There’s a thing that I keep pretending like I can get away with not doing, though, and I’m about at that point where I need to stop pretending.  It kind of sucks.  But it’s something every single writer who talks about the work says they had to do.

I need to start saying no to friends and stay the hell home and write.  I need to say no to hanging out, no to getting drinks, no to anything that means I don’t get something out onto paper.  All my talk of needing to buckle down is kind of shit, because when you get down to it, there’s always a friend I haven’t given enough time to that I should go grab a beer with.  Drawing a line at this point is cutting something off that I don’t want cut, or at least that I feel guilty about cutting.  It’s easy to put down a Playstation controller.  It won’t get hurt when you tell it that Dragon Age can wait for a bit.

I don’t mean saying no to obligations, like, “Hey, I can’t help you with your fundraiser,” I mean saying no to friends. Saying your faux-career that hasn’t paid you a cent is more important than their emotional needs.  It makes me feel like a shit just thinking about it.

I don’t know where to draw the line on this one. I just know that right now it’s in the wrong place.

Here we are again, then.  Looking at the last four months and seeing very, very little to show for it that wasn’t my day job.  I’d guess I wrote maybe – maybe – 10,000 words in that time.  Even my blog has sat fallow.  Blog posts are just a bandaid to feeling bad about not writing enough, I realize,  but at least it’s something.  At least it’s not just a pile of code that isn’t yours and you can’t even really show to anyone.

I have a finished novel.  I have a pretty good finished novel. And it needs to get published.  That means I need to send out more query letters, and not wait 8 months before sending out the next batch.  That needs to start this weekend.

I have, maybe, a quarter of a new novel.  It’s going to need heavy revision when the time comes, but at present, the word count is just shy of 60,000.  Considering Broken Magic was around 75,000 in total, that’s not a bad start.  I need to write more of that, and I need to write it faster.

And I need to write other things when I hit a wall on the current novel.  Short stories. Novellas (oh, yeah, I have one of those finished that I stopped sending out after one rejection letter).  Another novel.  Anything.  Anything at all.

Because if I’m serious about this writing thing, I need to stop screwing around, no matter how good a procrastinator I am.

Now, let’s see how much good saying this out loud does me.

So Joss Whedon decided to write a new Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic and call it season 8.  This seemed like a really neat idea when it started a few years ago, and in fact I’ve been an avid reader of the run since it started.  The first 20 issues or so were pretty fantastic.  It felt like a return to form for a series that, in my opinion, lost its way in the middle of its 6th season and never found its way home again.  In fact, its first three arcs – especially “No Future For You”, which brought us an awesome Faith/Giles teamup against an insane British noble with Slayer powers – were funny, tense and dramatic. Everything you want from Buffy.

Then it decided to get all clever on us.

Back in 2002, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman joined forces a second time on the film Adaptation.  The conceit was that Kaufman had been trying and failing to adapt The Orchid Thief and, instead of actually finishing that job he wrote a screenplay about trying to adapt The Orchid Thief. The first half of the film was one of the cleverest takes on the trials of writing I’ve ever seen.  But as Kaufman’s writer’s block intensifies, he starts taking his fictional brother’s advice (yes, he wrote a fictional brother into the screenplay) and ends the screenplay with exactly the kind of stock, action-packed Hollywood ending he’s been mocking the entire film.  Unfortunately, the switch to bland Hollywood film takes up almost a quarter of the film’s running time and never really switches back into something savvier.  The joke is funny, in theory.  But in making the joke, the film stopped being good, and I walked away disappointed and unamused.

That brings us to issue 21 of Buffy.  To this point, all we  knew was that the villain called himself Twilight and wanted to destroy, I don’t know, magic and slayers and stuff.  And the name was kind of a clever nudge; of course Joss was going to take a little swipe at the other, bigger vampire franchise. You probably couldn’t write a more diametrically opposed vampire series if you tried.  But with issue 21, “Harmonic Divergence”, the joke grabbed the wheel and drove the car into a ditch.

See, one of the vampires, Harmony, gets a reality show where she reveals she’s a vampire and, for reasons that are still unclear to me, gains the love of pretty much all the world.  Vampires are cool! Slayers are evil! The world’s sudden adoration of bloodsucking demons puts the main characters on the run and in grave danger.

I mean, I get it.  The world is holding up as awesome things that would like to kill and eat them.  They’re acting like vampires aren’t dangerous.  Aren’t scary. Like they should be loved and adored and hung in poster form upon their bedroom walls.  Just like fans of Twilight do!!!

And, on the face of it, that’s kind of a funny joke. I bet you could make a great pitch based on that idea, and in fact, it’s very likely that a funnier and more eloquent version of that was the pitch to Dark Horse for this series.  Hell, if it was pitched to me, I probably would have laughed and approved it.  Only, as written, it’s more clever than it is funny.  Sure, in theory, the idea of exploring how the vampires became the heroes and slayers the villains is the kind of on-point pop culture comedy Joss excels at.  Just like Adaptation, though, somewhere in the translation the cleverness eclipsed everything else and it became the kind of joke you end up having to explain once you’re done telling it.

I’m hoping the end of the series pulls something off that proves me wrong, but I fear we’ve entered the last act of Adaptation now and I’m just going to have to watch the joke play itself out.  If I’m lucky, there will be some actual jokes along the way.  And maybe the story will find its way back onto the pages before it’s too late.

Beyond it being a really good time, one of the things I love about running role playing games (you know, like Dungeons and Dragons and all that other nerdy tabletop stuff) is that it’s this great, abstracted storytelling style that works as a mirror to my more serious writing.  You don’t have to worry about language or grammar.  The subtleties of plot development are less important.  Nothing that happens is recorded verbatim, so minor missteps are easy to wash away or simply forget.  What you’re left with is the broad narrative structure, some character development and a lot of big emotions.  It’s a great way of learning about yourself as a storyteller.

I’m coming to the end of a major section of a campaign we’ve been running for a while, and over the past few weeks I’ve felt this really significant shift in it.  Things were kind of working, but I was struggling to build and sustain momentum.  It had been a long time since we’d played these characters and while nothing I was doing was wrong, it wasn’t taking on a life of its own.  Then, about four weeks ago, it went from feeling like pushing a boulder uphill to trying desperately to keep up with it as it barreled down the other side.

That feeling of frustration, of things technically, intellectually working without the spark of life is basically what I feel, in some form or another, when I do anything short form.  Things work, I like the ideas, and maybe I even really like the story.  But it never has its own momentum.  It’s always me turning the gears and stepping on the pedal.  In a shorter story, there’s never time for all that potential energy to turn suddenly kinetic.

What changed in my campaign? Nothing, exactly.  I just reached critical mass with everything we’d built to that point.  At some point in a long story, if you’re doing things right, you cross this threshold.  To that point, you’re running around, establishing the setting, introducing characters, building subplots and moving pieces into place.  It’s a lot of work, and even when things work, there’s still this sense of things moving only where they’re pushed.  Then you hit a point where everything is connected in just the right way, where any change in the web causes vibrations throughout the rest.  If something happens in this plot, the things it does to this character over here, on the other side of the map, forces them into action.  That cascades out to three other things, and before you know it the whole damn structure is shaking.

At that point, you’re not pushing things anymore.  They’re pushing you.  Whereas before you needed to get things carefully in place, orchestrating the whole situation, now all you need to do is pick up a rock and throw it.  You aim for the place where it’ll do the most damage, and then hold on tight.

If you’ve ever watched Babylon 5, you can see what I mean.  Up through the end of season 2 it’s good.  At times, it’s really good.  But somewhere in the middle of season 3, things go insane.  No one in the story can move without knocking ten other things over.  Every single story impacts on the rest. That’s what you get with a carefully planned, long form story.  You get to reach critical mass, and the whole way you tell the story changes.  You’re still writing the thing, but it starts feeling more like aiming a fire hose than pumping water out of a well.  It’s pretty incredible.

Do I need to roll a 20 sided die to realize that?  Nah, not really.  But seeing the whole campaign take on a fatalistic life of its own is a nice, clear distillation of where my interests and instincts lead me as a writer.  The rush I feel when all the guns are in place and I can start pulling triggers has a lot to do with why I feel so compelled to write.  It’s something I notice when I write, but separated from struggling over word choice it’s easier to see that, yeah, what I really want to work on is stuff where I have enough room to build a story that takes on a life of its own.

I didn’t go to college for anything writing related, but with all the drinking and swearing and unruly behavior that comes with gaming, it’s kind of the same thing

I can’t entirely blame the people who use them badly.  The term itself refers to the kind of cliffhangers I hate, where we cut away with a character in imminent danger then cut back to see them rescued without an extra scratch.  I get why they became so popular in old serial films. Any kind of suspenseful, what-the-hell-will-happen-next ending is likely to pack the seats for the resolution.  If every single episode ends with one, maybe you’ll keep making each installment as must see as the last.

Like half of the Star Trek season finales that ended with a giant OMG only for the Enterprise to come back next season and solve the whole problem in the teaser, a bad cliffhanger only reveals itself in its resolution.  It buys you some time with your audience.  Cliffhangers, both good and bad, work.  At least, they work until the audience catches on that you’re cheating.

I think Annie Wilkes in Misery said it best:

Anyway, my favourite was Rocketman, and once it was a no breaks chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn’t cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn’t what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! HE DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE COCK – A – DOODIE CAR!

So if the difference between a good cliffhanger and a bad one are in the resolution, what is that difference?  Leaving aside cheats like Rocketman’s retconned leap from the car, there are still a heap of really terrible cliffhanger resolutions sloshing around out there.  Especially on television.

My feeling on cliffhangers has always been this: The “What will happen next?!” suspense is nice, but that alone is not worth the cliffhanger.  That moment in The Next Generation’s “The Best of Both Worlds”, where Riker orders the Enterprise to fire of the Borg ship carrying Locutus-ized Picard is awesome.  If you happened to see it when it originally aired, you probably spent all summer freaking out over what would happen next.  It was a damn good feeling.  But when you got back, here’s what you got: The Enterprise fires…and the super-cannon does nothing.  At all.  Sure, the explanation is fair.  Picard’s knowledge of the weapon when he became Locutus prompted the Borg to prepare for the attack.  It was logical.

It also sucked.

A really good cliffhanger is one not where we cut away before the pivotal moment, but where we cut away after.  We don’t have to know we’ve passed the pivotal moment, or even what that moment means.  We could cut away after Riker says “Fire!”, provided that act – the act of firing on Picard’s ship – set in motion something irrevocable.  If the next season opened with the Enterprise damaging the Borg ship and killing Picard, yet not actually destroying the ship itself, imagine the intense episode we’d have gotten as Riker must continue to fight knowing that he has failed to end the threat, instead only killing his own captain?

A cliffhanger that convinces your audience to be even more excited by the next has to change something.  It doesn’t need to be what the audience expects to change, but if all you’ve done is made people wait for things to snap back to the status quo, you haven’t played fair.  Putting your heroes in danger for a cliffhanger doesn’t require their deaths when you return, provided their rescue costs something.  There are only so many costless, clever escapes an audience can take before they stop feeling the suspense.

In fact, if you play fair, you can get away with a cliffhanger pretty much as often as you want.  Code Geass ended almost half of its episodes in cliffhangers.  They never got old, either, because every single one changed the series.  Instead, since they let every cliffhanger push the series forward, the effect was more of an escalation; every one had you more anxious, because you knew how much getting out of the last one cost.

Guy Gavriel Kay and George R. R. Martin do much the same thing, ending chapter after chapter in a nail-biter of a scene.  But since they never cheat, nor do they allow their heroes to escape them all unscathed, each successive cliffhanger ratchets the tension further.  So their books are really, really good.

Use cliffhangers.  Use them liberally.  But try to forget how they were used when the term was coined.

Beautiful Design

Not immune to wear and tear

we buy plastic shells

And here’s one directly from @rmurken

Delicate iPhone

Ever thus, with Apple stuff:

Beauty needs a shell.

Waiting you just have to deal with.  There’s nothing you can do to speed it along.  Your query is out, waiting on someone’s desk, probably unopened.  The only action you can take – a follow-up letter – is something you have to wait for, too.  You send your query, and you wait. When the requisite amount of waiting is past, you send a follow-up letter and you wait some more.  And after the first follow-up letter?  That’s where protocol breaks down.  The general impression seems to be that you can move on, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t stories of responses well after the out date on your follow-up.

Trying to get published is like being told you can only apply for one job at a time.  You may have a dozen other places you’d be happy to work, but that’s irrelevant.  Applying for multiple jobs at once is bad manners.  Any employer must be given the opportunity to say no before you can move on and try again.

Sure, as a writer it’s the writing itself and not the person under restriction.  If I have three novels I can send them all to different places. But “write another novel” is tougher than it sounds when the first one has only gotten one response in the last year.  A nagging futility pursues you; why are you bothering to write a second novel when the first one’s gone nowhere? That writing a second novel, and a third, and a fourth will actually make it more likely that they could all go somewhere, someday is irrelevant.  Waiting is pernicious.

I’m having a hard time handling the waiting lately.  So I’m writing a second novel.  It’s the only thing I have to do.

What a mess.

Delete and rewrite. Delete and rewrite.

Last Friday, August 21st, was the Best Of screening for the 48 Hour Film Project.  Our film, “co workers” was in the running.  That much we knew. We just didn’t know what award we’d gotten.  The awards for the 48 run from the specific (Best End Title Credits, Best Use Of Required Line Of Dialogue) to the more typical (Best Direction, Best Editing).  This was my first award competition I’d ever been party to, so I was understandably a mess.

Thirteen films made the list.  There were three from my screening group, including our film, but the rest I hadn’t seen.  The films were screened before the awards were given, so I spent the time when I was not insanely nervous trying to game which awards would be given to whom.  It passed the time.

We won one award: Best Use of Character, which you should read to mean “We took the character we had to use and used him really well.”  I spent a couple of days struggling with the award, trying to figure out how proud of it I should be.  As a filmmaker, you hope you win a more generic, more filmmakery award like editing or acting or direction, and not something that feels so specific to this one contest.  But on reflection, Best Use of Character could be read as a bit of a writing award and a bit of an acting award.  It means we did something right, I suppose.  And walking up on a stage to be handed a shiny paper certificate is an ego boost.

Congratulations to all of the winners, and to everyone else who managed to get a film together in 48 hours.  Special congratulations to Wrecking Crew Media for “A Christmas Miracle”, which was chosen as the best film in Pittsburgh.  They’ll be going on to the international competition.  Do us proud.

If you haven’t seen “co workers” yet, give it a watch.  We’re really proud of the work we did and we’ll be sending it out to film festivals to see if anyone thinks we did something worthwhile.

Last Friday I was waking up to test my equipment and get psyched up for the 48. Thinking about that is kind of surreal. This time last week, nothing that’s on my mind today had even happened yet. No pulling Musical or Western and freaking out.  No writing and smoking Rocky Patel Jr.’s and drinking sake.  Not getting a new cast and crew together or struggling with an echoing room or shooting a 4 minute dinner scene in a couple of hours.  I hadn’t freaked out over last minute output problems, or freaked out over whether the movie files I turned in would play for the 48, or freaked out over whether the screening audience would like my film.

By the end of a week like that, part of me wants to sleep and play video games for a month, and part of me that’s so buzzed from the feeling of getting something done that I want to do it again right frakking now.

I won’t. I’ll do something closer to the former. I’ve got writing to do, and I’ll chip away at that, but it’ll be longer than I expect before I shoot something else. Truth is, it’s a lot of work and easy to screw up, so rushing into another project would be very dumb.  Better to think it out.

And buy a video game.  And sleep.