I’m sure a lot of other people do too. Handheld gaming consoles. Cell phones that also play TV shows. My mother just picked up a new iPod Nano and damn, is that thing slick. Touch screen, bright display, bigass internal storage… as they say, “the woiks.”
Writers especially seem to like gizmos. Scrivener is something of a software gizmo for writers that other writers will not stop raving about. Nevermind that, unlike the true artists out there, I don’t own a Mac. The aforementioned Shuffle’s the only iProduct I own. Still, I see a lot of creative folks making good use of iProducts – Chuck Wendig is using his iPad to tell tales of the Dreaded Dawntaint in his travels.
But I have to wonder. How much of banging on keys actually constitutes “writing”? We bang on keys to communicate, to play games, to balance checkbooks, search for stuff on the Internet, the list goes on. Writing is a different process in our minds, yes, but procedurally it seems like there’s little to keep it from all mushing together into one long amorphous string of fevered keystrokes.
For my part, just like a Nook or Kindle will never replace the weight of a real book in my hands, no keyboard or LCD monitor will ever replace the tactile satisfaction I get by pouring my creativity onto a piece of paper through the medium of pen. There’s a notebook in a vinyl cover from the Writer’s Museum in Edinburgh that contains the last third or so of Citizen in the Wilds. And when the going gets tough in my process, I toss out all the modern trappings and get back to basics. I put pen to paper.
Case in point, the ever-elusive query. I simply couldn’t figure out why the damn thing isn’t coming together in a way that any person who isn’t me interested in reading this book, let alone selling it. So on the train home on Friday, after I finished George RR Martin’s excellent novel A Game Of Thrones, I broke out the binder and my pen and started jotting down notes. I think I have a line on making a query that’s decent but just waiting to be rejected into a query that’ll grab the attention of someone who sees it cross their desk.
Now, I realize that in both typing out this blog post and translating the ideas born from the notes I’ve jotted into an electronic text file, I may come across as being a little hypocritical. But I’m also not going for an “unplugged” sort of lifestyle. Like I said, I love gizmos and I’m going to be using them for many, many years to come.
It’s just nice and fulfilling, on occasion, to do things the old-fashioned way.
I am loathe to admit this, but I’ve made it a point in my writing and especially this series not to be disingenuous in my assertions. That’s a good way to get punched in the face. So here it is: I don’t like spook houses. Those standalone buildings in carnivals, fairs and amusement parts where part-timers are paid to jump out of closets at you? Yeah. Not really my scene. I don’t consider it horrific when I get startled. It’s just annoying. Around this time last year when Pandorum was out I didn’t really pay much attention to it, half-expecting it to be a jump-out scarefest dressed up as a high-concept sci-fi horror flick. This is one of those times when I’m pretty happy to admit I was wrong.
The Elysium is a spacecraft carrying thousands of colonists and biological samples for the settlement of the distant Earth-like planet of Tanis. Earth has just about run out of room and resources. While humanity suffocates on its own wastefulness and hubris, the Elysium‘s passengers are kept in deep cryogenic sleep for their 123-year journey with the promise that they’ll save anybody left behind. When Corporal Bowers wakes up for his shift, however, there are immediate problems. He’s been out long enough to lose parts of his memory. His ship is dying, its reactor core malfunctioning and its navigational systems unable to tell him where they are. His superior officer, Lieutenant Payton, has a similar memory problem when he wakes up. As Bower heads for the reactor to fix the ship and Peyton acts as mission control at the one working console, two things become apparent very quickly: The officers are not alone aboard the Elysium, and one or both of them are suffering from a mental condition similar to nitrogen narcosis related to extended cryogenic sleep – a condition they call Pandorum.
Do you have a feeling you know where this is going? If not, maybe you should consider watching more movies. Specifically, you need to check out Alien, The Descent and Event Horizon, because those are movies that at best inspired Pandorum and at worst were victims of a blatant idea mugging at its hands. Players of System Shock 2 or Dead Space will feel right at home as well. On the surface, there isn’t much about the concept, narrative through-line or inevitable “twist” moments that haven’t been seen, experienced or lampshaded before. But that’s a general overview and maybe a little unfair. The devil, as they say, is in the details.
It’s a shame more PhDs aren’t this badass. Or this hot.
It’s been said that as soon as you fill your spaceship with metal grating floors devoid of carpeting and lights that flicker on and off, your protagonists might as well use marinade for a shampoo. However, in the case of Pandorum, the set design is a big part of the atmosphere. This ship is old, with limited power and even more limited resources. Instead of dropping beefy space marines or even powered armor the protagonists have to learn to use into the situation, our heroes have little more than their clothes on their backs and whatever improvised weapons they can lay their hands on. I never said borrowing from Alien was a bad thing, after all. We’re pulled into the story and feeling the dread and claustrophobia of Bower long before we see our first creature.
Speaking of which, this was the second work of Stan Winston’s legendary creature shop after the mastermind’s untimely passing. The first was G.I. Joe – the less said about that the better. Anyway, I might have appreciated the psuedo-tribal designs and creepiness more if I’d gotten better looks at these things, however the camera moves so damn much whenever they’re around that it’s really difficult to do so. Giving fleeting glimpses of a monster instead of showing us what we’re in for is good as a rule. It’s why the original Predator works on a level that neither Aliens vs. Predator movie comes close to reaching. But the more Pandorum goes on, the more it feels the film crew shot it this way after getting drunk and deciding emulating Michael Bay’s camera work was a great idea for their fight scenes.
I don’t think Dennis wants to be reminded of G.I. Joe, either.
Another problem this movie has is in sound design. Now, the soundtrack of Pandorum isn’t all that bad, at least to my ears but then again I’m a sucker for tribal drums in my sci-fi, e.g. Bear McCreary’s kickass music for Battlestar Galactica. And the screams of the creatures are fine, creaking bulkheads, visceral tearing noises, etc. The problem I had was with the level of dialog. With so much else going on it’s really easy to lose lines or entire exchanges as they’re frantically whispered between the survivors. I understood that being quiet was necessary for survival in most of the open areas of the ship, but some scenes were very difficult for me to follow in terms of dialog. Then again, this might be the fault of watching this via the Netflix Instant service in a room right next to a busy intersection.
There are a lot of minor flaws in the overall movie that would cripple the entire project if there weren’t good things holding them up. Beyond the set design and lighting, we have a pace that gradually builds the tension and is in no rush to get to the bottom of the mysteries, opting instead to keep the action moving and build the characters. Par for the course considering this somewhat derivative material, the characters we get aren’t really all that deep or unique. However, what I like about them is that none of them are beefy macho space marines. The obligatory knife-twirling action babe began life as a geneticist and her stoic, large spear-wielding guardian was a farmer. These are normal people that managed to survive in extraordinary circumstances. The closest we come to military characters are Payton and Bower. And while Bower does some of the heavy lifting action-wise, he’s not exactly the Emperor’s Finest.
Bower and the film’s only ray gun.
This is a good thing, though. It’s one of the best things Pandorum has going for it. Ben Foster as Bower does just about everything right in ways that invoke pleasant memories of Bruce Willis playing John McClaine in Die Hard. He and the other survivors demonstrate good instincts and decent cognitive skills, for the most part. There’s only one point at which an audience might yell at the screen at a character for making a bad decision. I’ve always liked Ben Foster, from his funny and touching turn as Spacker Dave in The Punisher to his unhinged second gun to Russell Crowe in 3:10 To Yuma. Seeing him take the lead here is a very pleasant experience, and as much as Bower might be just an engineer and not cut out for combat or extreme survival, there is a scene in which my jaw was hanging open – not at the visuals, not at the viscera, but merely at the demonstration of an everyday guy having some big, brass balls.
It’s nowhere near a perfect movie. In terms of sci-fi horror, Alien has nothing to worry about. Pandorum is saved from failure by surprisingly decent writing and acting, excellent set design and a premise that assumes the audience is smart enough to follow along without needing things explicitly spelled out every step of the way. They just seem to forget that we’ve seen other movies before, meaning we’ve seen some of these elements before as well. If Pandorum were a baked concoction, you’d throw together equal parts Alien, The Descent and Titan AE, dash it with a little Dead Space and frost it with Event Horizon after it’s done baking. The result probably isn’t all that good for you and you’ll have tasted better, but that doesn’t stop this particular little experiment from tasting pretty damn good.
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.
This was an image I originally hunted down for use in the potential video project of turning the IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! review of Emperor’s New Groove into an entry in the Escapist’s contest. However, it’s feeling more and more like I won’t have time to even think about seriously working on such a project. More to the point, to work on that project would take time away from the frustratingly gradual process of refining a novel to its publishable form. It’s been bothering me for days, sometime to the point that I can’t even stand to look in that folder’s general direction.
The query for Citizen in the Wilds has been the major struggling point for me. A lot of the sentiments and experiences I’m about to convey are going to feel like a pale echo of stuff that’s been said before and in a much better and more useful way here. And, at the expense of tooting my own writer’s war-horn, I’m making progress. I’m confident enough in my skills to say that what I’ve written (in the novel, mind, not the query, that’s still kind of meandering around) is good. I just worry that it isn’t good enough.
Why?
I feel I may be too close to it.
Hence the Police-flavored title. See what I did there?
Anyway, my big fear along with the usual little ones of not being good enough, smart enough, charismatic enough or prompt enough to grab and hold the attention of an agent is that I’m too close to the work. I’ll be looking for grammatical errors, hunting down darlings and re-examining passages with such myopic focus that I’ll miss some big glaring issue that will keep this from getting published. I think it’s part and parcel of being the sort of person who fixates on games along with being a general media sink: I’ll zone in on something of a particular interest to me, at times to the exclusion of all else. In other words, expect my blog posts to be a bit less substantial in content when Cataclysm actually releases, in other words, provided I haven’t decided to play through the Mass Effect games for the seventeenbazillionth time instead.
I’m wandering off my point again, but this is less of a coherent advice-focused blog post and more of a stream-of-consciousness infodump. I’m sure you’ve picked up on that already, and if you didn’t you’re either on some other, better-written site or looking up an old ICFN to hear me rant about how badly something sucks because we just don’t have enough Internet critics yet.
My point is that I am aware of the fact that this myopia is a problem inherent with geeks in general, gamers in particular and me most of all. Compounding the problem is the fact that I don’t know what the Achilles heel of my own work is, because in the act of creating it I have inextricably put myself in very close proximity to it. I’m not about to run to the mountaintop declaring that the salvation of fans of high fantasy is at hand with this tome, fuck no, but I’m also not operating under the impression that it’s absolute shit. What I will say is that my goal is mostly to have it not be mediocre, the sort of easy-to-crank-out guaranteed-to-sell-to-morons schlock I’ve decried on many an occasion here. But my dilemma is while I strive to avoid those things that piss me off about said schlock, I may be writing a different kind of schlock entirely and not even really know it.
I can say “this doesn’t work and needs a rewrite” or “this is unnecessary and I need to bypass it before I take it out back and put a bullet in its brainpan.” What I’m struggling with is saying “Overall, this book is really about X in the context of Y but element Z undermines or detracts from that central theme or narrative throughline.” This is probably why the query is such a tremendous hurdle for me to clear. Ultimately I am unsure if the proper course of action is to hand it to someone I trust to read critically from start to finish or to put myself through the editorial process as many times as it takes, but the fact I can’t shake is that I might just be too close to it.
It’s a “forest for the trees thing.” I can tell this tree is an oak and that over there’s a pine, but I have no idea how big the forest actually is, how close the nearest river or roadkill-strewn freeway might be or how much (if any) of it is on fire because I forgot to stamp out my stogy properly and now HOLY SHIT IT’S SMOKEY THE BEAR AND HE’S PISSED OFF AT ME RUN JUST GODDAMN RUN. I wouldn’t see it coming. I’m nose-deep in bark and needles trying to get the sticky sap out of my beard and the sharp plantlife out of my eyeballs. I’m too obsessed with details to realize that the kind and gentle guardian reminding me that only I can prevent forest fires is only wearing that park ranger hat because he ate the last park ranger that trashed his woods.
I really don’t know how else to express this impasse I seem to have reached. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m writing this properly. I’m uncertain if I should be pestering those brave souls who’ve volunteered to test-read the thing to give me more feedback, or if I need to keep to the writer tradition of the bitter isolationist hermitage into the editorial chambers. And I remind myself that no matter what I do I’m likely to still receive a shitload of rejections long before I even remotely grab the attention of someone in a position to help me turn a hundred thousand words of fantasy fiction arranged in a particular order into something that actually pays my fucking bills.
I do this because I’m crazy. I do this because I hate myself. I do this because I’m sick of working dayjobs.
And, deep down, I do this because, frustration and depression and bad metaphors and all, I love it.
I just need to not be so close to it. Otherwise, I may lose sight of how good it actually is.
A lot of my friends and associates, like myself, enjoy reading, watching or experiencing media in which human beings are placed in mortal danger. We move humans from cover to cover while shooting at other living things. We watch as political scandals unfold. We read about intrepid people delving into the darkness beneath the earth.
It’s fun, diverting and sometimes thought-provoking, but when it happens in real life, it can be a very different story.
For example, a lot of the gamers on X-Box Live playing a first-person shooter love to go on and on about how badass they are. But how often do these kids move off of the couch and off to their local recruiter? Does the thought even occur to them that holding a real gun and shooting at real brown people might satisfy them in ways holding a controller and shooting at digitized brown people never really can? Hell, paintball battles are frantic enough, can these people even fathom how terrifying it would be to try and make their way across an open area covered by people with assault rifles?
The reason this is on my mind is because the miners in Chile are being rescued after two months. In fantasy RPGs, players are often underground or delving into haunted dark hallways for a very long time. Most players are either alone or in a small party. In the context of a game, this is no problem. But when you’re actually in the deep darkness by yourself for an extended period of time, bad things happen. Those guys in Chile were taken care of in many ways and kept each other sane as much as possible.
Anyway, this dichotomy between the settings and circumstances of a game setting and a real-life one isn’t all that odd. I’d much rather keep Commander Shepard behind cover while alien weaponry inexplicably bounces off metal crates instead of going to a foreign country myself with little more than a submachine gun and a prayer book. Escapism is a way to experience these situations ourselves from the safety of our couches. I think it’s important to remember, however, that there are those who do end up in these situations who do so without the benefit of save points, an omniscient support character or a controller to stand between them and the events taking place. And the moments when they overcome the obstacles set before them is an event much more worthy of celebration than any achievement we might unlock on our consoles or PCs.
