Sidney Blaylock Jr.'s Blog, page 54

152 Hours

152 Hours.  That’s how long the email from PlayStation congratulating me on completing Mass Effect Andromeda says that I played ME:A.  I wasn’t shocked as I knew that I had put a lot of time into it, but what was surprising was how much of the time wasn’t utilized well in terms of the story.

Story is important for narratives, be they games, books, movies, or any other entertainment medium that depends on narrative.  What I’ve learned with ME:A is that I can’t waste time with diversions in my stories because only about 60 hours of content in ME:A was actually story focused and interesting.  If not for my desire to finish the game, I would have abandoned it as YouTuber did recently.  

I won’t say that my time was wasted as I can try to store those narratives and repurpose them for my own uses, but I will say that ME:A wasn’t as impactful and engrossing as it could have been–because it was about 70 hours longer than it should have been.  152 Hours isn’t an inconsiderable amount of time and the story- tellers need to make sure that their content matches the investment of time that they ask the audience to engage with their narratives. 152 hours shouldn’t be a marathon, but an adventure!

Trying Something A Little Different

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I’m trying something a little new with my writing–I’m actually trying to write daily, but since I don’t have my computer (more on that in a different post) I’ve gone back to pen and paper.

What I’m trying now is to write a little bit a day and then over the weekend when I have more time take the writing on pen and paper and transfer it to the computer.

This is actually only the first week that I’ve tried this so I’ll report back here next week on how well I thought it worked out. I’m trying to be a more reflexive writer and be more aware of what works and what doesn’t.

I need to work on my consistency–I’ve known this for a while now, but I haven’t really put any strategies in place to help me, so I’m trying this out in the hopes of becoming a more consistent (and successful) writer.

Submissions: An Introspection

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Pen and Writer, Image Source: Shut Up and Write

Okay, I finally think that I have a system together to deal with submissions effectively.  It has taken me close to a year and half to develop this system so that it is effective (for me, at least), but I have refined and refined it over the past year and a half so that now I spend less time stressing over rejections and more time getting the work out and into the hands of markets.  I try my best to ascertain whether my story is appropriate for the market based on their guidelines and the stories that are on their websites/in the journals and/or magazines, but at the end of the day it is still a crapshoot as my taste in fiction apparently runs counter to “modern” (I would say, more nihilistic) sensibilities.  As a LibraryDella, a reader of this blog and librarian who has read my work, would tell you, some of my stories don’t end happily.  But, for the most part they do–LibraryDella just happened to read and respond to the batch that didn’t (sorry about that , LibraryDella! :)).  Anyway, today I wanted to talk about a little bit more about submissions to markets and my submission process.

Trailblazing New Markets

So, I use Duotrope to find new markets and to track the temporary opening and closing of submission periods throughout short fiction market (and novels once I start writing & submitting them).  Duotrope charges a yearly subscription, but I find that their service allows me to better track other submission opportunities (like anthologies, for instance) to help me publish more widely.  Their are other places to find markets–The Submissions Grinder–comes quickly to mind that are free, so please don’t feel that this post is an advertisement for Duotrope.  I just happen to like Duotrope’s layout, tracking services, etc., and it works best for my workflow.  I use Duotrope’s weekly newsletters to find out about new markets and opportunities for my stories.  From there, I try to figure out which markets my stories would be best suited to which markets and then submit.

8.88%

Currently, thanks to my Acceptances earlier this year and late last year, my Acceptance ratio is 8.88% (and Duotrope notes that this is above average).  I’m not bragging–I just want to point out how hard it is to write professionally and creatively.  A major league baseball player is considered successful hitting at .250-.350 range.  A creative writer, it seems, is “successful” at a much smaller range (just below 10%) according to Duotrope, at least.  So that’s on average, 1 in every 10 submissions, or in my case (approximately, 8 Acceptances out of every 100) as for me, my Acceptances tend to come in bunches–nothing for a long time (two or three years) and then 2 or 3 Acceptances in a fairly short order.

Persistence

The key is persistence.  I’ve come close a couple of times this year (2 stories short-listed, i.e., made it to the second-round of reviews), but they just didn’t make it for publication.  I will continue to submit them until they do.  I’d hoped that they would have both found homes in their respective markets, but they only thing that I can do is continue to try and submit the stories that are finished, write news stories to start the submission process all over again, and brainstorm new stories.  I just need to keep working and submitting.

Batman/Superman: SuperGirl

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Superman Batman Supergirl Cover, Image Source: DC Fanbase

Last week I finished rereading a graphic novel in the DC Universe.  It was in the Batman/Superman universe and it told (or more accurately) retold the SuperGirl origin story and the first meeting of Kara Zor-El.

I really liked this Graphic Novel a lot–although I think it one me over in large part due to Michael Turner’s artwork (an artist from Crossville, TN who died way too soon & who will be missed).

STORY

I like the way that the story was told and I also liked the dual-inner monologue that allowed the reader to see the story from both Batman’s and Superman’s point of view.  I also liked the actual narrative of the plot and the way that the story unfolded.  Kara’s “capture” and subsequent turn to the dark side seemed a little forced, but considering the time constraints of the story and the compressed nature of the narrative, I was able to look past this minor flaw.  I did think that they made too much of the dislike of Krypto (the Super-Dog) of Kara as it seemed to be going somewhere, but doesn’t actually pay-off.  I think it could have been rectified had their just been a panel or two showing a reconciliation or acceptance of Kara by Krypto at the end.  It wasn’t major, but no resolution of it did bother me a small bit.

ART

Michael Turner was an extremely talented artist.  I have another graphic novel by him that I will also be rereading and responding to later, but I enjoy reading stories that have his artwork.  His style is very bold and expressive and he reminds me of my favorite comic/graphic artists–Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee.  His style was very mature and I’m glad that his work became popular and got a wider exposure before his untimely death.  His style has that element of vivaciousness without devolving into “cartoony” that some artists seem to slip into when they draw.  His two page spreads were among the best in the business as they seemed among the most readable–either visually or when paired with words.

GRADE

A+.  If it isn’t apparent, I really like this story and this graphic novel.  The art and the story come together and produce a very strong narrative that I could (and have) read over and over again.

Star Trek Backwards

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Star Trek Original Series Crew, Image Source: Apopka Voice

I have found that I’ve become enamored with Star Trek series again–it is probably because I can binge watch it now, rather than having to wait a week for episodes to come out.

I’ve finished watching Star Trek Enterprise, Star Trek Discovery, and I just started on Star Trek Deep Space Nine (more on that one on another post).  My plan is to finish DS9, watch Star Trek The Next Generation, and then finally the original Star Trek series.

I’m not sure what I’ll do after that (probably) buy and finish the rest of Babylon 5 as I seem to be in a sci-fi mode right now.  Anyway, I hadn’t posted in a while so I thought I should at least update everyone on what I’m watching.  Hopefully, posts should go back to a (mostly) regular schedule.  Fingers crossed!

Till next time!

Mini-Review: The Mummy (2017)–No Spoilers

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The Mummy Movie Poster, Image Source: Dhaka Movie

For the Labor Day Holiday (in the US), I watched The Mummy (2017).  I thought it was fun and the action set pieces were very interesting, but The Mummy tried to mimic several things from the previous Mummy movie (with Brendan Fraser) and didn’t do it as well as it could have.  Here is a short review (& rumination) on some of the reasons why the movie was not as successful as it should have been.

Characterization

We were supposed to understand and buy that the main character is a “rogue,” similar to Han Solo.  He is a man of questionable actions and intents, but ultimately has a “good heart.”  This doesn’t come through in the script.  This is told to us by other characters, mostly by the female lead, but we don’t actually get to see him be a good man or a scoundrel.  We just get to see him make several questionable choices that don’t really make sense.  The filmmakers needed to have given him one “trait” that he could have done over and over again to emphasize that he is “impulsive,” let’s say, or something similar.  He frees the mummy without asking the “expert,” but is unprepared to deal with the consequences.  If he kept doing impulsive things throughout the movie, then that would show us that he acts before he thinks and this would have been a problem that he could have worked to solve (or understand) by the end of the movie, but that’s not what happened.  Look at World War Z if you want to see characterization by showing rather than telling.

Dialogue

“Witty Banter.”  My bane in Ken Smith’s Writing Class at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (at least during my early, formative days as a writer).  I had to learn that witty banter (a la Star Wars and Star Trek) doesn’t equal a good story.  Witty banter comes about with characters who are in opposition with each other, but who are also clever and know they’re clever and they fight not just with guns and swords (or phasers and lightsabers), but who also fight with words.  The writers used witty banter in place of true characterization and instead of making the characters seem human and real, witty banter was included to make the characters seem hip and cool.  The problem is that without true characterization, the banter felt (to me) forced and didn’t have the necessary zing to it.

Tone

Finally, there was a problem with the tone.  The movie wanted to be everything at once.  It wanted to be dark, funny, irreverent, clever, scary, and a blockbuster all in one go.  It had too many elements that didn’t mesh as well as they could have.  It was trying to channel the old irreverence of the Brendan Fraser Mummy while still trying to tell as serious story like King Kong: Skull Island or something similar.  It reminded me very much of the movie Sahara starring Matthew McConaughey in terms of tone.  It was angling to be a much more serious movie, but was undercut constantly by in-jokes, witty banter, and improbable plot turns that turned it into something more like a comedy than an action movie.  The same is true here.  It had the same type of protagonist, the same “ditzy” sidekick, and the same independent woman/dependent woman love interest.

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Sahara Blu Ray Cover Art, Image Source: Amazon.com

Now again, I thought it was fun movie, but even as I watched it my mind was critiquing it for the problems that it had.  Truly exceptional movies, however, have the power to withstand my inner critic and only upon repeated viewings do problems arise.  If the makers of The Mummy (2017) really want a successful movie franchise, then they’re going to have write it in a much more believable and consistent manner or audiences are not going to show up for future installments.

 

Deja Vu Dreaming: Dreaming in Sequels

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Image Source: i-Spirit.ca

We all know that dreams are strange beasts.  Psychologists tell us that our dreams are our brain’s way of trying to make sense of the world and to process the days’ (weeks, months, years) events and integrate them into our psyche.  So, dream logic is strange, wonderful, and the source of both inspirations and nightmares.  I’m a writer, and a fan of Science Fiction and Fantasy, so I expect my dreams to be strange and I try to harness that “strangeness” and turn the most coherent of dreams into characters, or plot ideas, or stories, etc.

Last night, however, I experienced a type of dream that I usually only experience rarely (maybe once a year or once every two years) that I’m going to call the “sequel” dream.  It is a dream that tells a fairly coherent narrative (at least, for a dream) and then fades away upon waking so that you remember only small flashes or bits of the dream, but by the end of the day even those flashes are gone.  I hate those because they were usually so vivid that if I could have awakened before the dream faded, I would have written it down in my journal of ideas for stories.  Yet, I experience a curious phenomenon where I will (much) later, either dream the same dream again (I call it Deja Vu Dreaming), but this time I will remember most if not all of the dream AND have the feeling of Deja Vu, somehow recalling that I’ve already dreamed the dream once before all ready.  Or (like tonight), I’ll have that Deja Vu dream experience, but this time my mind will actively create additional segments to the dream (it will turn the dream into a sequel, of sorts).  Again, I will remember that I’ve dreamed the dream before, but I will also get new additional “chapters” to the dream-story.

I first noticed this phenomenon as a child, but I really became invested in documenting the dreams when I decided to become a writer.  The previous most recent example is a dream that I still haven’t found a way to turn into a story just yet, but it involves a Sidhe (Elf-like faerie) who marries a mortal, but there is a “creepy” house that disapproves of the marriage (this is just a synopsis of the dream–the dream itself is more complicated as the house is more of a “horror” house than it is creepy.  Yet, the horror part of the house didn’t come to me in the first dream, but rather in that second Deja Vu-Sequel dream.  Last night’s dream was more of a “police procedural” as I used to watch a lot of (the original) Law & Order reruns on TNT on my free days working at the public library.  I found myself trying to negotiate a hostage situation and then chasing the perpetrator when the situation went sour. Again, upon waking I remembered that I’ve dreamed that dream before and I remembered so much more about the dream upon waking.  As I don’t write police procedurals, I’m not quite sure how I’m going to work this dream into a story, but at least the dream allowed me to be introspective about my dreams and dreaming process.  Maybe my experience will allow you, the reader, to become more introspective about your own dreams.

As long as they aren’t nightmares, I’ll take Deja Vu – Sequel Dreams any day.

More Does Not = Better

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More Does Not Equal Better – Woman Drinking Coffee Image Source: YouTube

This was a piece of advice given to me by my Graduate Advisor at U.T. at Chattanooga (UTC) once when I was writing a paper.  My memory is fuzzy on the exact details of the paper, but I “seem” to remember that it had something to do with an essay in which I had fulfilled the length requirements, but kept writing way past the requirements thinking that more = better.  When I was informed that indeed longer doesn’t always equal better, I have to confess that I felt a keen sense of disappointment in that all of the extra work that I had done was probably wasted.  And then, when I went back and actually looked at the essay, I saw that my advisor was right.  Instead of being this tightly constructed essay where my points flowed one into another to create a satisfying whole, the essay was bloated and formless.  Sure it was long (and made sense), but the points just kind of kept going and going and going and it lacked my normal sense of “cohesion.”

I learned a valuable lesson that day from that assignment–the length of a work should be defined by what it needs to accomplish–no more, no less.  If it needs 25 pages to accomplish the task, then by all means devote 25 pages to it.  However, it only needs 2 paragraphs, then 24 and a half pages have been wasted if you expand it just because you want to write long.

I’ve seen quite a few “bloated” popular pieces over the past two years (2016-2017) where the creators/designers should have stopped far sooner than they did with their creation than they did.  For instance, last weekend I thought I was on the last mission of Mass Effect Andromeda, a game that I’ve been playing all summer.  Imagine my surprise when at the end of the mission, I find that I’m still not finished.  There is at least one more mission to go (perhaps a couple of more–I can’t really tell).  MEA would have been a really tight and suspenseful game at the 60-70 hour mark, but at well over 100 hours in and still no sign of stopping, the game has worn out its welcome and has become tedious and often boring.  I understand the rationale–our fans want more, so let’s give them more (if we give them more, then this will = better, but that’s not the case).  Unless each and every experience is meaningful then more for the sake of more is just more, not better.

Even in these blog entries, I try very hard to remember this lesson as I can often type for hours on a particular subject (unless I’m constrained by time).  So, as I embark on another school year and creative writing season, I have to take a moment to remind myself that more doesn’t = better.  Finely crafted and purposeful experiences are what = better.

Perpetual Copyright

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Image Source: SlideShare

As I was doing research on the character Kathryn Janeway for yesterday’s entry on Star Trek Voyager, I discovered something pretty amazing that I thought I’d point out.  The idea that we should have “Public Domain” for knowledge that is older has fallen out of favor due to lobbying by corporations.  Corporations are retroactively branding old pieces of knowledge and information as “new” and this will affect how we as consumers interact with knowledge and information in the future.

For instance, I was looking at Wikipedia and one of the entries on Janeway said that another actor (Genevieve Bujold) dropped out of filming and the actress that we now recognize as Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) replaced her for that role.  I was intrigued so I clicked on the footnote/citation and was taken to a nytimes.com article that explained the whole Janeway actor situation.  The date on the article is 1994.  However, if you read and/or scroll to the bottom, you’ll notice that the copyright date is 2017.  Now Congress has changed the copyright law recently with the Digital Millennium Act so as to address online violations of copyright, but copyright (to the best of my knowledge) is still defined as coming into play when the work was created in a fixed form or published (available for public consumption).  The copyright of the article should be 1994 which means that is when the clock starts for it to fall into the Public Domain (where anyone has a right to use it for whatever purpose), not 2017.

Now, I know that nytimes.com probably uses CSS or HTML 5 and the outer layer where the copyright notice goes is different from the layer/frame with the story, but it is telling that they leave the 1994 date for accuracy, but the change the copyright date to current year for economic reasons.  And nytimes.com isn’t the first place where I noticed this trend of companies “locking down” their information.  Microsoft was big into doing this when Windows was the dominate Operating System in the 90s and 2000s.  Their splash screens showed copyright dates of 19xx-20xx, implying that their technology was perpetual so don’t bother trying to decompile their technology because all of it (even the older tech) would always be theirs in perpetuity.

This is important because the Public Domain is important.  Disney grew to be the behemoth that it was through fairy tales that were in the Public Domain.  However, now NOBODY can even begin to reference Disney’s work without a lawsuit.  Imagine the irony.  Sure, you can do Snow White or the Little Mermaid, but your conception of those fairy tales had better be very, very far from what Disney has done or you’re risking a lawsuit.  This also hurts because the Public Domain needs to be refreshed with new ideas.  Right now, only corporations like Disney and Microsoft and the like (and really popular authors a la Stephen King) have the power to command vast empires of content (which is one of the reasons why I was so set against the Dark Tower), whereas those with ideas and a strong Public Domain might be able to remix works well enough to forge their own empires (i.e., become a new Disney–taking from the Public Domain and remixing old ideas into new ideas).  Perpetual Copyright is an idea whose time needs to go away if we want new ideas, new talent, and new blood to enrich our creative content.

Star Trek Voyager: Series Review

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The Crew of the Starship Voyager from Star Trek Voyager, Image Source: Tales of the Marvelous

So I finished watching Star Trek Voyager over the weekend.  I enjoyed it, but it seemed a little more uneven than Star Trek Enterprise.  There were some episodes that I really loved and there were some episodes that I had to fast-forward through in order to watch.  I think the problem is that the series had a tendency to focus on certain characters too much and didn’t always work to mix the characters together as well as they could have.  I think too, that the way STV used the “subplot” didn’t really ring as true as it did with other Star Trek series.  Sometimes the subplot was used to great effect and really enhanced the story and at other times, the subplot was barely developed or didn’t have as much effect as one would have hoped it would, which made the main plot seem lifeless.

I think the problems that I’m having with the series as a whole are more on the writers/showrunners side than on the actors side.  I really liked all of the characters on the show–both new and old.  Having watched the entire season in a short span of time, I feel that there are two parts to Voyager: Kess/Pre Seven of Nine and Post-Kess/Seven of Nine.  The Kess/Pre Seven of Nine stories focus more on Capt. Janeway’s desire to get her crew home, while the Post Kess/Seven of Nine stories focus more on recovering Seven’s humanity and socializing Seven into Voyager’s crew.  The quest home, while still very much a plot structure, gets subordinated to the ideas of what it means to be human.  And Seven isn’t the only character who goes through this storyline–The Emergency Medical Holographic Doctor is also a central figure when it comes to this plot line as well.

I want to be clear–I liked this series!  It is a more complete “conceptualization” of what Star Trek is as a series than Enterprise was, I think.   The fact that it ran for seven full years, however, hurts it when comparing it to Enterprise which ended in its fifth season because you can see the “choppiness” and “uneven” nature of the stories even more readily the longer the series goes on.  I “fast-forwarded” through many more episodes of Voyager than I did with Enterprise because the episodes lacked the necessary tension to drive the stories (and the series) forward.

OVERALL SERIES GRADE: B- (mainly due to inconsistent writing/episodes), B+ for characters and overall characterization (only for that aspect)