The Lost Finale

Kottke does a nice round-up of sites’s comments on the Lost finale. Many of them express what I’ve heard as a common theme among fans – it’s okay that all of the questions weren’t answered, because most of them were. The major storylines were wrapped up.

io9, on the other hand, came up a with a list of 50 questions that they felt Lost really did need to answer with their series ending show, and a tally of what was actually covered and what was left open (more questions than not, unfortunately).

I’m with io9 on this one. Sure, red herrings are a mystery tradition. But they’re always exposed as red herrings in the end. That’s just good storytelling to wrap up the loose ends. Lost left way too many of them. Writing them off as unimportant is just yanking people’s chains. People who don’t think much may be okay without all the mind-benders solved. But thoughtful people want real closure in their storytelling. I wonder how many of the “it’s okay, they don’t have to explain everything” folks read novels regularly.

And I’m really dissatisfied with the ending as well. If you’re going to sell me a series of religious programming, label it as such so I can watch the sci-fi channel instead. Don’t disguise your religious blah blah blah as science fiction for 5 and a half seasons and then zing me with mysticism at the end. It’s pretty clear that the writers very much wrote themselves into a corner. They didn’t have an end in mind when they started, and they got a giant kick out people’s excitement at the layer-upon-layer of mysterious events, so they kept laying it on thick even after they had laid out so much they couldn’t explain it all. I cry deus ex machina foul. My fierce belief in free will over fate leaves me feeling this series was ultimately a giant turd.

I’m hoping that with on-demand technologies, television writing will start moving in the direction of series treated as long mini-series – with a completely plotted story line from beginning to end and more tightly written detail, rather that completely open-ended affairs that peter off after awhile. Television programs do have a predictable end point, no matter how popular they are. Using that to create a real story that holds together throughout would be much more satisfying.

In search of the next Lost

Entertainment Weekly has an interesting article in their current issue about all of the shows written to be the next big Lost and how none of them seem to be taking off in the way the networks are hoping. I am watching FlashFoward, and it’s interesting, but most of the shows are missing a key ingredient to the formula…

The reason I got hooked on Lost was because I had no idea at first that it was a mystery. The first episodes seemed like a scripted version of Survivor (an interesting idea by itself) – and when strange stuff started happening, there were tons of “Wow, what the heck just happened?” moments. A mystery is a mystery because you don’t realize at first that’s what it is – you think you’re going along with life, an you start noticing little stuff that just doesn’t make any sense. You pull the string, and it all unravels into one big pile.

All of these Lost imitator shows – FlashFoward especially – are coming out of the gate with “hey look at this big mystery! We’re gonna solve it, yay!” scripts that just seem too self-conscious. When you have to tell people you’re really cool – probably not so much. Start by telling an interesting story first.
I don’t know that there’s any way to really “fix” this about FlashFoward – they started off on the wrong foot to begin with. It’s interesting enough, but the constant references to how mysterious all of it is – over the top.

December? Oh my.

Wow – time to wrap up the year, and I’m utterly at loose ends with various projects. I’ve been working steadily on knitting projects, and organizing the house, two areas where we’ve made some pretty big gains. We’re steadily getting through the mounds of papers that need to be filed or thrown out, with the help of our organization lady. The room is becoming what we want it to be – a guest room where people can visit from out of town, and a crafting room where we can sit and work on craft projects. Don’t get me wrong – it still needs LOTS of work – there are still tons of boxes to go through and purge, and we’re in danger of acquiring new crap to replace all the old, but it’s starting to look more like what it should look like.

The knitting is fun and very relaxing. I’m concerned though, about what I really want to do with it. It’s enjoyable to make things for people, but it’s not exactly a lever that will move the world.

We’ve spend all the weekends of November bagging leaves for the most part (we really grabbed a lot of time back by paying someone to pick them up last year!) which is really satisfying, until the next round of them fall off the trees. We currently need to redo the backyard. I’m completely frustrated by how much time and energy this takes, and we don’t even have that many trees; they’re mostly from the neighbors.

I’ve lost complete track of what I’ve read and am woefully behind on photo editing.

I attempted a brief stint at NaNoWriMo but gave up after a few days. That seems to happen at the utterly wrong time of year for me. Why don’t they do it in March? Except that’s about the time I’m driving hard to get a painting project done somewhere in the house though; last year in March I was painting the staircase room I’m in now. But the writing – it’s so hard to do, and my life is too chaotic to achieve it, I think.

And web projects. Boy oh boy. I’ve been neglecting this blog, and my photoblog, and several other domains to remain nameless.

I think I need to make different use of my time at times. I’m frustrated with how little time I have to accomplish things I think are important, and how much time we spend doing stuff that doesn’t move us forward. I’m frustrated by the sheer number of projects we have that remain unfinished, as well.

Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing a short story

Cribbed from Kurt Vonnegut’s Wikipedia entry:

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O’Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.

Also via kottke.org, How to Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut.

Ennui

I’ve been rather blue lately. I’m feeling creatively frustrated.

N is for Neville, who died of Ennui

I have some idea in my head that I can’t quite get out – like that time when you had that really fantastic dream, and just as you woke up, you thought “I gotta remember this!” at the same time all the details start sliding away from you and you’re left with just that feeling that the dream gave you – a feeling of awesome, a Stendhal syndrome, that you’re trying to reconstruct…

Like I know there’s a picture there that just isn’t coming into focus, and every time I think I just start to get it, the dog barks, (if I’m at home) or someone comes into my cube (if I’m at work) and I lose track of that vision that I was trying to get to, that I almost just had in my hand if I’d just closed my fingers more quickly…

I find myself wishing for a work space at home that’s more like my workspace at work – a clean, organized desk with plenty of space and a big monitor to get my work done and away from the pets and the phone as distractions. Someplace I can focus. Entertainment Weekly has been doing a “Writers at Work” series, and Neil Gaiman’s is cool:

Gaiman escapes to his wooded Wisconsin hideaway with pup Cabel in tow to craft his fantastical works. Says the author, ”The setting is interesting enough that if I get stuck and need to stare out the window, there’s something to look at, which isn’t interesting enough to make me stop working and look at it for long.”

What a jerk with his “Wisconsin hideaway.” Where’s my hideaway?
I play for you the world's tiniest violin

I know, what a terrible problem to have, right? You play for me the world’s tiniest violin in response.

I think really just want to be more like this kid:
I fucking love colouring

Fascinating Interview with David Simon

David Simon is the producer of HBO’s “The Wire” – a highly acclaimed series that I have on my Netflix queue since I’ve heard so many rave reviews calling it “The Best Show on TV Ever.” Here is part of an interview he gave with Nick Hornby for The Believer:

We got the gig because as my newspaper was bought and butchered by an out-of-town newspaper chain, I was offered the chance to write scripts, and ultimately, to learn to produce television by the fellows who were turning my first book into Homicide: Life on the Street. I took that gig and ultimately, I was able to produce the second book for HBO on my own. Following that miniseries, HBO agreed to look at The Wire scripts. So I made an improbable and in many ways unplanned transition from journalist/author to TV producer. It was not a predictable transformation and I am vaguely amused that it actually happened. If I had a plan, it was to grow old on the Baltimore Sun’s copy desk, bumming cigarettes from young reporters and telling lies about what it was like working with H. L. Mencken and William Manchester.

Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearingen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

NH: How did you pitch it?

DS: I pitched The Wire to HBO as the anti–cop show, a rebellion of sorts against all the horseshit police procedurals afflicting American television. I am unalterably opposed to drug prohibition; what began as a war against illicit drugs generations ago has now mutated into a war on the American underclass, and what drugs have not destroyed in our inner cities, the war against them has. I suggested to HBO—which up to that point had produced groundbreaking drama by going where the broadcast networks couldn’t (The Sopranos, Sex and the City, et al…)—that they could further enhance their standing by embracing the ultimate network standard (cop show) and inverting the form. Instead of the usual good guys chasing bad guys framework, questions would be raised about the very labels of good and bad, and, indeed, whether such distinctly moral notions were really the point.

The show would instead be about untethered capitalism run amok, about how power and money actually route themselves in a postmodern American city, and, ultimately, about why we as an urban people are no longer able to solve our problems or heal our wounds. Early in the conception of the drama, Ed Burns and I—as well as the late Bob Colesberry, a consummate filmmaker who served as the directorial producer and created the visual template for The Wire—conceived of a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.

First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components.

Did we mention these grandiose plans to HBO at the beginning? No, they would have laughed us out of the pitch meeting. Instead, we spoke only to the inversion of the cop show and a close examination of the drug war’s dysfunction. But before shifting gears to the port in season two, I sat down with the HBO execs and laid out the argument to begin constructing an American city and examining the above themes through that construction. So here we are.

November is National Novel Writing Month

National Novel Writing MonthThis year, for National Novel Writing Month – I have a plan! I’m going to do something really innovative — I’m going to spend the month of November…

… building a website for my friend Chi.
Yes! I know, it’s not a novel. However…

1. I actually know how to build websites (unlike novels, which I seem to be unable to achieve).

B. I promised her I’d do it months ago.

3. It will be fun, and not stressful, like trying to write a novel was.

D. Chi is an actual published writer, so, it’s LIKE I’m getting some writing done, because I’ll be helping her.

So, that’s my grand plan for National Novel Writing month – to once again NOT get a novel written, only this time with less stress and some actual pretty, creative stuff to show for it at the end of the month.

Think it will work? I hope so.

NaNoWRiMo Update

I’m hopelessly behind and have no reasonable expectation of ever catching up by the end of November deadline. I know what the general story is, but when it comes to writing scenes that make any sort of sense, I’m completely stalled. And the stress of being so far behind is really interfering with my actually sitting down and getting any writing done. The idea of this is no longer fun, it’s a chore, and a painful one. I realized yesterday, after I had a big argument with Stephanie about how we scheduled our time this weekend, that this is ridiculous, because this is a stress I can control.
Unlike the other stress that is occurring in my life right now, which includes, but is not limited to:

  1. The Stress of The House that Would Not Sell
  2. The Stress of Attending Meetings with Potential Renters Who Do Not Show Up to Appointments 2/3rds of the Time
  3. The Stress of the Shitty Roofers Who Would Not Show Up To Complete Their Work
  4. The Stress of Attempting to Merge Two Households Worth of Stuff and Not Knowing What to Get Rid Of
  5. The Stress of The Weather that Rains Every time I Want to Rake Leaves
  6. The Stress of the Looming Apocalyptic Chaos That is The Impending Holiday Season (refer to Ghosts of Holidays Past)
  7. The Stress of Four Cats Who Just Don’t Want to Be Roommates
  8. The Stress of Not Being Able to Get a Good Night’s Sleep And the Ensuing Problems of Walking Through Every Day Fuzzy Headed and Bleary-Eyed
  9. The Stress of the Work Projects That Spiral Out of Control
  10. The Stress of the Cascading Style Sheets That Just Don’t Seem to Work in IE6, No Matter What Hacks I Apply (AKA, I Hate Microsoft, Part 987)

… The stress of NaNoWriMo is one I imposed upon myself. So I hereby release myself from the the deadline, in the hope that I’ll actually be able to accomplish the task at some point in time, because at the very least, the story I was planning on writing cracked me up, and I got much further in the task than I was ever able to do before.

Nanowrimo: Day 3

Okay, I really, really have the plot all worked out and I’m very excited by my idea, which I think is fun, entertaining, and a Big Idea, also.
But I have to do some more research, in the form of purchasing the Historic Plan for our neighborhood, at a cost of $5, from the Indianapolis Historic Preservation Society.
Back in a flash to get caught up on the actually writing. And if you been following along with my blog posts over the past several days, you can see hints and drops of my idea scattered among them. Except for the Slush Mug commercial; that’s just silly fun.
National Novel Writer's Month

Nanowrimo: Day 1

My word count for day 1: 1281 words.
That sucks! I spent most of the day trying to figure out the plot, which I should have had outline in October. It didn’t help that I had my teeth cleaning appointment and the chimney sweeping appointment. Also, the dog barked all day along. Apparently Cthulhu is hiding under our deck again. Pesky elder god.
And today I have a cardiologist’s appointment, and the furnace guy is coming to work on our radiators. Ah, well. I’ll do my best.
National Novel Writer's Month

National Novel Writing Month

National Novel Writing Month is November 1st, and the sign-up for it begins this Friday October 1st (I managed to skip the entire month of September in my head). One of my friends participated in the past and is going to again this year. Here’s the scoop:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

I’m going to throw caution, inhibition, sanity, free-time and probably dignity to the wind and sign up. (Doing the math…. hmmm, hmmm… 1,667 words a day. Eh. I could do that.)

Who’s with me? Anyone?

“Mary Sue” in Online Fan Fiction

MARY SUE (n.):

1. A variety of story, first identified in the fan fiction community, but quickly recognized as occurring elsewhere, in which normal story values are grossly subordinated to inadequately transformed personal wish-fulfillment fantasies, often involving heroic or romantic interactions with the cast of characters of some popular entertainment.

2. A distinctive type of character appearing in these stories who represents an idealized version of the author.

3. A cluster of tendencies and characteristics commonly found in Mary Sue-type stories.

4. A body of literary theory, originally generated by the fanfic community, which has since spread to other fields (f.i., professional SF publishing) because it’s so darn useful. The act of committing Mary Sue-ism is sometimes referred to as “self-insertion.”

Sounds dirty.

Making Light’s lengthy article on the concept of “The Mary Sue” is well worth reading.