A.R. Knight's Blog, page 7

The Haunting of Hill House and the Fun of a Good Scare

Yes, I know it’s Thanksgiving and here I am writing about scary stuff. I’ve never been much for timing, so consider this in line with my usual habits.

A couple of nights ago, the wife and I watched the first episode of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House. It’s one of a newish genre, that of a serialized horror experience where the scares and thrills are drawn out far beyond the 100 minutes of intensity most of the movies strive for. Whether the show will succeed in keeping us captivated for all its episodes is a question that’s going to take us time to answer, as we haven’t built up the energy to tackle episode 2 yet.

That’s because, other than a well-done, emotionally intense drama, horror is the most draining exercise in visual entertainment. For almost the duration of the experience, you, the viewer, are caught up in a cascade of increasingly stressful moments. Often, as is the case with this series, those moments are punctuated by jump-scare releases that get you jerking but also bring relief, the knowledge that the next scare is probably a little ways off yet.

After an hour or more of riding this wave, and experiencing an ending that almost always brings one last boogeyman out to play – be it a last jump scare or an ominous farewell stealing the apparent victory away – I’m left shaking my head and searching for lighter fare. A book, maybe, or a quick episode of a comedy (we chose Parks and Rec). Something, anything to remind the soul that the rest of its life isn’t going to be spent with a steadily growing chorus of violins and shifting shadows.

But! In the moment, those scares and the creeping dread that comes with them provides a life-affirming sensation unlike any other found in entertainment. The best horror gets you so involved in the story, so wrapped up in the atmosphere and the characters that you’re not seeing someone dodge a slashing knife on screen – you are the person dodging that knife. When the protagonist inevitably makes the decision to go down into the dark basement, you’re walking there with them, both secure in the knowledge that you, personally, are not really at risk and yet willing to put that fact aside just to dally with the diabolic.

And that’s why Nicole and I turned on the show on Monday night and why we’ll go back to it soon – the frights on offer twist and turn our nerves, get us closer on the couch, and make us grip our cats so tight they can’t escape. It’s an experience unlike any other, and while I wouldn’t want the feeling all the time, I’m enjoying it now.

The Joys of Writing In Advance

I wanted to try something different with The Skyward Saga  – a title which I’ll either italicize or capitalize depending on the amount of coffee I’ve had while writing the post, you guess which means what – namely, writing almost all of the books in advance before publishing a single one.

This has a couple of advantages, and disadvantages, but on the whole, it’s kinda nice being stuck in the vacuum of your own story for months on end without any sort of outside input.

Pros:

You get to mold just about everything without fear of a deadline or outside feedback. For some, this might be a double-edged sword; gotta have that pressure if you’re going to get anything done. For me, it meant the chance to be creative with the plot, the characters and the galaxy without needing to press things into a tight form from the get-go. Because book 1 was still a flexible document on my computer, I could toss in a reference that would matter in book 4 without a second thought. In other words, the story stayed malleable.
When you’re done, you get a steady stream of releases to put out while buying yourself time to produce the next one. Yeah, if you just pounded shot after shot of espresso and typed until your fingers fell off, you could get the same steady release without the build-up, but this is one way of buying yourself future time by holding back completed work in the present. If you have the income flexibility to try it, I would.
Last pro I’m going to list here – from a marketing angle, the dark side of selling stories, it’s far easier to build ads and such around a series that releases on a monthly (or even faster) basis. You’re going to have momentum that most others won’t have, and readers, if you use pre-orders, will be able to see they only have a few weeks to wait until your next book. That’s huge.

Cons:

You’ve got to be able to float yourself during those months when you’re ‘banking’ releases. If writing is the way you pay your mortgage, your car insurance, and your cat overlord, it might be hard to sit on completed material that could be earning you dough right this very moment. So if this is a strategy you want to try, it’s worth saving up ahead of time.
You might be writing trash! Maybe your story about a squad of interstellar crustaceans who battle the galaxy’s terrifying, star-surfing seagulls is, uh, lacking in compelling characters and conflict. If you’re banking releases, you might get four or five books in (or more) before you know that Captain Claw and his merry Lobstermen isn’t going to resonate with readers, or lobsters. Consider at least pitching your plot to a few folks ahead of time to get a pulse on whether your idea is intriguing or, uh, not.

Overall – it’s worth a try. Especially if you’re getting a little tired of the monthly hustle or the always-annoying book-publishing process. Banking releases gives you some time to focus on the whole point of this enterprise: telling the stories.

Castlevania, Season 2 and doing Slow Burn right

In the hyper-active modern era of entertainment, saying something is a ‘slow burn’, meaning it takes time to build to its active thrust, seems like it should be a death sentence. Why do I have to wait for the demon-slaying, the gigantic space battles, or the pivotal scene where the main character tells the love of his life that he’s leaving to go on some suicidal mission?

After all, I’ve got Snapchatting, Instagramming, or, hell, three other jobs I’m working on and there’s no time for this crap. I’ve got 30 minutes to cram in my day’s entertainment value, and I better get it.

Castlevania, Netflix’s gory gothic broodfest, mocks your intentions with Dracula’s sinister scowl. The first season, with a breezy quartet of episodes, comes after you with nigh-unstoppable action, drawing you into its world where, frankly, everything is constantly dying or doing the killing. Growing up in this universe would be the most horrifying thing – vampires, night beasts, wyverns and more are all liable to rip you to shreds if you so much as step outside your house.

Season 2, though, takes the fact that you’re already in after mainlining its hyperkinetic brother and decides to take it slow. Like a new relationship – Castlevania takes a hard turn towards the serious, the (relatively – it’s still vampires and insane magic, after all) deep, and, most importantly, makes a great effort to get you to care about the characters whipsawing through the demons.

There are two parts to a good slow burn, in my opinion:

The dangling threat of something terrible
A world we want to spent time in

Castlevania makes no secret of Dracula’s grand plan to annihilate the human race, and the threat that the vampire lord might actually do it serves as the prize at the end of the parade of episodes – if we can make it through, we’ll see whether good ol’ Vlad can pull it off. That Dracula himself is such a compelling, broody character makes this an even more interesting question – when was the last time you wondered whether a supervillain would actually commit to their plan if given the opportunity to do it?

It’s the second part, though, that makes the season work. Castlevania‘s chorus of strange vampires, mystical magicks, and bickering characters make for an entrancing way to spend the 25-28 minute episodes, which make for great side-snacks while making dinner, doing a workout, or dealing with cats that refuse to let you cut their nails.

Every episode brims with tension, even while they steadily build towards the climax. The stakes in every scene aren’t world-ending, but they are fascinating, and the backstories to what could have been one-note plot characters are fleshed out in fantastical, fascinating ways. By the time the climactic battles come, we know everyone taking part, we understand why, and we care about both the winners and losers.

In other words, it’s good stuff, and well worth a watch if you’re into vampires that don’t sparkle.

Stories To Tell

Ideas often appear out of nothing, as though some hidden synapse in your mind says “Now” and then bam, inspiration strikes. Starshot, my new novel and the first of a six book series, wasn’t like that. Instead, like a jigsaw puzzle, its story came together by plugging in one piece after another, then occasionally breaking everything apart and starting over again.

This, needless to say, isn’t an efficient way to write a story. It is, however, a good way to get really, really close with your characters. As trauma befell the setting and the plot, the characters grew, and eventually drove everything else.

Starshot and the series, The Skyward Saga, are an adventure. A clashing of wills, of wishes and desires with the reality of destinies beyond our control. It’s a tale of how to adapt when there’s no other choice, and how to forge a new path when your own principles demand it. There’s aliens, there’s spaceships, and all the gooey nougat filling of a science fiction story too, because that stuff’s just fun and I can’t help but write it.

Every month from now through March, you’ll find a new book in this series popping up on Amazon’s infinite shelves. I’m structuring the release this way because I’m hoping you’ll find it easier to stick with the tale, and that the story, as a whole, won’t break up the way so many sagas do when years are burned between their entries.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy Starshot and the stories around it – two, The Spear and Oratus are already available and take side sojourns into some of The Skyward Saga’s side characters. I loved pulling this world together until it yanked me into its strange designs, and I can’t wait to see what you think of it.

The Incredibles 2 and the wild fun of B Stories

Read or watch most full-length novels and films and you’ll find what’s often called the B story or subplot. Sometimes more than one. If done well, subplots can add all kinds of crazy flavor to a tale, like a great appetizer or wine paired with an entree. Done poorly, they’re boring slogs that cause people to drop the book entirely or dash to the concessions for that refill.

The Incredibles 2 – and I’ll endeavor to keep this spoiler free – centers its B story on the young family, and particularly (as is shown in the trailers) how Mr. Incredible deals with being a dad. While easy fodder for funny bits, the movie takes a dangerous gambit in introducing a subplot that has little to do with the main story. It’s not, for example, a side story about keeping the evil at bay while the hero works towards ultimate victory (Lord of the Rings) or a dive into why a character is helping the main hero succeed (Creed, a bunch of sports movies).

So if we’re ditching the main plot for family hi-jinks in Incredibles 2, why does it work?

Because the draw of The Incredibles is the family itself. We’re really there to spend time with this goofy collection of kiddos and adults put in hyper-exaggerated situations most of us can identify with. We don’t really care about the nefarious villain or their schemes – we go in knowing the Incredibles family will probably make it out OK, so when the movie gives us the sugary creme filling of their everyday struggles, it’s a grand ride.

So much so that by the time we return to the more rote villainy of the core plot, it’s less fun. The action is more standard superhero fare – stuff we expect but, by that very definition, is less exciting for it.

Which brings us to the big power of a B story done well – it’s a chance to subvert genre expectations and really experiment. We’ve seen superhero families before, but usually from the position of one teenage hero (Spiderman or Superman, namely) who’s so alienated from his ‘normal’ relatives that it’s just a barrel of angst and secrets. Here, there’s no secrets, just ridiculous fun.

A great B story gives characters dimensions the main thrust of the plot doesn’t let them explore. Maybe family, maybe a hidden talent or addiction (Don Draper’s drinking problems in Mad Men) , or even just aspects of daily life in the story’s world (The Shape of Water’‘s artist). They’re the place for the writer/director/artist to exercise their creativity and, simply, enjoy themselves.

 

What an Early Morning Flight Has Going For It

Answer: Not a whole heckuva lot, except for options. So many options.

They’ll delay you, rebook you, churn you through the infinite complexity of their algorithms and yet odds are you’ll wind up where you want to go, even if it takes forever to get there.

Take an evening flight and you’re rolling dice with the devil. There’s every chance you’ll wind up in a random city you didn’t even know existed before the night’s out, scratching your head with thousand other people in a taxi line looking to get to Shacks’R’Us for a night playing tag with the bed bugs before heading right back into the slime pit someone just forced you out of.

Get an early morning flight and you’ll wake up well before dawn, pass by the drunks riding out a legendary night on the way to a car you barely recognize because your senses are running on ‘Instinct’ mode. You’ll encounter minimal traffic, as sanity keeps most people off the roads during the hours most likely for ritual seances and life regrets.

Cruise through the airport in the evening and you’ll get a mishmash of dinner menus, chock full of solid names and washed down with liquid victuals for triple the price. Because you’ve been working all day, dealing with the endless wash of announcements and gate numbers is like playing sudoku after twenty straight go’rounds on Space Mountain – what’s left of your logic is barely enough to get you to the gate.

After you spike your wake-up with some expensive espresso, the early morning flight greets you with some peaceful bliss. Either on the plane or at the gate, you’ll be treated to some solace in silence, a peaceful minute or ten to contemplate the magic of sitting in a silver tube as it teleports you across the world. It’s magic.

On an evening flight, you’re sitting in manic desperation, praying to every god you know and ones you don’t that you’ll make it home, or to the hotel, or just anywhere where you can stretch your legs and sink into oblivion, because you know as soon as you hit that sleeping point, the captain’s going to come on and announce some light turbulence, or that they’ve entered a holding pattern and your bathroom bladder calculus suddenly flips to the wrong side of the equation.

So take the early morning flight. Take the pre-dawn wake up and cherish seeing the dawn through the window of a plane as you zip through the sky at 500 miles an hour. It’s so, so much better than the alternative.

The ‘Lego Ninjago’ Movie and Relying on Broad Themes to Save You From Nonsense

Every time I start one of the Lego Movie films, I experience a sense of bewilderment that what I’m about to watch actually exists. Of all the various merchandise brands that could be movie series – I’m waiting for you, Nerf: The Movie – Lego is somehow gracing the big screen nearly once a year. They do it, like your old school mascot at Homecoming, by leaning into the crazy.

The Lego Ninjago Movie makes even less sense than the batshit two movies that precede it (not that there’s a hint of continuity here). At the start, there’s a Power Rangers-esque force of warriors fighting off the big bad, warriors that have apparently been fending off evil for quite some time with huge animal mech-beasts, but who are such crappy ninjas that their master doesn’t trust them with finding some magical weapon?

Eh, whatever. If you start questioning one of these movies, you’ll go insane long before you get to a satisfactory answer.

So how, why do people still watch them? How do they do reasonably well at the box office and on critical sites like Rotten Tomatoes?

Because, darn it, they cook their crazy with the strong spice of simplicity. The first Lego Movie ran the same Hero’s Journey gauntlet so many flicks have before. Lego Batman has the loner discovering he, uh, can’t go it alone. And Lego Ninjago has a kid and his father learning to love each other.

These easily understood through-lines anchor all the chaos surrounding them and give us those cheesy popcorn moments that make movies so often seem so fun. We know they’re coming, and we don’t care when the father realizes who his son really is, when the son realizes his father may have had reasons for abandoning him, and when they both realize that there’s still time for them to develop some sort of relationship.

Those beats keep you grounded as giant cats, killer crabs, and an overflow of oddball mania wash across the screen every three seconds. And that’s fine! It’s what these movies are about – telling soft-hearted stories with manic abandon.

If there’s a lesson to draw from the Lego setup, in my opinion, it’s this: your audience has a certain amount of tolerance for the crazy. For different. If you scramble up the plot beats, defy convention and spin things in strange ways, you’re using up that tolerance. If you introduce new worlds, words, characters and laws of physics, you’re using up that tolerance.

So if you want more than a niche play, then look for that connective thread that most people can identify with (or at least recognize). Build a broad base, then raise up a tower of your own original ideas.

Bonus points if it comes with a catchy theme song.

The 2012 Chevy Impala Rental Car: A Companion in Dark Times

Lest you’re staring, confused and – after checking the year – wondering if you’ve entered some sort of internet time warp, let me disabuse you of that notion:

This is a simple, short recounting of about a rental car, something which I may do from time to time (as travel is, as breathing is to most, a natural and frequent function of my existence).

Anyway, set the scene. It is, as you might imagine given the title, 2014. I’ve been skipped around like a hot potato between airports with my intended destination – Hartford, CT – that one person everyone secretly feels sorry for and, therefore, keeps said potato away from. Wow was that belabored. Point being, I was delayed and rerouted and cast into the inferno only to wake up at the edge of midnight at La Guardia in NYC.

My usual trajectory upon hitting La Guardia, like most sane others, is to find some sort of taxi/shuttle/uber and get out of there as fast as possible with the least need of my own abilities to handle the swirling hydra of New York’s highways, bridges, and fondness for naming things multiple times.

Sadly, no shuttles went up to Hartford at this time of night, and the prices for a cab to another city two hours away were, uh, near bankrupting levels. Thus relegated to the rental world, I placed some calls and was laughed away from the usual big name suspects (National, Hertz, etc.). They were sold out, leaving me, like some scrounger forced into a dark corner with a strange, trenchcoat-wearing vagabond, hunting the nether realm for a vehicle.

That vehicle, from a rental company I can neither remember nor care to try, was a 2012 Impala. I had to take a squat shuttle to get to it, parked as it was back behind some warehouses where, I’m sure, the organ trade was flowing free.

The engine purred to life and I was reminded of a time before back-up camera, before infotainment and the beauty of the bright teal dash and big old clock-style numbers. She may have been stuck in the back of nowhere, but the Impala was ready to ride.

And we went like a deluded maniac into the highways. If you’ve ever driven with a GPS yapping at you around NYC, then you might be able to empathize with the experience of a voice rattling a seemingly endless series of names at you, none of which seem to match the actual signs you’re driving by.

Thankfully, perhaps because the Impala I was driving was clearly a rental, people gave me the benefit of the doubt as I swapped lanes the same way a day trader swaps stocks. You’d have thought I was rolling with a Lamborghini out there, the way I stopped and started, zigged, zagged, and swerved.

Somehow, perhaps with the 2012 Impala’s innate knowledge, like an experienced horse, of my own confusion, we made it out. The car and I worked in tandem, and all to the beat of local radio (I lacked an AUX cable, and the car didn’t have functioning Bluetooth audio, or at least not any I could get to work). Together, we raced randoms through the night, streaking away from those big city lights through the northern woods.

I like to think that we saved each other that night, the 2012 Impala and I. She got me out of the city, and I returned her to a nice parking lot with a view of something other than chain link fences and warehouse walls; the sports-betting pseudo casinos and scattered chain restaurants of BDL.

Bradbury’s Final Victim and the Earned Twist

Back again with another random walk through Ray Bradbury’s early short fiction, because that’s what happens during rainy Wisconsin summers: we pull out Golden Age stories and imagine ourselves into interplanetary peril.

Final Victim is a longer story, spending more time developing cross sections between a bunch of characters, from the morally dubious but untouchable lawman Jim Skeel (great name) to the asteroid-dodging hotshot Nadia Miller (another great name). Many shorts eschew the kind of setting development and background Final Victim goes through, but if the end is worth the journey, then isn’t that time well spent?

This story checks off all the boxes you’d want from an action sci-fi tale – you’ve got monsters, space stations, lasers and the constant threat of imminent, brutal demise. It’s best part, though, is the ending twist, which I won’t spoil, but will instead mention that it only works because we – even in this short time – understand how the characters come to their actions.

In other words, it’s a twist, but after the initial surprise, you’re not shocked or confused as to how it came to happen. It’s not random – the killer hasn’t returned from the grave, or the narrator doesn’t suddenly reveal them been lying to the reader the entire time. No, it’s a logical consequence resulting from the logical decisions of people in desperate situations.

A lotta twist endings are slaps to the face – designed to shock and awe. This is more like a cookie dough smoothie – delicious and fulfilling, and earned through the sheer exercise of working your way through all those pages.

So yeah, Final Victim is a fun jaunt of a tale that’ll take you a bit longer than the average short to read (it even has chapters), but set aside an hour and you’ll be rewarded.

The Challenge of Relative Fun

Every day starts with an onslaught of choices, tasks, and, in my house, attacks from clawed felines. There’s the standard issue stuff – making breakfast, ingesting as much caffeine as possible, staring at the ceiling and wishing for just one more hour of sleep. And then there’s the interesting bits, what actually gets done not by necessity but by choice.

Jobs, those burdens of our pre-robot utopia lives, tend to dominate the bulk of our daily routines. Meetings, emails, water cooler griping sessions with Jeff, they all kinda blur into a broad miasma that stretches between after breakfast to whenever the sanity is so far gone that you stop. Maybe you’re working on a line that’s a constant grind from start to finish, muscles moving in a routine that is so baked in you’re more machine than man, now.

Either way, eventually, whether in the evening or during your lunch break, you’ll come to a crossroads. A set of options, each with glaring pros and cons. I’d argue making those choices is the most power any of us have during a normal day – namely, how to spend what time we have that’s not predetermined by necessities.

More and more, I’m coming to make those choices by their degree of relative fun – a thoroughly unscientific and subjective measure. The relative in that label doesn’t just apply to the moment-to-moment comparison of, say, mowing the lawn vs. chasing said kitties around the house in a halloween costume, but also to the future satisfaction posed by those same activities.

Mowing the lawn, for example, may have less immediate joy than terrorizing the pets, but it’s going to have a greater long-term benefit because my house won’t look like a jungle ruin, and I’ll have the added boost of podcast listening time, and something of a workout. Not bad!

This also applies to things like piano, or reading books, watching one movie over another, etc.

And it also, yes, applies to writing – a fun but also difficult activity. Give me a notebook and a cafe and I’ll scribble down nonsense about alien uprisings and delusional, diabolical cat wizards that can only be defeated by an enchanted ball of yarn. Getting me to that cafe, though, over the aforementioned movie or game is much harder. Both of those latter activities offer more immediate fun, an easy grab at joy with little cost or effort – and both can have lasting benefits too, whether in cultural knowledge or by throwing popcorn at other people and thereby improving one’s popcorn throwing accuracy, a sure-to-be-vital skill in our coming AMC-dominated dystopia.

So I’ve been working through this daily battle by finding those moments where writing is easy to access, and when I’m presented with lots of mediocre choices, instead reaching a little deeper, pushing a little harder to make the long play. If, say, there aren’t any movies I really want to see, rather than settle, maybe I’ll jot down another chapter or an outline of another story. If I have a ten minute break between meetings, maybe I’ll update a synopsis or jot down an idea instead of flick to Facebook to see what ads they care to serve me today.

I’m definitely not as good at this as I’d like to be – it’s still too easy to reach for the phone instead of the notebook, but I’m trying.

One thing I do know? I never regret choosing to write, afterwards.

And, because I’m not chasing them, the cats curl up in my lap while I scribble away, which makes for a pretty good reward.