Harry Connolly's Blog, page 37

Yesterday

Was pretty great. Thank you for the well wishes.

My Birthday, redux

Today, I’m celebrating my birthday.

I had to postpone it a bit for the best of reasons, but still: YAY! I get to take the day off. No homeschooling. No cleaning. No working on the new book (although I’ll have a notepad handy for unexpected ideas).

Instead, I’ll be kicking back to watch all three extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies, along with delivery Indian food for dinner, along with a not-birthday cake for my not-birthday (I don’t much like cake, so I’ll be having fruit salad with no nasty cantalopes), along with fancy beer. The movies are about eleven and a half hours, not including various bathroom, meal, and birthday song breaks, so I’m planning to start early.

I’m also planning to be offline most of the day.

Last year, I celebrated my birthday this same way, and I found it incredibly rejuvenating. And I don’t just mean emotionally. It refilled the well creatively in a way I hadn’t expected, and I spent weeks and weeks aching to binge on the movies again. With luck, I can satisfy that ache with the Tom Shippey Tolkien book I’m reading, and an upcoming re-read of the trilogy.

Have a great day, you guys. That’s what I’m planning to do.

Linda Nagata says it’s okay to quit writing

And I agree. A quote from her post[1] about it:

Quit if you need to. That’s my advice. And I can say that without hypocrisy, because I did it. I quit. Not utterly, and certainly not irrevocably, but I basically walked away from the game for ten years.

The reasons were the usual: money, time, and family. I had never made any reasonable amount of money from writing, so I was working full time, my kids were teens (not an easy time of life), my parents were elderly with issues of their own, my husband was working more than full time, and all those long years spent trying to create some sort of a writing career had begun to seem like a joke. Writing was making me miserable. So I quit. Given that I had only a few spare hours in any day, it was more important to me to spend those hours on my family than on writing. It was as simple as that. We all make choices. That was mine and I don’t regret it.

I walked away, too. I’d been struggling and failing for many years, and I had promised my wife I would go back to school and get an MA in something so I could get a real job when my agent offered to take me on. I returned my GRE study guide to the library and started revising Child of Fire.

There are sacrifices that have to be made, and sometimes the rewards are just not worth it.

Occasionally I’ll see someone online say “I’d KILL to write like you!” to an author, and that always seems weird. You’d kill someone? Steal years from someone else’s life? Because that seems like the easy way out.

Writing takes dedication. It takes hours from your week and years from your life. I’ve sacrifices all sorts of things for writing, from sleep to exercise to a high-paying career, and you know what I have to show for it? Books about a nearsighted faux hoplite who sings like Tom Waits, an ex-con armed with a magic piece of paper, and a genius gorilla in a fucking zoot suit.

Is that worth it? If I had skipped all that and gone to law school, could I have spent my years helping people who need it or earning enough to take my wife on trips? Should I have? Well, I haven’t stopped writing, that’s for sure. I’m still trying to get this right.

Is that the right choice for everyone? Of course not. There may come a time when I quit writing all together, if circumstances warrant it.

So don’t sweat it if you’re a writer who decides to stop writing, and don’t pressure people to keep going when they feel they need to stop.

[1] Like political Military SF? She has a new book out today.

Massive Failures of Copyright and Capitalism

One of the supposed benefits of the copyright system we have is that people with a monopoly over intellectual property will have a market incentive to keep that IP going. There’s money to be made selling copies, they’re the only ones with the right to make copies, so copies will be available.

Obviously, this doesn’t really work. We have numerous examples of IP that have fallen out of print, which can not be legally acquired without paying ruinous prices for used goods.

And if you though THE FUTURE would change all of that with digital distribution, nope. FOR EXAMPLE:

ONE:

TWO:

Hopefully, those images show up, but if they don’t, the links take you to the Amazon page for the film soundtrack pages for THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING/THE TWO TOWERS – THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS, respectively. If you want to buy either one you have to pay (at the time I’m writing this) $250/$800 used, or $500/$1300 new.

Of course, if you want to buy The Complete Recordings of Howard Shores’s Return of the King soundtrack, that’s on iTunes.

Why is the third one available for digital download but the first two are not? Good question! You’d think they would be leaving money on the table. So I emailed Warner music about it. The message I sent was lost in the contact form, but it basically reiterated what I said above, along with a request that someone put digital copies on sale. The response:

Hello Harry,

Thank you for contacting us! We do not have current plans for this release, but thank you for your email and your input. We will forward your message to our suggestion box.

Okay. I’m in the suggestion box. For whatever that’s worth.

So, here is some art work–and not obscure art work, either, it’s the complete record of an Oscar- and Grammy-winning musical score–that can only be legally acquired at ridiculous prices.

It’s ridiculous.

Look, I’m in favor of copyright. I pay my bills with the money I earn because of copyright law. And when I see something I can’t afford, I don’t try to get hold of it another way. That’s how I choose to live.

But this is a ludicrous situation to be in.

We Are Not Descended from Monsters: the Illusion of Moral Clarity

At one point not too long ago, I had to ask myself: Why are so many dramas that examine social evils set a generation (approximately) before they were made? From Auntie Mame to Mississippi Burning to comedies like Ruggles of Red Gap, the easiest way to talk about systemic social problems is by looking at the ones you can see in your rear view mirror. Criticizing your parents (or grandparents) is way easier than taking a careful look at your own flaws.

We’re all familiar with people who imagine themselves heroes of the past, saying exactly the sort of thing this comic mocks. (I encourage you to click that link. It’s great.) But would we have been paragons of progressive virtue? Or would we have accepted the status quo with a shrug and an unconvincing rationalization?

People calling Confederates "monsters" miss the monster dormant in them, and really in us all.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) June 24, 2015

I tell people if I was born in 1840, and had the right skin, and had the money, I would have bought slaves too.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) June 24, 2015

People often say to me "My great-great-great grandfather didn't own slaves." And I tell them, "Yes, but he wanted to."

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) June 24, 2015

Good (though not great) way to answer the question, "Would have I owned slaves?" is to ask something like "Do I use fossil fuel?"

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) June 24, 2015

Dangerous to assume that you are a better human than slaveholders. Misses the great power of structures, and furthers myth of individual.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) June 24, 2015

We all like to imagine ourselves to be good people, and to be on the right side of history. Of course, when we look back we see that the ones on the right side were killed for the cause.

And, as mentioned above, the people on the wrong side of history were not monsters. They loved. They did charity. They worshiped with sincerity. They had strong ideas about good and evil. They acted with honor and kindness.

But they also bought into a corrupt system that was so pervasive they couldn’t even recognize another way to be. That doesn’t make them monsters, and it doesn’t make them mustache-twirling villains.

It doesn’t help that the narratives we tell are full of Evil Baddies of Evilness, who are irredeemable assholes rewarded with a bullet at the denouement. Hell, right now I’m reading Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and I plan to reread a one-volume edition of Lord of the Rings right after, to see if I can get through it without skimming.

That book is the archetype of othering your enemies and making monsters of them, and I’m going to read it again (right after I rewatch the movies).

Obviously, there are real villains in this world, just as there are real heroes, but everyone thinks they’re one or the other. Most aren’t. Most are caught up in the cultural assumptions around them, and are living their lives the best way they know how.

To make note of the “fossil fuel” comment by Ta Nehisi-Coates, I want to tell a brief story: Earlier this week I took my family to see INSIDE OUT. Not having a car, we walked six blocks to the bus stop. On the way, a neighbor who lives in our building drove by and parked right beside the stop. He and his girlfriend (both young and healthy) were running an errand and instead of walking on a hot June day, he drove. Six blocks. And it’s not like he was picking up a mattress or something huge.

I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on the guy. If I sold more books, I’d have a car, too. But driving six blocks? Hey, maybe he was in a hurry. Maybe he didn’t want to get all sweaty. Maybe he had another errand to run across town (it’s possible!) But getting into your car and going is how Americans live. We know the damage it does, not just to the environment but to our bodies, too, and yet we still build cities to accommodate them. Those cities that predate the car get retrofitted for them. That’s how our world is designed, from getting to work to shopping to school to everything. Going against that is hard. I know, because we’re doing it. I waste a shitload of time, comparatively, just to go to the library. I walk for an hour to take a trip that is less than 15 minutes in a car. It’s good for me, but I know the time I’m giving up is writing time, and that sucks.

But I’m not an anti-climate change hero. I’m not fighting for a better world, or setting a good example. I’m just poor. When future generations look back on our wasteful choices, I hope my descendants don’t try to defend me by saying I’m not a monster. I hope they know better.

It’s easy to look back at the moral failings of past generations and pretend that we’re different. We aren’t. The fact that they did awful things, or fought to sustain evil institutions, or turned a blind eye to injustice doesn’t make them any different from us. Most of us do the same.

Rest in Peace, Chris Squire

Remembering stalwart @yesofficial bassist Chris Squire, who has lost his battle with leukemia: http://t.co/rEdbH97ChJ pic.twitter.com/dlatex43e0

— UltimateClassicRock (@UltClassicRock) June 28, 2015

From my Twitter feed:

Chris Squire, the bassist for Yes, who appeared in every incarnation of the band, has passed away. He had leukemia.

— Harry Connolly (@byharryconnolly) June 28, 2015

I was a huge fan in high school. I think I was the only person in my whole school who liked them. Maybe it was deeply uncool, but…

— Harry Connolly (@byharryconnolly) June 28, 2015

I understood the music. It didn’t swing and it wasn’t funky, but it was complex and chaotic, changing tempo suddenly. Sorta like me.

— Harry Connolly (@byharryconnolly) June 28, 2015

Not to mention that I was a young fantasy reader, and Yes had all those Roger Dean covers.

— Harry Connolly (@byharryconnolly) June 28, 2015

I also spent a lot of time teaching myself to draw this logo. http://t.co/oRKdF5pxx5

— Harry Connolly (@byharryconnolly) June 28, 2015

I always wanted to be an artist but I could never make it work. Learning to draw the logo taught me how to see things in a specific way

— Harry Connolly (@byharryconnolly) June 28, 2015

Hopefully, that makes sense.

— Harry Connolly (@byharryconnolly) June 28, 2015

I should also say that, when my buddies started up a band, I agreed to play bass b/c of Chris Squires. Because I liked his work.

— Harry Connolly (@byharryconnolly) June 28, 2015

Anyway, I don’t listen to Yes anymore. I’m not one of those people still listening to the same music I loved in high school.

— Harry Connolly (@byharryconnolly) June 28, 2015

But the music Chris Squires made was important to me. It helped me. I’m sorry to see him pass on, as all things must do.

— Harry Connolly (@byharryconnolly) June 28, 2015

To clarify, there’s nothing wrong with listening to the music you loved when you were young, but if that’s the only music you listen to, that’s sort of sad.

Activism. It works.

BREAKING: WE WON! #SCOTUS has struck down bans on marriage for same-sex couples nationwide! #IDO

— Lambda Legal (@LambdaLegal) June 26, 2015

Per this morning’s Supreme Court ruling, same sex couples can be married in all fifty states in the US. It’s a great victory for justice and equal treatment under the law, and it was accomplished through the hard work of activists all over the country.

But I want to disagree with this quote by Theodore Parker:

We cannot understand the moral Universe. The arc is a long one, and our eyes reach but a little way; we cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; but we can divine it by conscience, and we surely know that it bends toward justice.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. offered this punchier version:

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

I think that’s wrong. There is no moral universe, and there’s no reason that human beings will continue to accept more human beings into their in-groups, granting them rights and laws. We know that’s the just thing, but the passive construction of that cliche disguises the fact that justice comes about because people fight for it.

Activists fought to have the Confederate flag taken down from government buildings, and that’s beginning to happen. Activists fought to legalize same sex marriage, and they have succeeded. They have a won a hard-fought victory. Congratulations, and good luck in the next fight.

Time to buy a bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale

I’ve mentioned that here before, haven’t I? Arrogant Bastard Ale?

It’s the beer I buy for myself when I finish something big. Something difficult. Something like… oh, I don’t know, the Fate Core writeup for The Great Way and A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark!

It’s about to go out to its first beta-reader, my current GM (who’s probably the best GM I’ve ever gamed with). When it comes back, there will be fixes.

But for now, I can put it aside and work on the NEW THING.

OH MY GOD FINALLY.

To commemorate the opportunity to write new fiction, I’m going to tag this post with a new tag, the working title of the new book.

So excited, you guys.

The Babes in the Wood, by Ruth Rendell book 12 of #15in2015

The Babes in the Wood by Ruth Rendell


My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Book 12 of #15in2015

Wow. This was sort of terrible.

Rendell died recently, and the way her obituaries described her work made me want to sample it. The sensible thing would have been for me to carefully select a much-lauded novel, but instead I grabbed something at random on the shelf.

The characters were cliches: an absent-minded professor, a snotty supermodel, misogynistic Christian fundamentalists, the overweight guy who can’t resist a sweet cake in the most awkward of social circumstances. The plot dawdled, in part because of characters who find a body but don’t report it because of the bother it would cause them (missing children? So what?) and in part because there’s so little going on.

Worse, there are continual little author self-inserts that make no sense in the context of the rest of the book. Stuff like (paraphrasing) “The inspector had forgotten to ask an important question, and it would be weeks before he realized what it was” which doesn’t match the bulk of the novel, but seems very like a ham-fisted attempt to create tension.

Finally, it’s apparent from the latter part of the book that the author had a lovely vacation abroad, and much of the denouement made it tax-deductible.

Maybe her earlier work was more nuanced and interesting. Maybe it had momentum. This doesn’t.

Buy a copy

Complex, Single-Take Action Scenes (starring women on AoS)

Blah blah blah Daredevil fight scene at the end of the second episode. Right? When Daredevil came out last April, everyone was talking about it. And why not? It was pretty cool. No hidden edits, no cgi tricks[1], just an actor and his stunt doubles doing some ninjaparkourboxing.

The second time she watched That Fight, my wife confessed that she couldn’t tell the actor from the stunt doubles. She’d been comparing their muscles, specifically their butts. Like she needed an excuse to look at muscular dudes’ butts on TV.

But for all the furor over that long scene, few people seem to have noticed that AGENTS OF SHIELD has been doing similar things (in a smaller way) for Chloe Bennet, the actress who’s playing Skye/Daisy/Quake/whatever they’re calling her. No stunt doubles for her, and the single take action scenes she’s been in haven’t been as long as the six-minute Daredevil bit, but they’ve been complex and really nicely shot.

I tried to link to them before but… did you know ABC doesn’t have a timer on their video player? What the hell are they thinking? Then I turned to YouTube.

First, ep 19, “The Dirty Half-Dozen”

Some solid JOHN WICK-style action there, all in one take.

Second, ep 22, “SOS part 2″

This one is physical martial arts fighting, and it’s a single take for the first 30 seconds or so. I couldn’t find one with better sound.

There may be others in the season, but I didn’t notice them. I should mention, there are plenty of great fight scenes in the show [2] but I was looking for single takes.

These aren’t exactly ground-breaking, exactly, and they aren’t anywhere near as long as the much-lauded Daredevil scene (they’re on a network schedule and it’s an ensemble show) but they’re nicely done and almost entirely overlooked. It’s too bad. Chloe Bennet acquits herself well here.

[1] Hah, fooled you. There was cgi involved. The camera was mounted on a track affixed to the ceiling, and the track was digitally erased in post-production. That’s how the camera work was so smooth over the busted door and collapsed stunt men.

[2]