Pierce The Heavens With Your Prose!

I've been exercising my capability to write in the epic mode, recently, with varying amounts of success. My endeavors in this direction were prompted by the fanfic Shinji and Warhammer 40k, which chronicles the events of Neon Genesis Evangelion if Shinji had been...more confident, shall we say. It carries us through Shinji's adolescence all the way through the events of The End of Evangelion, and you realize that it has somehow become something undeniably epic when you realize that our hero is facing down an unstoppable Lovecraftian cybernetic monstrosity formed by twelve similarly unstoppable Lovecraftian cybernetic monstrosities that have combined, while piloting a giant cyborg that has had both its arms ripped off, his friends and Enemy Mine fighting alongside him as companions in battle, and you're wondering precisely how they're going to pull victory out of their ass this time. Also, the only people who have gone batshit insane are the bad guys. Which is rather a bit different for Evangelion.

Anyway, the fight scenes in this particular fic...the whole thing, really, when you come right down to it...are incredibly well done. The city that most of the story takes place in actually feels vibrant and functional, and wartime heroics somehow still manage to shine through the unavoidable carnage and debris. And I was hoping to capture that in the project that I'm currently working on. I might be succeeding, because the first honest-to-goodness battle scene that I've written in ages has already shown up and is currently occupying ten full pages of text.

I've basically learned that taking a cinematic approach to writing is Not a Bad Thing, regardless of what creative writing teachers will tell you. It's okay to split a reader's attention among three or four things going on at the same time, so long as those things are clearly delineated to avoid confusion with each other. A few paragraphs of action here, a few paragraphs of action in another location, let's check in on these characters over here, and so on and so forth. If pulled off properly, it gives a sort of sweeping effect to the proceedings, granting an impression of the bloody chaos befalling the characters without having to go into massive, explicit detail concerning the larger picture--though that is nice too, every once in a while.

Also, I've learned that just letting rip can be the best thing to do. I've been so concerned this past year with writing good fiction that I've not really had the presence of mind to write fun fiction. And to me, a story being fun is a lot more important than it being Literature. That was a difficult lesson to learn, and it's even more difficult to put into practice. But I'm getting there.

I would much rather entertain people than crank out yet another American Classic that will be ignored by prisoners of academia for the next three hundred years.

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"A hero strikes when least expected! The enemy of all that is good, the one who wants to destroy this world that is made of love! And peace! Will never escape from justice! Specially in the moment that he feels safe, he will know! There is nowhere to hide! The name for this! IS DYNAMIC ENTRY!"

Running the Gauntlet

As much as I've bitched and bellyached about grad school, I think it has done me some good. I've gotten some of the best literary exercise I could possibly imagine during the past two semesters, and I think it was exercise I sorely needed. As much as I really, really hated writing sci-fi and fantasy when every other person in the bloody world seemed to be writing realism, I think it was the best thing that could have happened. It forced me to pay as much attention to the human aspects of the story as I do to the fantastical parts.

I think I'd really, truly managed that in only one story up until I started grad school. And that story is still my absolute favorite of everything I've ever written. It was one of those that was like silk off a spool, right from the very beginning. At least, it feels like that, looking back on it. And I knew I had something special by the time I was even partway done. I just didn't realize why until much, much later. It was because, deep down at the heart of it, past the wizards and the royalty and the fantasy bric-a-brac, the two main characters were absolutely human, and they acted it. And their personal realness extended out to the rest of the story, despite its fairy-tale-ish trappings, to make the world they occupied real.

So I guess I understand what was going through Christian Bale's mind when he initially turned down the role of John Connor in the new Terminator. True, special effects are awesome. And that's what a lot of the trappings of fantasy and science fiction are: special effects. That is in no way meant to belittle them, either. I love the conventions of fantasy and sci-fi. They're great fun. And you can build a fun story based on special effects alone. It's absolutely possible. You get the literary equivalent of a popcorn flick, which runs on sheer enthusiasm in order to get its paper-thin protagonists from one plot point to the next. The problem is that, unless it is particularly uninhibited in its exuberance, few people are going to remember that sort of thing two days after they've read it. Just like with a movie that's all CGI flash and zero storytelling substance.

So if you really want to fill out a story, to give it genuine weight, to make it memorable, then your characters have to be people. In all their beautifully ugly glory. And that's really all there is to it.

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We were going to use the time machine to prevent the robot apocalypse, but the guy who built it was an electrical engineer.

Homosexuality != Edgy

All right, folks, I'm gonna lay it out right here and now. If you write a story whose entire existence revolves around the fact that a character is gay in a transparent attempt to be oh-so-avant-garde, you have written a bad story. I think we passed the point a long time ago where guys having sex with guys and women having sex with women were enough to make any given narrative "edgy".

Do we have an understanding, Internet? There is no edge.

Writing about characters who happen, by some stroke of coincidence, to prefer sexual relations with their own gender has as little bleeding-edge art quality to it as writing about characters who have bottle-blonde hair or work on farms for a living. It's just an aspect of character. If you're straight, does it dominate your entire bloody existence? No. It's just something you happen to be, just like you also happen to be an insurance salesman or an astronaut or The Goddamn Batman.

Batman never gets laid. Does anybody give a shit? No, because he's too busy going out and being awesome! His sexual preference is almost entirely incidental*. Can you imagine Batman manufactured as a character solely for the purpose of being an exemplar of straightness? How fucking boring would that be?

So here's the thing. It's all well and good to write gay characters. I do on a regular basis. But you can't let what gender they get hard/soggy for be the only thing that defines them. Gay folk are people, not sexual preference incarnate. It irks me especially when a writer does something like, say, write a story in which a homosexual man is married to a woman for no good reason. Ostensibly to hide his sexual preference, but from who? The only people who give a shit anymore need a good hard smack upside the head anyway. Everyone else on the planet just goes with it. Unless you are extremely personally religious there is no need to deny yourself like that in this day and age. And at that point you are the one who needs a smack upside the head.

Just thinking about that story makes me want to punch someone in the throat.

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You guys don't know what it's like to be straight. It's horrible.

* Which is not to say he shouldn't go ahead and get it on with Talia al Ghul. Because rrowr.

Portrait of Grad School as a Catholic Schoolgirl

I'm going to start completely off topic by addressing a commercial I just saw on USA. This commercial (for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest--which is to say, for the last good PotC) muses on the subject of the "fairest pirate of them all". It notes that Orlando Bloom has the hair (fair enough), that Johnny Depp has the makeup (affirmed by the shot of him in full cannibal-god facepaint), and that Keira Knightley has "the chest".

I adore Keira Knightley (now that there's a year or so of distance between me and the debacle that was At World's End), but nobody is attracted to her because she has boobs. Because she doesn't. The girl is in the same category as Natalie Portman. She's practically concave.

Don't take this to mean I have something against small breasts. I just think it's kind of ridiculous that Mademoiselle Knightley is being advertised as having something that she clearly does not.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I spoke to my short story prof earlier today. I'd tried once before and failed miserably, and damn near missed her this evening. I caught her just as she was leaving, though, and we had what I think was a fairly productive talk. It basically came down to her apologizing for pressing the point so hard in class, that she was just trying to get me to branch out into different things. Which I can understand, but I also explained to her that writing fantasy and horror is when I have the most fun, and that I find literary fiction to be rather boring, in all honesty.

That led to kind of a strange place, wherein she compared my seeming inability to like literary fiction because of my fondness for high-energy and plot-centric genre material to her inability to like jazz because her musical realm of choice has always been rock. Which makes sense if you squint a little bit and try not to think too hard.

Then things returned to normalcy, and she pointed out that everyone has a tendency to teach to their strengths, and that perhaps she doesn't know enough about the fantasy genre to really help. When she asked for a recommendation for a short story collection, I said I'd bring around Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman and a couple old issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction for her reading pleasure. She seemed to take well to that.

Anyway, the main thing she told me was to not worry about the thesis, that what I write will work for it. Or that they'll make it work, or whatever. The main thing was that I would be able to construct my thesis out of the sort of stuff I like to write. So I suppose I'll hang about for a while and see how things go.

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"So I figure I'll dally with graduate school for a while longer, make out a bit, see if I can get her to take her knickers off, and if she won't...I'll go find something else to do."
"An easier girl, you mean."
"Yes."
"Men. You're all alike."
"Hey, y'know, sometimes the penis just asserts itself."

This...Might Be A Problem

I'm aware that I haven't made an update in quite some time. There's a perfectly good reason for that, and the reason is this: school started. I've been up to my neck in the beginnings of grad school for the past several weeks, and I can't say I'm altogether fond of it. Things didn't improve today when we had our first workshop session. I wrote one of the pieces that was workshopped, and while the class seemed to think highly of it in general, the professor didn't like it near as much.

Her major beef with it was that it was a genre story. Urban fantasy, specifically. She seems to think that the science fiction and fantasy genres are used as crutches by younger writers, especially those who feel insecure enough in their skill that they want to have something stable (like, say, genre conventions) to shore up the weak spots in their storytelling. She thinks my writing is better than that--which I'm afraid I can't exactly say is flattering, per se.

But that's all well and good. Her opinion is just as valid as mine, which in turn is just as valid as that of the next guy in line, particularly if the next guy in line happens to be an unmedicated drunken schizophrenic. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, and she just happens to opine that genre writing is "lower class".

The problem of the post title is her assertion that one cannot piece together an MFA thesis with "this kind" of writing--by which I assume she means genre writing. This is a problem because I write nothing else. I'll do some moderately realistic/literary stuff when I'm writing for the stage, but beyond that it's all Weird Shit With Pretty Girls In. We spent a whole class period in this short story course talking about knowing what our material is, what we work best with and what we like to write...and my material is Weird Shit With Pretty Girls In. That's pretty much all it comes down to. And if I can't compose my thesis using those kinds of stories...I guess I'm not going to have a thesis, then.

So it would seem I'm at an impasse. The main thing that baffles me is that this woman, who was on the selection committee for the program, seemed to think that genre writing was not my standard schtick. Even though the story that I offered up as my writing sample was comic fantasy. It had a thief, and a princess, and a tower with a wizard in it! I can't fathom how it could have come off any other way. Aside from which, I included with the application the required letter talking about myself as a writer. Here is a direct quote from it:

I have a distinct leaning towards genre stories, especially fantasy and speculative fiction. I think that it is in the extreme conditions that these genres so often present that the best, most exciting, and most illuminating stories can be found.

...Does that sound like genre writing is not my standard schtick? I'm beginning to think that someone wasn't paying attention when they accepted my application.

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It's like when you're watching a play and someone walks on stage naked. You get used to it eventually--it just becomes another costume--but until then you're just sitting there going, "That guy's naked."

Grues, Games, and Gainful Employment

So I now have requests in to several individuals to allow me to use them as professional references when I attempt to get a job this summer, and I'm just waiting to hear back before I start filling out online applications.

Seems like the old "sidle up to the place of employment with the classified ad clutched in hand" method of job-hunting seems to have fallen by the wayside. On the one hand I'm a bit disappointed by that, but on the other I'm glad to be saved the trouble.

In any case, I've got two projects that will also be keeping my attention for the rest of the summer, along with (hopefully) my job. The first of them is a bit of interactive fiction that I started last summer, but put on hiatus when school started kicking my ass. I picked it back up again yesterday and added a few more rooms on to it, along with at least one instant game over for the player.

In my experience, IF enthusiasts seem to like those. At least, the third or fourth time I was strangled by the janitor in The Lurking Horror, that was the conclusion that I drew. Strangely enough, it had to be the time I went to try to catch the snippet of the game where you realize he didn't blink the entire bloody game that I figured out how to beat him. Go figure.

The other project is (at the suggestion of a friend) to write my own role-playing game. I've been working on the opening fluff since yesterday, and I've got a good solid four pages or so of it (single-spaced, at that). I'm liking it. It's going to have some nice layers to it, I think. Or at least as many layers as Western steampunk fantasy can have. After I'm done writing this I'm going to post a chunk of the fluff on Literary Bushido, just for the hell of it.

So between those two and the job I'll (optimistically) get, it seems I'll have a fairly productive summer. And hey, one of my reference hopefuls just emailed me and said that he would. Just one more to go before I start putting in applications.

Then I will be gainfully employed. How about that?

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It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Personal Archaeology

Some time ago I was shoveling out my room (this is a more or less constant process, as my room is never fully shoveled out) and stumbled across a collection of writings from my not-so-halcyon days as an eighth grade middle school student.

There wasn't anything especially bad about my life back then, to be honest, there was just the overwhelming and undeniable fact that I was in middle school. But I digress.

Its strange, to look back and see how my style has evolved over the years. There were hints of my sense of humor even back then. It was also painful to see the pomposity that pervaded my science fiction. I was a conceited little shit when I was writing sci-fi. I used to think that hard science fiction--serious, factual, and scientifically-supported--was the One True Way. I came to this conclusion after being exposed to far too much Star Trek and Michael Crichton. It took me a long time to discover that, while hard sci-fi is all well and good, that space opera is way more fun. I'll take high adventure in hard vacuum over believable military tactics anyday.

It was also strange just how caught up I was in science fiction. I'm not sure I had any real awareness of fantasy as a genre at that point. I'd read Lord of the Rings, but I'm not sure if I fully comprehended it. Which is an odd distinction, but one I've run across often enough that I'm not afraid to make it. It took me a long while to actually understand how difficult it was to write good science fiction. There's a certain suspension of disbelief inherent to fantasy that I find much easier to work with nowadays. I still attempt to make the worlds believable (insofar as they need to be), but I don't have to worry about having thoughts like, "Wait...shit. Relativity. Dammit."

That's a freedom I'm rather fond of.

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"Leave my mother out of this."