With the first draft of Citizen in the Wilds done, and gearing up to revise and post the first chapter in what is sure to be a twenty-part series of me getting my ass handed to me, I find myself thinking I’ve no reason to sit idle. I’ll probably start putting ideas on the cork-board for Alchemist at Sea, Citizen’s sequel, but I’d also like to drum up interest in my work.
Marc Schuster had a great suggestion. Since this blog is about writing, and places for people to write, I should be willing to look at periodicals that post fiction, and post about them in turn. It allows those of you who take the time to read these drips and drabs to find places to possibly feature your fiction, and it gives those periodicals free publicity. Win/win, right?
In contemplating these journal reviews, I found myself wondering what I’d shop around. I don’t want to just get something I’ve already written re-printed. Akuma seems to have been something of a success in David Rupp’s Blood from the Underground, and Polymancer Studios is holding onto the rights for Captain Pendragon.
But whatever happened to Lighthouse?
I’ve kicked around the idea of Morgan Everson, human stopgap between the world of the supernatural and the mortal population at large, being featured in short stories instead of a novel. I can drop all of the expository stuff about her and her dad, make the reveal of who and what characters are more gradual, and basically handle things more episodically. Constantine does it in comic books, The Dresden Files in novels (though Harry’s a magician and Morgan’s pretty much a Badass Normal) and, to an extent, True Blood in television. It’s something I still have an interest in doing, and I want to keep writing even as Citizen in the Wilds gets itself vivisected.
I really can’t start on a sequel until the first novel’s really finished, anyway. And who’s going to publish a raw first draft or a bunch of incoherent bloody bits? I’m not going to sit on my hands and wait for the criticisms to filter in, either. The only way to write is to write, after all.
Here’s some free advice for anyone looking to become a critic: be prepared to experience things you don’t like. If you just write up reviews of things you like, you’re a reviewer, not a critic. I know I’ve fallen into this trap, and I’ve touched on it before, in this very series, so I’ve been looking for an opportunity to encounter a film with which I’m unfamiliar but probably wouldn’t be terribly interested in watching otherwise. When my co-worker insisted that we watch Grandma’s Boy at our monthly Movie Night, and the film began as it meant to go on with stoner humor and jabs at gamer culture, I could feel myself smiling. Not at the humor, because there isn’t much of that despite this being a comedy, no – I was smiling because I was watching an atrocious movie and I couldn’t wait to tear it apart.
Grandma’s Boy, released in 2006, has absolutely nothing to do with the pioneering feature-length comedy of the same name released back in 1922. The older film was about a cowardly man who needed help from his grandmother to overcome his fears and win over the affections of a girl. The 2006 film follows Alex, a single 35-year-old video games tester, as he is thrown out of his apartment because his roommate blew all of the rent money on Filipino hookers. He eventually moves in with his grandmother (thus making him a grandma’s boy, get it? Get it?), charms the female middle manager brought in to help get the video game in production ready for release, and participates in antics related to getting stoned, making fun of the company’s resident genius programmer and getting his grandma and her girlfriends into Antiques Roadshow. If this sounds disjointed in the narrative broad strokes, wait until you see the end result.
Let’s get the praise out of the way so I can go into detail about what doesn’t work in this deplorable movie. The two people whose efforts make this movie watchable are Doris Roberts, as Alex’s grandma Lilly, and Linda Cardellini as Samantha, the middle management troubleshooter. Doris is a delight, one of the few members of the cast with real comedic experience, and her bits show a woman who loves her grandson and has learned to take everything in stride. Linda’s Samantha isn’t terribly well developed, but she’s charming and also rolls well with the punches, on top of being the kind of middle manager anybody in a day job situation would be lucky to have. She’s the kind of manager who knows well the sort of people she has working under her, and also is capable of interfacing with the superiors in the company on their level. She comes off as a true go-between interested in overall success, rather than being out for herself. I’d almost call her a positive female role-model, but given the sort of movie she’s in, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when she gets just as high, drunk and wild as everybody else the audience is supposed to care about.
Having your manager look like this doesn’t exactly hurt, either.
On the other side of things, we have Allan Covert as our “hero”. It’s not that his character, Alex, is unlikable. His jabs tend to be mostly delivered in a good-natured way, since people do need to get along with him otherwise the audience won’t buy him as a protagonist. No, what bugs me about Alex is that his motivations are more clouded than the room in his dealer’s basement. When I think of good comedies, I think of people who are in a situation where they want to do something better or make something of themselves. Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles is dedicated to succeeding when the white men in power would have him fail. Marty McFly in Back to the Future wants to fix his past to make a better future, since he’s kinda stuck there anyway. Jason Nesmith in Galaxy Quest is looking for something meaningful, a fresh start after riding his washed-up sci-fi television career just about as far as he can. Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning Vietnam wants to support his fellow troops with the truth and great music, not the stuff his superiors consider “safe”. In all of these situations, we have protagonists who are somewhat down on their luck, looking upwards and struggling to become more than they are. This doesn’t have to fit every comedy for it to be successful, but at least Ferris Bueller and Jeff Lebowski have clear motivations. Ferris is having a great day off while helping his friends, and Jeff wants his rug back. It really tied the room together.
Alex in Grandma’s Boy feels like someone tried to cross Ferris Bueller with Jeff Lebowski but the experiment went horribly, horribly wrong. Ferris was a kid who had everything together, a sense of ambition and poise, and used his smarts and charm to show his friends a fantastic time. Lebowski’s a stoner, an unmotivated deadbeat, but this plays into the events that occur in his story and remains consistent throughout. Alex waffles back and forth between being an ambitious smart guy and a pothead slacker with little to no warning. He’s trying to be a video game programmer instead of just a tester one minute, and saying “fuck it” and getting baked the next. If the writers wanted to do something with these shifts in tone and make Alex out to be some kind of manic depressive who needed to get a hold of the aimless direction his life had taken, that probably would have worked. Instead we have things working out for him mostly due to contrivance. Real quality storytelling there, Allen.
“Yeah, these assholes actually gave me money to make a movie! Can you believe it?”
Now, not all comedies should have meaning or messages or even necessarily need good characters. But if you’re just going to be a movie about stoners or gamers or race relations or family matters, then in my opinion you should pick one and run with it. The Gamers got this, and was very funny to me as a result. This flick starts with some gamer humor and then meanders into stoner territory before it begins a rather annoying habit wandering back and forth. Waffling between spheres of humor like this just makes the whole thing shamble along like a Frankensteinian construction of Half-Baked and Hackers. Or, more to the point, it feels like Half-Baked bent Hackers over a railing and went to work on its nether regions with a variety of blunt and phallic objects.
The most glaring thing for me when it comes to Grandma’s Boy‘s shortcomings, however, is its sense of time. For one thing, the sense of comedic timing necessary to good humor seems absent for most of the jokes. They either go on for too long or are delivered so poorly that you’re lucky to elicit a bit of a chuckle. And speaking of going on too long, moreso than the comedic timing problem, this movie might only be 96 minutes but the way it is shot, written and acted, it feels quite a bit longer. Good comedy knows not to overstay its welcome. Grandma’s Boy is the sort of comedy that crashes on your couch for six months, doesn’t pay you any rent or grocery money, and leaves the whole place smelling like pot.
At least Doris never failed to class up the joint.
There are so many better comedies out there than Grandma’s Boy. Any of the movies I’ve mentioned previously are much better investments of your time than this turd. The jerk programmer’s neuroses are never fully explored or explained, existing instead so we can laugh at his weirdness and inability to interact with real people – though, in fairness, if I had his office setup I’d be tempted not to deal with my co-workers either. There’s stuff that makes absolutely no sense, like Dante’s obsession with exotic animals protecting his stash or what I like to call the Giant Space Party From Nowhere. And just when you think you couldn’t be any more repulsed by the movie’s failing attempts at humor that go on for way too long and ultimately aren’t all hat funny, up pops David Spade to remind you he’s still trying to be as funny as he was in Tommy Boy. Which he isn’t. You might get a couple of laughs out of Grandma’s Boy but ultimately it’s the kind of sloppy, flaccid and almost mean-spirited comedy that Hollywood seems to think is what the slack-jawed popcorn-gobbling public wants to see. If nothing else, we see how humor in the style of Adam Sandler’s movies turns out when Adam Sandler isn’t directly involved. As much as some of his comedy falls flat from time to time, when we watch some of Sandler’s roles we feel like he’s got two things necessary to be a viable human being and a good humorist: a brain, and a heart. Grandma’s Boy has neither.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
You remember Return of the King, don’t you? How Frodo and Sam are laying there on Mount Doom when (SPOILER ALERT) the eagles, Tolkien’s favorite deus ex machina, sweep down from the sky and carry them away to safety, and after Frodo wakes up to have Merry and Pippin jump into bed with him, the screen fades to black only to fade in again? Remember how that happened a couple of times, leaving you feeling like the movie had three or four endings?
Those are epilogues. They’re portions of the story at the end that, to some, may seem vestigial. Could the aforementioned film have ended without these additional bits of story? Probably. Would it have been improved? Absolutely not. Lord of the Rings, in prose or motion, is focused on its characters, and these epilogues expand even further on those characters, showing what becomes of some of them in the aftermath of this epic confrontation.
While a good ending doesn’t always include an epilogue, an epilogue should always be part of a good ending. Chuck gives great advice on endings which I won’t repeat since he said it first & better, but a good epilogue that’s part of a good ending should fit a lot of his criteria: it should be unexpected, satisfying, and leave the audience hungry for more.
Basically when you hit the last line of the last numbered chapter, the feeling the reader should have is to want to keep turning pages, to see what happens next, how people respond to that line of dialog, etc. Turning the page to find it full of more delicious words instead of just mocking you by being blank is a great feeling for a reader, even if the epilogue begins with a little exposition of what happened after. An epilogue is, by and large, a wrap-up. It’s an opportunity for the author to tie up a loose end or two, get the characters where they need to go after the action concludes, and capitalizes on the reader wanting more. “If there were more,” one might say, “it’d go in this direction.”
You don’t want to leave too many things dangling. That’s sloppy and unprofessional work. You don’t want to drag it out or leave too many things unresolved. If the reader is asking a couple of questions when they do reach that blank page after the words are done, that’s good. The reader asking so many questions it frustrates the hell out of them isn’t.
That’s my goal tonight and into tomorrow, as I pen the epilogue for Citizen in the Wilds. The plot’s pretty much wrapped up, the world has been established and one of its continents explored. Now, without too much faffing about, I need to resolve the situation facing our heroes and show the conclusion of Asherian’s arc. It will end where it began, but the young man’s very different now than he was almost 100,000 words ago. He’s going to keep growing, as I keep writing, and I hope his growth will be as interesting to read as it is to chronicle.
Citizen in the Wilds is swiftly reaching its conclusion. The word count you see to your right doesn’t reflect the several hand-written pages I’ve yet to transcribe. I have one crucial scene to finish, an epilogue to craft and another scene to pen in order to sew this puppy up. But the bottom line is, I want to get a jump-start on the next step.
That step is giving the manuscript a blindfold and a cigarette, standing it in front of a pock-marked brick wall, and handing you each a rifle.
Yes, you. I need some assistance here, folks, as I don’t trust myself entirely to catch my horrid but insidious misspellings, repair any split infinitives and hunt down my darlings. I want to make sure my narrative makes sense, my characters have depth, my themes carry meaning and the whole thing is about something. Sure, I care about this thing, but I don’t feel it’s right to expect anybody else to care unless they get a chance to look it over. Make sense?
Now, this could just be my paper-thin veneer of confidence slipping to show just how insecure I am, especially when it comes to my writing. So be it. I try to be honest, and I’d be lying if I said I have a masterpiece on my hands. I think some things work smoothly and others may be a bit clunky. In the process of getting chapters ready for posting, I’ll definitely revise a bit myself, checking word choice and possibly making some cuts. But I still might miss something. The possibility is there that something I think as fine or just ignore entirely could be a deal-breaker for an agent. And that frightens me.
So I’d like to get other eyes and fingers on the thing. I’ve been debating the best way to do it without printing out multiple copies and killing the planet. Google Wave is still being super beta and occasionally vomiting horribly. Google Docs is more stable, but not everybody will want to go about it that way. And they might be uncomfortable with other people seeing their comments. Scrivener? Sorry, don’t own a Mac. Rob Oaks is working on a Linux-based software solution quite similar to it, called LyX-Outline, and I plan on trying that out. Seeing if I can get people to collaborate that way. Let some folks have at the manuscript, kick the tires, jam the gearshift, see if the damn thing runs.
Anybody out there want to get in on this? Get a sneak peek at the novel before it hits the streets, maybe play a role in bringing it to life? Also, any suggestions for collaborative revision, from other software I haven’t found to reasons why it’s a bad idea, are more than welcome.
I was going to put this off until tomorrow. I was thinking of putting up my entry to Chuck’s contest as late as possible. But I can’t. I’m way too inspired, way too charged, to hold onto this that long. He set the word limit at 1000, so I guess my hope is to deliver twice the story in half the verbiage. That is to say: this is 500 words, and it’s all about doing laser. And rocking your face. Enjoy.
The most amazing thing I’ve ever seen on stage is the Wendigos. These guys that write songs based on odd search engine terms, and not every song they do catches the imagination of an audience. Most of the people in the stadium that night were there for the headlining band, anyway. But as they launched into their last song, ‘I Wanna Do Laser,’ something started happening. It was like night and day. Just a minute before people were wondering what the hell ‘Oatmeal Boat Canvas’ was all about. But the pulsing groove of that final song, the utter unfettered desire to live life, zap through obstacles, fucking DO something, was infectious. It rolled through the crowd like a plague of awesomeness, a sick fetid cloud of the unbelievably cool.
Chuck, the frontman, is rocking the mike. Thirty thousand people are getting into the groove of the song. After the first couple verses, the last two lines are grabbed by the audience who begin shouting it along with Chuck’s singing. In the middle of the song’s bridge, Chuck runs towards the back of the stage, towards the drum kit. His drummer, Larry, looks like he’s facing down a charging rhino. Chuck very nearly kicks Larry in the head as his foot heads for the bass drum pedal. He starts pounding out the beat of the song, which is how the bridge in the studio recording goes into the last verse, but Chuck has a different energy. His eyes are wild. Sweat is flying off his beard. He brings the mike up and shouts.
“My beard come so fat!”
He raises his fists in the air. The response from the audience is immediate, loud and boisterous.
I WANNA DO LASER!
“My beard come so fat!”
I WANNA DO LASER!
“My beard come so fat!”
I WANNA DO LASER!
Over and over again. The rest of the band stops playing. It’s just Chuck, pounding his foot down on that pedal and giving the prompts, communing with thirty thousand brand-new Wendigos fans. Larry and the others walk off stage. Finally, after a good two minutes of this orgy of joie de vivre, Chuck steps off of the pedal, and says it one more time.
“MY BEARD COME SO FAAAAAAAAT!”
I WANNAAAAAAAA DOOOOOOOO LAAAAAAAAAAASER!
The arena explodes. People are screaming. Chuck walks out to the front of the stage, looking around.
“Where’d everybody go?” Chuck looks off-stage. “You buncha pussies! Don’t YOU wanna do laser?”
He turns back to the audience, who are laughing, applauding, crying for an encore.
“What about YOU? YOU STILL OUT THERE??”
The voice of the crowd is like a wave. It washes over the stage and Chuck just stands there basking in it. He turns and looks to the band the Wendigos opened for. He’s grinning like a madman, white teeth shining out of the sweat-soaked tangle of his beard.
Steven Tyler turns to Joe Perry, looking like he just got kicked in the gut.
