Filling the Well

I’m on the road again, traveling in New Mexico, so posting will be spotty this week. But the scenery here is so beautiful I may have to post some pictures.

I leave you with a couple of thoughts:

Battlestar Galactica is dead to me. I’ve written about how to write a good series. BSG is doing a really good job right now demonstrating how to screw up a series. More later, I’m waiting to see how they wrap it all up.

Yes, I’m still following all the GI Joe movie rumors and character photos. I must say, I heart Dennis Quaid’s Hawk, and the Baroness looks pretty darned good (this version looks a lot like the excellent artwork of Mike Bear in the current run of comics). But it’s all looking very dark and Matrix-y, which is confusing my 1980’s cartoon lovin’ sensibilities.

I saw the funniest set of bumper stickers yesterday. The car had an “Obama 08″ sticker, and right under that was a “Ron Paul for President” sticker.

The thing is, I don’t think it was supposed to be funny. But I can’t figure it out. Does the car belong to two people with wildly different political affiliations? Did someone change preferences and not bother taking off the old sticker? Does this person think they’d make good running mates?

I added a convention: OSFest, in Omaha, Nebraska, July 11-13. So don’t say I never get out east! Okay, sort of east… from here it’s east… never mind.

You’ll also notice I’ve added a page to the sidebar listing my whole upcoming convention and signing calendar. I hope this is helpful.

Now, off to work! Or I could go outside and smell the lilacs and enjoy the weather. I live near a couple of lakes, except they’re actually drainage/irrigation ponds. During the winter, the flow to them gets cut off and they dry up completely. It’s very sad and I hate it, because instead of lakes, they turn into big ugly dry pits. Well, last week the irrigation flow started up again, and one of them had filled halfway up, and I bet the other one is starting to fill, too. I want to go look and see what birds have settled in!

I avoided reviews of “Iron Man,” but the tremendous buzz was apparent. My take on it? Wow. Just wow.

But let’s talk about plot, because this thing was almost perfectly plotted. Plot has been the hardest thing for me to learn, so I think about it a lot and am always taking notes. One famous way of thinking about plot: if you put a gun on the mantle in act one, it needs to be fired by the end of the story. My favorite way of thinking about plot: it’s like setting up dominoes. You spend the first half of the story setting up the dominoes; the second half, you tip them over and watch them knock each other down in a complicated pretty pattern. Ideally, every piece of the story plays an important part and contributes to the whole pattern. If it doesn’t, the story (like the domino pattern) stalls, fizzles in the middle, or leads to a dead end.

“Iron Man” did this beautifully. Scenes worked on multiple levels, and they were all connected to a whole pattern. Here’s a great example. **SPOILERS** The scene where Tony needs Pepper to help him switch out the little generator thingy that’s keeping him alive is hugely funny. But it also gives the characters a chance connect, and to show the audience how important they are to each other. From this, we know that when Pepper learns that Tony is Iron Man, it’ll be okay because he can trust her, and when Tony needs help Pepper will totally have his back. But that scene sets up another cool character moment: Tony tells her to get rid of the old generator. She doesn’t, but returns it to him as a trophy that says “Proof that Tony Stark Has a Heart.” I swear, an entire theater full of hard-bitten comic fans all went “Awe!” So another funny scene that also builds character. But then it sets up yet another scene: when the big bad dude (love Jeff Bridges) gets to Tony and rips the new generator out of him, the solution is right there — he’s still got the old one. It’s been set up, and it’s perfect.

The whole movie is like that.

And that’s how you do it: you look for solutions to the story among the elements you’ve already put into play. And ideally, each of those elements also builds character, contributes to the theme, creates subtext, etc. The solution, the climax, whatever, needs to be planted early on. If you have to go back and revise the first half to make sure the dominoes you need are there, then do it. Later seasons of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” had serious problems with this. There’d be a big problem, and in the last ten minutes LaForge or Data or someone would come along and say, “Oh, but if we change the frequency of the tachyon stream the power surge will override the polarity of the blah blah blah.” And we, the audience, are sitting there thinking WTF? Where did that come from?

I could say a lot more about “Iron Man.” The secondary characters were well-rounded and awesome. The effects looked fantastic. My geek-fu is strong because I guessed the acronym of the secret government agency halfway through. The easter egg at the end of the credits left me squealing in glee. (Because Jackson is so much better than the last guy to play Nick Fury.)

And none of the fight scenes went on too long. The movie actually left me wanting more. Awesome.

My life is full of adventure and good things. Tonight is “Iron Man.” Last night was Pink Martini, with the Colorado Symphony, bringing that whole retro ’50s cabaret dance band sound to the modern era. So awesome.

The set started with Ravel’s “Bolero,” but with a dancy latin kick. You know, bongos and congas and marimbas and stuff. Like the soundtrack of a 1950’s adventure flick. So I instantly get this story in my head: It’s right after World War II, we’re in a seedy bar in Brazil. The kind of place with bamboo furniture and a ceiling fan cutting through columns of cigarette smoke. A couple of dirty men are in the corner, playing poker with damp, wrinkled cash. A large, suspicious man, wearing a panama hat and smoking a cigar, sits in a shadow, holding a tumbler of bourbon that he isn’t drinking. At the bar is an exotic-looking woman, with an orchid in her dark hair. She’s wearing a tight floral dress and watching the door. She doesn’t look happy. In the distance there’s the sound of a diesel engine — a boat motoring up the river. The engine stops, and a moment later two men enter. They might be German. Just something about the look in their eyes, the way their stiff bodies ought to be wearing uniforms. One of them is carrying a black leather satchel. They go meet the man in the panama hat. But the woman at the bar has been waiting. She gives a signal. Five more men leap out of hiding, determined to steal away the smuggled diamonds in the satchel. There’s a fight, then gunfire — and so on.

Yeah. I had a really good time. I had stories playing in my head all night because the music sent me to another world. Music does that to me a lot. As a special treat, Lauderdale played Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” after the intermission. And then there was all that great singing. Hmmmm….

…to folks in Colorado. Remember yesterday when I bragged about how nice the weather was?

Well, today we have this:

Sorry, guys. My bad.

At the start of April I set myself a goal of getting to 40,000 words on the current project, Kitty #7, by the end of April. At the time, I seriously didn’t think I was going to make it. But since I’m at 39,600 right now, I think I’ll make it with room to spare. This puts the book at about the halfway point. Woot! Makes me happy. (what’s happening in the book right now: everybody dies! Well, okay, not really…)

Some of you are probably thinking, Ack! Book 7? What happened to 5 and 6? The answer is, they’re still in process. I still have to do revisions and copy editing and all that good stuff on them. It’s going to be a busy busy summer. *rolls up sleeves*

In other news, we are having a beautiful spring here. T-shirt weather, lots of singing birds. Yesterday a flock of migrating pelicans soared and circled over the ponds where I walk Lily. I bought a mint plant, and am going to work very hard to keep it alive so I can have fresh mint tea — and mojitos! — by the end of summer.

Oh, and I have a really good title for #7. Unlike the last two, when I had to slog through title hell to find good ones. I’m not going to tell it until I run it by a few people first. On the other hand, for your amusement, here are the working titles: “The Kitty Horror Picture Show” (rejected for obvious reasons) and “The Most Dangerouser Game,” which a friend of mine came up with and which I think is completely hilarious.

So. I was going through some old pictures when I found this one. It’s my vampire hunter Halloween costume from 1999 or 2000. I’d forgotten all about it. But now I look at it and think, “Wow, this could be the cover of a stereotypical urban fantasy novel!” Mind you, this was a few years before the current blazing popularity of novels with such covers. As I said, ahead of my time.

I have a couple of video links for you.

Joseph Kittinger free falls from space.

A longer version, with a lot of really cool footage of the preparation and balloon ascent, but with a cheesy soundtrack.

This is my favorite story from US aerospace history. In 1960, as part of a set of tests designed to record the effects of high altitude on the human body, Air Force test pilot Joseph Kittinger rode a helium balloon to an altitude of 102,000 feet. (For reference, most commercial airplanes don’t get higher than about 40,000 ft.) That’s 20 miles up. Then, he jumped. He wanted to prove pilots and astronauts could bail out safely, using a special multi-stage parachute. This feat hasn’t gotten nearly the press as the Mercury 7 or the Apollo moon landing. In fact, not many people know about it at all. But I think Kittinger’s jump is mind-blowingly unreal. And it’s never been equaled, in almost 50 years.

I encountered the story through Craig Ryan’s book The Pre Astronauts and only found film clips of the jump later. But ooh, boy. The film is MIND BLOWING. He’s jumping. FROM SPACE. Falling at over 600 mph! He’s high enough to see the curvature of the Earth. And HE’S FALLING. According to Kittinger, he couldn’t feel himself falling. He had to look back at the balloon to realize he was moving away from it. The image of this tiny human body (captured by a remote camera in the gondola) falling against the backdrop of far distant clouds makes me catch my breath every time. The longer clip has a bit I hadn’t seen before: a little further into the fall (about the 5:18 mark), Kittinger pulls himself into a jackknife, to better control his freefall. There’s a test pilot for you.

As you might imagine, this went into my idea file, and I wrote a story, “This is the Highest Step in the World.” (It’s in an anthology called All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories.) I got the title from the sign placed on the door of Kittinger’s balloon gondola. You can see it in the longer video.

The short review: This is my favorite movie in a very long time. It was gorgeous.

The commentary: This got me thinking about how a cliched story that we’ve all seen a million times can still be really good and make me so very happy, like this one did. Because The Forbidden Kingdom is a really cliched story. White kid loves kung fu movies, gets in trouble, gets sucked into Chinese kung fu fantasy world, meets analogs of his favorite kung fu characters, goes on quest, learns kung fu, saves the world, lives happily ever after. This may be the most cliched fanboy fantasy story there is. But I still loved it, and rather than being predictable (because it was) the outcome was satisfying. It fulfilled expectations rather than boring or frustrating me. So what’s the key? How does it work?

A couple of things make it work, I think. First, great production values. This is a great looking film, very beautiful, all the pieces fit together. I was in Chinese kung fu fantasy world and not on a sound stage. Second, it was sincere, and it was true. Sure, Jason gets sucked into the fantasy world and learns kung fu. But learning kung fu is really really hard for him. He struggles mightily. He bleeds. He screws up a lot. He’ll never be as good as Jackie Chan and Jet Li. (Duh. But the movie never tries to convince us that just because the kid’s destined to save the world that he can fight better than those two.) In fact, for about a third of the movie, Jason has this look on his face like, “Holy crap. I’m stuck on this fantasy quest adventure and I don’t think I can hack it. I don’t have what it takes. I’m going to fail.” It’s the same expression Luke Skywalker has after his hand’s been cut off in Empire. And I think, “Yeah, that’s about how I’d look in this situation.” It’s true. The film treats this world and this story sincerely, and with respect.

I think a lot of times, films and books tell a cliched story like this and it feels like paint by numbers, like they’re just checking plot points off a list. When that happens, it never feels true or right, and the whole thing is boring and predictable. In The Forbidden Kingdom, I believed. The emotions were true, the characters were likable, the magic was seriously cool. And the Monkey King — wow. I have a new favorite archetype. Jet Li is amazing.

And the Jet Li/Jackie Chan fight? For just a second my internal editor snapped on and thought, “This fight’s going on too long.” But that thought was immediately quashed by my fangirl side, which said, “Dude, this is Jackie Chan and Jet Li. This is the fight martial arts fans have been waiting for for twenty years. Let it go for as long as it wants.”