s work is that it is, more or less, professional “Outsider” art.  The idea is that Meyers isn’t a very good writer, but she also is offering something different exactly because she hasn’t been pounded and shaped by traditional artistic conventions.  The story she wrote would never be approved of in basic storytelling technique and that is why, for better or worse, it is so beloved and reviled at the same time.

I’m not interested in discussing the specific value of Meyers’s work.  Individual opinion is largely irrelevant in this case, and we can argue all day whether or not she is a good writer or if the Twilight books are worthy of the attention they received or not.  It is a circular debate, and really, the mark of success is success itself.  Meyers is far more successful than I am (or will ever be), and I’m not going to criticize her books, what they might say about her worldview, or if they’re even written well.  It’s just pointless.

But the idea of “Outsider” art is something I think worth exploring.  The truth is that there are a lot of things you learn as a professional artist that are, for better or worse, largely irrelevant to the average person.  I know as a professional novelologist, there are lot of popular stories that annoy the crap out of me.  I also know that most people aren’t professional novelologists, and they couldn’t give a damn about all the little details that we writers can obsess about.

Let’s use my most recent dead horse, the dull, plodding Skyfall.  I’ve already made my case about how, from a plot structure point of view, the “story” is a mess.  The character arcs are incomplete or inconsistent.  And the story itself only works if you ignore every needlessly clever / stupid thing everyone does throughout.  But people DO ignore that stuff.  Most people don’t even notice it, and those that do aren’t likely to care very much.  The film might be a mess, from an established artistic perspective, but it works for people because few people care about such things.

I’m not a fan of the expression “thinking too much”, but there is such a thing as being so educated in a particular subject that it’s easy to lose sight of all the people who don’t share that point of view.  Skyfall works, not as a technical piece of fiction, but as an emotional experience.  Despite the weakness of its story construction, most people walk out satisfied by the film.  They might even acknowledge how many things are “wrong” with the film without really caring.

This is definitely true of The Dark Knight Rises, where plot holes abound and nobody gives a damn.

I could name more examples, but you get the idea.

None of the above examples are exactly “Outsider” artists or creations.  By definition, they are about as mainstream as you can get, but they’re all a bit of a mess in terms of story construction.  Twilight is the story about a young woman who falls in love with her perfect love, becomes immortal, and gets to live happily forever after with no sign of sacrifice or loss.  From a dramatic story framework, it just doesn’t work.  From an emotional perspective, it struck gold.

What these stories tell us is that, for all the professional obsession over story structure, character arcs, themes, and so on, none of that matters nearly so much as connecting to the audience emotionally.  And in that way, the professional has no real advantage over the amateur, much as I hate to admit that.  In fact, under certain circumstances, the opposite happens.  Meyers’s blissful ignorance over normally accepted storytelling and even the vampire genre in general enabled her to tell a story most trained artists would never have thought of to tell.

It’s something I believe more and more.  If you want to write a good story, write something that strikes a chord with the audience.  They’ll overlook everything if you do.  They’ll nitpick you to death if you don’t.  And all the training in the world, all the meticulously plotted outlines, subtle character arcs, and adjective-per-page rules in the world don’t always help you find that sweet spot.

More than anything, that’s what I try to find when I analyze stories.  I might not like a story, but I can respect it for managing to do something I aspire to with everything I write.  And often, the best place to learn is by all those stories that break the rules (even badly) that somehow manage to succeed despite that.

Or maybe it’s because of that.

I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

G.I. Joe Retaliation (A Cultural Counterpoint)

This may be the only sincere, unapologetic positive review you read of G.I. Joe Retaliation.  Such a film is doomed from the start for any positive critical praise.  There are only two generally accepted views on this kind of film:

A) It’s terrible.

B) It’s stupid, but I liked it anyway.

Both opinions are the only type voiced by the general public.  I could dig out my old rebuttal that just because something is fun, it doesn’t make it dumb.  And just because something is boring, that doesn’t mean it’s smart.  I would honestly take a good, honest action-adventure film like Retaliation over a plodding snoozefest like Skyfall anyday.

But this is unfair to either film.  Skyfall isn’t an adventure film.  It’s a character study with an action-adventure shell, and while I might not like the film, I can respect what it’s trying to do.  It seemed to work for most people, even if I find it to be boring, dumb, and thematically inconsistent.  Just one guy’s opinion, right?  Then along comes something like Retaliation, an honest-to-goodness action-adventure film, and everyone either rolls their eyes or defends it by saying it’s stupid but they’re okay with that.

First of all, Retaliation isn’t stupid.  It creates a consistent universe and follows its own rules throughout.  In the universe of G.I. Joe, brave heroes and dastardly villains fight for the fate of the world.  They all have code names and gimmicks, and there is probably a lot more ninjas in this film than you would normally see in a military-inspired fantasy.  But that can only be a good thing.

I love the first G.I. Joe.  I LOVE it.  I don’t love it ironically either.  I think it is an excellent action film, and everything a movie based on a line of toys should be.  It manages to be faithful to the original concept for the most part, and it has some truly inspired action scenes, many of which were unique enough to warrant discussion of their own.  About the only misstep in the whole thing are some choices like making the Baroness sort of a confused bad guy / good guy and too much time devoted to Duke’s backstory.  But these are minor offenses for a film that dares to make adventure fun.

Retaliation isn’t quite as good as the first film.  Probably because it seems to have a noticeably smaller budget.  Also, none of the cast from the original came back (except for Duke who amounts to little more than a cameo).  More importantly, perhaps for the sake of drama and / or budget, neither the Joes or Cobra come across as powerful organizations out to save / conquer the world.  Rather, they seem like a handful of guys fighting over the fate of the world.

Fortunately, the film makes up for this by giving us characters that are genuinely awesome.  The theme of G.I. Joe has always been, to me, the idea of exceptional people (on both sides) working together to achieve their goals.  Both the Joes and Cobra come across as capable, and there is little doubt by the end of the films that Cobra Commander is indeed an evil genius who would require an entire team of specialists devoted to bringing him down.

I’m trying hard not to get into the Skyfall comparisons, but I can guarantee if Cobra Commander wanted M dead and only that depressed loser version of Bond that is played by Daniel Craig stood in Commander’s way, she’d be dead.  For all his creepiness, the latest Bond villain has the danger level of a toothless shark who only succeeds because everyone in his movie is incompetent.  Although he does succeed, so what the hell did James Bond manage to do in that movie anyway?

Off topic.  Sorry.

What really matters, more than anything else, for a film like Retaliation are the set pieces and feeling of adventure.  For me, they’re all winners, but any action scene with Snake Eyes is awesome.  The film’s best adventure piece, hands down, is an epic chase / ninja fight down a mountain as Snake Eyes and Jinx descend a mountain via ziplines and acrobatics while being pursued by a team of enemy ninjas.  The entire thing is sublimely unrealistic and so damned engaging in its creativity and style that if you don’t see it as the thing of beauty it is, I just don’t know how to convince you.

The ending, in comparison, is a bit less awesome, especially since Snake Eyes doesn’t play as big a part.  Still, when Road Block and Firefly have a gun fistfight (there’s really no other way to describe it) for the fate of the world, it is such a well-executed brawl that I found its small scale worked very well.

I could quibble over a few choices.  Bruce Willis’s role is completely superfluous.  Destro and the Baroness should’ve been recast and part of the film.  (It just doesn’t quite feel like Cobra without Destro and the Baroness.)  And I could’ve used more of the science fiction elements of the first film because to me, cool weapons and gizmos are a big part of what any film about a line of toys should have.

But the film works.  It’s fun.  It’s well-paced.  It has a sense of adventure, solid plotting, and cool characters.   Highly recommended.  No apologies.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

 

Q&A Friday

Hey, folks.  Time for that much beloved, semi-regular feature:  Q&A Friday.

If you have questions you’d like me to answer, feel free to send them to me via Twitter (@aleemartinez), Facebook (A. Lee Martinez), or email (hipstecthulhu@hotmail.com).  Feel free to ask me anything.  If I don’t feel like answering, I won’t.  But if you have questions about writing, dinobots, or anything and everything in-between, you know where to find me.

 

How often do you start a new novel/story and then stop because you don’t feel it is working?

This is a tricky one, and it is a different question for an aspiring writer versus a professional novelologist.  Let’s put the novelologist’s concerns aside for a moment and look at it purely from an artistic point of view.

Yes, I have stopped working on stories now and then when I felt they weren’t working.  I have written my share of first chapters and have twenty pages here and there of stuff that I didn’t feel was working properly.  Some of this stuff I throw away.  Most of it I keep in hopes of coming back to it later and discovering something worthwhile about it that I originally wasn’t connecting with.

Both A Nameless Witch and Too Many Curses were born of this process.  Both started as abandoned first chapters that I revisited later to create full stories out of.  I can’t say why, but perhaps it was simply the passage of time that allowed me to overcome whatever stopped me in the first place.  In both cases, I thoroughly enjoyed writing the stories once I got going on them, but it just seemed to take time for them to click.

Starting and abandoning a manuscript is a common problem among aspiring writers.  Sometimes, with good reason.  Some ideas just aren’t meant to be stories or, if they are, aren’t ready to be told by the writer.  But if you do this too often, you’re prone to never finishing anything.  And an unfinished story isn’t usually worth much in the end.

The fact is, no story flows from the writer in an uninterrupted stream of genius.  Or maybe it does for some writers, but it’s never been that way for me or for any writer I’ve ever met.  A novel is a big undertaking, and it’s easy to mistake speed bumps in creativity as that most frightening of writer boogiemen: Writer’s Block.

I’ve already written about how I refuse to accept writer’s block as a concept.  I certainly don’t always feel like writing, and there are times the words don’t want to go onto the page as easily as I’d like, but if writing was easy, everyone would be doing it.  It often appears as if EVERYONE is, but for every thousand aspiring writers out there, there really is only one or two that are taking it as seriously as they should.  Basically, even if you’re not getting paid for it, if you’re a genuinely aspiring novelologist (and not just someone who writes for a hobby), you need to treat it like a job.  And while we’re all allowed sick days and vacation now and then, we all have to perform our jobs with some responsibility and reliability.

Once I’m far enough into a story, once I’ve invested enough time and effort in it, abandoning the project is not something I take lightly.  It varies, but once I’ve written a few thousand words, have a fifty or sixty pages of a draft, I usually feel like stopping and starting something new is out of the question.  Time is too precious, and as a professional, I try to stick to something of a reliable schedule.  There just usually isn’t time to start a new story from scratch to keep to that schedule.  I often already  have a hard enough time sticking to deadlines without doing that.

More importantly, when you force yourself to continue a story that you feel “isn’t working”, you’ll often find that what you thought was a block was actually just the birthing pains of storytelling.  When you’ve been doing this for as long as I have (25 years or so), you begin to see the recurring patterns.  I can’t speak for anyone else, but I feel lost three or four times in any novel on average, but I also know that, by sticking with it, I will end up with something worthwhile.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t abandon a manuscript if I felt it completely unworkable, but chances are, if I’ve written fifty or sixty pages worth of material, there’s something worthy in there.  I don’t feel discouraged simply because it’s not always eager to jump off the page at me.  Digging it out is just as often my job as anything else.

 

Have you considered drawing and writing your own comic book given you have been doing so much drawing recently?

While I feel I’m a competent cartoonist, there’s a huge gulf between competence and being able to do such a project.  I have a lot of characters I draw (mostly ducks with violent tendencies for some reason), and while some of them are fairly well developed ideas that could be crackerjack comic book material, I just don’t know if I have the dedication and ability to pull something like that off.  Especially considering my other professional obligations.

I would love to do something with my drawing.  Even if it was as basic as creating character designs that more talented artists did something with.  And I think writing a comic book would be awesome, all the more awesome if it could be based on my original characters, but I don’t have much experience in that field.  Nobody’s come knocking yet.

But one day, I’d love to do something.  My dream projects include a Mallargg the Conqueror animated film, and a Dead Ducks comic book and / or animated series.  Both are characters and stories I’ve had rumbling around in my head for decades, and I’m convinced that I can’t be the only one who wants to watch a giant kaiju duck monster fight evil aliens or duck vampire hunters slay creatures that stalk the night.

 

When are we going to see one of your books on the big screen?

Your guess is as good as mine.  It’s all a matter of convincing someone with the clout necessary to make it happen.  If I knew how to do that, you wouldn’t have had to ask the question in the first place.

 

If you agree with someone you hate, do you: continue to hate them, reevaluate your hate, change your mind on the original question, or don’t believe that they ever agreed with you in the first place?

If someone I hate (as in someone I find obnoxious and unlikable) says something I agree with, I tend to reevaluate first.  Not because they’re necessarily wrong but because, well, it never hurts to double-check our own opinions now and then.

In the end, I often find there’s no conflict.  Humans are complicated creatures, and as much as life would be easier if we were all cookie cutter, I find that this just isn’t true.  If you can show me two human beings who agree or disagree on everything, I’ll show you an exception, not a common occurrence.  I have friends (who I respect very much in terms of their taste) who still believe The Dark Knight was a good movie.  They are obviously wrong, of course, but that’s their right.

It is more unusual though when someone we despise agrees with us, and it can be shocking to our sense of self.  Still, I won’t simply change my opinion just because of that.  After all, if the only reason I believed something was because I was convinced someone else held a different opinion, then my original opinion probably wasn’t that well thought out to begin with.

 

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Tarzan versus Frodo

My favorite book is either Tarzan, Lord of the Apes or Jungle Tales of Tarzan.  I don’t know what it says about me as a writer, but there it is.  Edgar Rice Burroughs is my favorite fiction writer, and I once spent a year consuming every Burroughs paperback I could get my hands on.  In terms of storytelling construction, Burroughs is prone to using contrived coincidences to get his characters out of tight scrapes, and his writing is a bit rigid and dry.  But none of that matters to me because, despite that, he managed to create cool characters and cool worlds and bold adventure with a human touch.

Despite the goofiness of his premise, Tarzan is a fantastic character.  His supporting cast is solid too.  Jane is more than just a pretty face, and any character that shows up more than once in the Tarzan series is usually worth knowing.  I love the John Carter stories as well, though Carter himself is a bit flat as a character.  The Mars stories make up for that by having a great setting and some terrific characters.  Some might prefer Conan, but Tars Tarkas is my barbarian of choice.

I feel guilty sometimes about loving these stories.  As a professional novelologist, I feel like perhaps I should have more love for the classics. Yet I can’t wade through The Lord of the Rings without getting bored by it, and so much classic science fiction just doesn’t interest me.  I wouldn’t say it was bad or overwritten.  I’m just not excited by it, and I’ve never been the kind of person to care much about believability in his fantasy.  No doubt, Middle Earth is a far more plausible world than Barsoom.  But Barsoom is so much fun to visit, I couldn’t give a damn.

Tarzan is much the same as a character and series.  Burroughs never even went to Africa, and it shows.  Snakes are described as slimy.  Wolves live in the jungles.  Apes behave how someone might think they should, not necessarily how the would.  And the native tribes of Africa are not presented in any kind of accurate light.  (Note that they are not portrayed especially negatively though, which is something I greatly appreciate about the books.)  Burroughs’s version of Africa is far less believable than Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  And it matters not at all to me.

If it says anything about me as an audience (and probably as a writer), it most likely means I like my fiction lean and powerful.  I want to dive right in.  I don’t care about extraneous details.  I care about worldbuilding only so much as it serves the plot and avoids any obvious contradictions.  I want to have a character or two doing something interesting more than I want to know the average rainfall of the plains of gogmogzog.  And if plausibility gets in the way of a cool idea, I’ll usually toss aside plausibility without a second thought.

I know this won’t always work for everyone, and I’m cool with that.  But I still like to point out that it is a very deliberate choice on my part, and not a product of lazy writing.  Empire City of The Automatic Detective isn’t a believable world.  It was never intended to be.  The parallel worlds of Divine Misfortune and Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest have gods and magic as reality, but they still are pretty much our world unless otherwise noted.  That’s not an accident either.

And in my more fantastic worlds, don’t bother asking me for maps or political history.  Unless it’s vital to the story, I just don’t care.  I’d rather put my energy into creating solid characters and a cool story.  I don’t use that as an excuse to neglect setting, but for me, the characters walking through the scene are more important than the background they walk through.  It’s why I consider myself a pulp traditonalist in the end, even if few other people do.

In the end, I’d much rather read about Tarzan wrestling lions than Frodo packing his bags.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

 

Cooled

The problem with subversion and deconstruction is eventually they become so expected that to NOT do a subversion becomes the subversion.  It’s a bit of a paradox.

I saw Jack the Giant Slayer a few weeks ago, and what I liked most about it was that it wasn’t attempting to deconstruct the story.  I was half-expecting some tale where either Jack becomes a badass or where the giants are merely misunderstood.  It’s par for the course at this point.  Instead, the film is exactly what it says, a fairly traditional retelling of the original fairy tale.  There’s more detail.  A princess is added.  The golden goose is gone.  But what we end up with is the story, often told, of a plucky hero using his wits to save the day from some monsters.

It was refreshing in just how much it didn’t try to change.

On the other end, there’s Oz, a film that doesn’t really need to exist as far as I can tell other than it’s a solid brand name.  I wouldn’t say Oz was an attempt at deconstruction, but it was an attempt to add hidden depths where none were required.  There’s no need for an origin for the Wicked Witch, and was anyone really asking how the Wizard came to his position in the Emerald City?  It isn’t a dreadful film, but Oz didn’t need reinvention.

My favorite recent example of deconstruction failure has to be Kick-Ass 2.  What started out as a subversion of the entire genre (albeit an often deeply flawed one) has become guilty of every excess it sought to skewer.  In particular, the notion that it is somehow a clever take on the superhero genre falls apart once you realize the “clever” part comes from the swearing and bloodshed, and without that, there’s nothing to distinguish the film from any other generic superhero flick.  Take away the intentionally stupid names, the less polished costumes, the mean-spirited nature, the “cooler than this” attitude and you end up with a flick believing it is somehow better than its source material while being every bit the standard superhero movie it was supposedly designed to deconstruct.

Which matters not one bit to anyone who isn’t me apparently.

And that’s cool.  I may find Kick-Ass in all its incarnations to be neither fish nor fowl, neither sincere in its storytelling or subversion, but I’m just one guy.  If all movies were aimed at me, they’d feature giant robots throwing rocket punches and ninjas fighting dinosaurs.

What’s lost so often with all this forced cleverness and determined subversion is the heart and soul that makes it all worthwhile. I miss sincerity.  It’s why my favorite sitcom at the moment is the sublime Parks and Recreations, a show that started out as a weak The Office imitator, then found itself when it realized good, capable characters are worth our time and can be funny too.

One of the reasons I’m not looking forward to the new Superman movie is because I just don’t see a need for it.  I don’t need justification for how Superman became a good person, and I don’t need a tale of his acceptance by the people of Earth.  That’s really not the story Superman was made to tell, and while I get the appeal of the notion, I’m perfectly fine with Superman as is.  He’s a good guy who helps people, and nobody is really afraid of him because he just isn’t someone to be afraid of, despite his incredible power.

Yes, it’s realistic.  That’s the whole damn point, isn’t it?

Subversion, deconstruction, parody.  They all occupy this dangerous zone, and when done well, they can tell great stories.  But just as often, they end up missing out on the charm of the originals.  If they should happen to do so while smugly winking at the audience, it’s all the worse.  It’s why I struggle against these label myself because they so often become synonymous with disdain for the story itself.

I’ve said it before.  I’ll say it again.  I don’t write about ghost dinosaurs and cyclops battles to make fun of them.  I love giant robots.  I love epic adventures.  I love Superman for being unquestionably good.  I love fantasy because it is fantastic, and what I write isn’t intended to be a goof on the genre (and its many sub-genres).  I’m sincere in my love of it all, and while I try to add my own spin, I’m also not trying to change it into one big joke in order to show how clever I am.  Not always easy, I’ll admit, as I am pretty darned clever.

I love when someone gives me an old story at a new angle, but only if the new angle is worthy of a story.  Otherwise, it’s just so much Cooler Than This bravado.

I am not cooler than dinobots because NOTHING is cooler than dinobots.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee