Writing on an Activation Roll

 

In the superhero role playing game champions on of the disadvantages you can added to a character’s power to lower its point cost is an activation roll. Basically, when the character attempts to use their power, flight, energy blasty, whatever it is, the player must roll dice and if they make the target roll then the power function otherwise nothing happens.

For me writing can often feel like a power with an activation roll.

I have my stories, my characters, my themes and setting but getting started on that day’s writing can be a challenge. The internet with its endless diversions is a powerful temptation, as are movies, video games, and just plain old-fashioned daydreaming.

However, once I have begun to actually write, burying myself in the exact act of placing words into sentences, bringing the characters and events to life as I type them all resistance evaporates and it is terribly easy to fall into ‘flow’ and just write.

I am certain that there are many writers who feel the same way I do. It’s the basis of my statement ‘The hardest part of writing of butt to chair and fingers to keyboard.’

What exactly is the source of this resistance I am not sure. I don’t think it is a fear of failure. I have failed so many times that is holds little terror for me. Much like rejections its failure is simply another aspect of the writing experience that is nearly inescapable. There are numerous abandoned short stories, scripts, and novel in my history. It is not heart wrenching when a story crashes on take and never achieves flight, it is just part of the process. (Though I am happy to say that unfinished stories happen with far less frequency than they used to.)

I think it is simply the desire to not work.

Writing is work.

For me it is an emotional experience. I feel that same things my characters feel. Fear, elation, arousal, these are mirrored in me as I attempt to put them into prose. That is a tiring and strenuous process and it probably the common desire to avoid strain that levels this activation cost, a toll I again and again must find a method to pay.

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Spooky Movie #1 The Keep (1983)

This is a rewatch for me as I saw this during its original theatrical release. Adapted from a novel of the same name by F Paul Wilson The Keep tells the story of an ancient evil trapped in fortress deep in the Carpathian mountains and its attempt to escape during 1941. Occupied by German

Paramount Pictures

Soldiers and SS troops the mysterious entity released greed stalks and slaughters the soldiers. In desperation to discover the truth and to stop the killing the Nazis unwisely bring a Jewish historian and his daughter from a concentration camp who, justly thirsty for revenge, quickly joins forces with the entity, endangering not just the keep, its occupiers, and the surrounding village but humanity at large with the entity’s escape.

The Keep, plagued with production troubles, studio interference, and questionable artistic choices, failed up on release and I recall leaving the theater far from satisfied. In nearly 40 years since its release the film has gathered some praise and a small cult following. Rewatching the feature I can say I have seen far worse horror films, I have watched worse the same week with far better production values, but The Keep still misses the mark and falls short of being an engaging piece.

It is reported that the studio cut more than a half an hour from the film and the sloppy editing shows. After establishing a mood and atmosphere for the story the rough reductions caused the story to skip over the force stalking and killing the soldiers, reducing what should have been building tension and terror into one line of quickly delivered exposition.

With the tone so destroyed by the poor edits the film is further damaged by gaudy and unsubtle special effects. Where a story of this type works more powerfully with less, hints of powers, suggestions of something at the edge of the frame, The Keep went with bright, flashy effects and animation that are incongruous with the rest of the production design. This friction is inflated by the film’s music. Tangerine Dream’s synth infused score destroys more mood that it creates, often overpowering scenes and robbing them of their emotional impact by drawing attention away from the story.

The bones of the film are quite sound and with footage restored, new more subtle effects, and a more appropriate score The Keep might have had a chance to be something fairly interesting but as it is currently formatted it’s a flawed work with a fine cast.

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Barbarian (2022) & The Plausibility Envelope

When I first watched the trailer for Barbarian film my initial thoughts were that it looked stupid and uninteresting, and I placed it on my do not bather to see mental listing.

20th Century Studios

Then on Facebook and Twitter I saw from various quarters of the horror community that the film had interesting twists and sociological commentary that couldn’t be explored without spoilers.

Well, with my curiosity engaged I changed my mind and took in a late-night screening this past Friday.

I need to listen to my intuition. This film was bland, and uninteresting and an insult to the audience’s intuitive intelligence.

Every narrative film is fiction and ever fiction has a plausibility envelope. Actions within that envelope are accepted as possible and within the realm of the characters and nature of that fictional world, actions beyond that envelops shatter disbelief and destroy the story’s illusion of reality. The boundaries of plausibility envelop vary with the genre of the story. In a superhero film Drax can be swallowed by a huge beast and emerge unscathed by its digestive acids but in a thriller such as JawsQuint cannot survive the maws of a shark. Dramatic fiction has tight boundaries on its envelopes while fantastic fiction has more distant edges. However, a thriller/horror without supernatural or science-fiction elements to push that envelope has a limited range of actions before disbelief is compromised. Barbarian ignores all constraints of reality and all illusion of reality vanishes like fog on a bright hot day.

In the screening I attended laughter erupted during dramatic moments because no one present could accept anything presented as ‘real.’ The violations of plausibility that I witnessed were not ones restricted to people with advance of obscure knowledge but ones everyone understands as to how the world functions. If person A plummets from a height and person B plummets a moment later, we understand that B lands on A, but Barbarian would have us accept the A ends up atop of B.

Some spoilers follow but honestly you should just skip this movie.

A middle-aged or older woman who has never been properly fed cannot survive being crushed between an automobile and a structure much remain a terminator level of threat. The same malnourished woman cannot simply lift a full-grown man of normal size straight up more than seven feet. If someone falls from fifty or more feet they are not, if they survive, going to stand and walk away.

There is very nearly but not quite a Psycho level twist about half-way through the film’s running time, but unlike Psycho where the hand off to a new set of leads were to characters, we had some establishment and level of engagement with Barbarian throws us cold into a new principal character and one so utterly unlikable you can only root for his demise.

Barbarian wasted my time, precious hours I can never reclaim.

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Losing Cultural Context

I find it fascinating how knowledge and context can slip away and vanish from cultural knowledge. This has been demonstrated with YouTube reactors and 1973’s The Exorcist.

In the film Father Lankester Merrin and elderly priest and archeologist played by a 40 something Max Von Sydow repeatedly with shaky hands takes tiny white tablets that he carries with him everywhere.

No audience member in the 70s need a word of exposition to understand the meaning those actions. Merrin suffers from severe heart disease and takes nitroglycerin tablets to treat his heart.

And I can’t think of a single YouTube reactor that intuitively understood what the filmmakers communicated when Merrin took his pills or what was being established for the film’s climatic final act.

Times change, culture moves one, and what was common knowledge to one generation is a mystery to another. It makes me wonder what I am missing from stories, movies, and books from previous generations. What did they take as universally understood that passed me by without any impact? What are we creating today so certain of our intention and meaning that future generations will misunderstand or fail to notice at all?

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Not Quiet “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”

In Stoppard’s play and film adaptation Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead the central conceit is that we follow these two minor characters from Hamlet, occasionally witnessing their scenes from that tragic play but mostly seeing them ‘off stage’ and using that device to explore the meaning of life and art.

Stoppard produced in the play and in the film a piece that uses comedy to interrogate serious question of life and coming next month to Hulu a comedic film uses the same trick for what appears to be purely comic effect.

Rosaline like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead uses a minor character from one of Shakespeare’s plays to create a new point of view from which to watch the tragedy unfold. This time the play is Romeo and Juliet. This time the minor character is one who was mentioned but never actually seen in the text, Rosaline, the girl Romeo professed to love and adore before his ill-fated meeting with Juliet. Now spurned by her Romeo, Rosaline conspires to win her love back.

I don’t hold out hope for high art, but I’ll watch it on streaming for amusements sake.

 

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My Novel Vulcan’s Forge

March of 2020 saw the publication of my SF/Noir novel Vulcan’s Forge by FlameTree Press. Sadly, being published the week the world goes into shutdown for a once a century pandemic did nothing for the book’s sales. Still, I believe in the book and for those who are interested here’s some things about this novel.

Deep Backstory

By the end of the 21st century advances in computer sciences produced true artificial intelligence, along with automated manufacturing, advanced 3D printing, and practical fusion power. Instead of ushering in a period of expansion these technologies became the means by which humanity survived a planetary cataclysm. A rouge brown dwarf drifting thru interstellar space was discovered with a trajectory that carried through the inner solar system, disrupting all the rocky planets and close enough to eject Earth from the solar system.

Humanity launched solar sail arks carrying sperm and egg cells, fully capable artificial intelligences, and automated manufacturing equipment to save humanity by planting it on scores and scores of target worlds throughout the local stellar neighborhood. Due to the advanced technology and manufacturing techniques the cost of an ark was low enough that private groups, religious organizations, and loose confederations could launch one to preserve their culture and people.

Vulcan’s Forge takes place on a colony, Nocturnia, whose founders were fixated on racially diverse urban Americana of the 1950s. Like all who become focused on nostalgia their view of the past was not entirely historically accurate but rather a more romanticized and idealized view of that period in American history.

The Story

Jason Kessler helps create the social and cultural norms of Nocturnia by carefully curated film and television preserved in the digital storage of the ark that founded the colony. However, Jason himself find the conformity and repressed sexual mores of his colony stifling, not wishing to marry young and produce a brood of children to re-populate the species. He would rather

Flame Tree Publishing

enjoy to banned films labeled ‘anti-social’ and live a life of pleasure, but the colony’s surveillance and enforcement of their morality makes this impossible.

When Pamela Guest sweeps into Jason’s life everything changes. Contemptuous of Nocturnia’s morality and seeming immune from its enforcement Pamela introduces Jason to the possibility of everything he had ever dreamed about doing and wanting. Jason also learns that there is a secret criminal underworld to the colony and soon he and Pamela are fighting to survive as darker conspiracies than mere criminality threatens Nocturnia.

As a traditionally published novel Vulcan’s Forge can be ordered from wherever books are sold. I am including links to San Diego premier specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy along with links to Amazon.

I am also including the YouTube video of myself reading the novel’s prolog.

Mysterious Galaxy Paperback

Mysterious Galaxy eBook

Amazon Paperback

Amazon eBook

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The Unlearned Lesson of Black Panther

2018’s Black Panther, written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, and directed by Coogler, was Marvel’s expansion in Afrofuturism exploring a mythical African kingdom, Wakanda, with incredibly advanced comic-book technology and wholly untouched by historical colonialism. An incredible box office success Black Panther gave a new myth to millions around the world while exploring the theme that isolationism, both for individuals and nations, solves no problems but merely leaves them to fester and grow. Its lesson that through interconnectedness can we heal the harms of the past is a valuable one.

However, there is another lesson in the plot of the film that none of the characters learned or even took note of its existence.

(Some spoilers follow)

After Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan) defeats T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) in ritual combat and claims the throne of Wakanda as his own he launches a campaign to wage war on the rest of the world seeking to ‘liberate’ the African diaspora around the globe. (I place ‘liberate’ in quote because his statement that ‘the sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire’ makes clear not only the historical analogy that he has become the colonizers he so despises but that liberty’ is far from his goal.)

Despite the Wakandan royal court knowledge that this will lead to millions upon millions of deaths around the world King Killmonger’s plan is put into immediate action. The King of Wakanda is an absolute monarch, ruling by decree and without any limitation.

T’Challa and the other heroes of the tale foil Killmonger’s plan for a global war and return the film’s protagonist to the throne.

But there is no hint in this film or the ones that followed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that the Wakandans even took notice that an absolute monarch is a plan for disaster.

Never create a political power you aren’t willing to see in the hands of your enemy.

There are other kingdoms in the marvel Universe, the films have already introduced us to Asgard, and it certainly looks like the sequel to Black Panther will introduce thew kingdom of Atlantis and it is doubtful that either will see limitations of the king’s authority, but Wakanda and Black Panther is different than those other stories and settings. Black Panther is a commentary on the real world, real history, and real evil that was visited upon the African continent. While superheroes with their magical and physics defying powers are modern fairytales and myth if you make such a direct and applicable statement on modern political systems and power then ignoring the dangers of absolute monarchy, of too much power concentrated into one person hands, is a disservice.

The unlearned lesson of Black Panther is power must be distributed and checked or will eventually be abused.

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Thoughts on Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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One of the most divisive science-fiction novels published is Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Written as one his juvenile novels it was rejected out of hand by the publisher and immediately upon publication by another house stirred intense political debate that carries on to the present day. My meager thoughts in no way will settle this argument and for those firmly fixed in their camps nothing will dislodge them.

Troopers posits a future where humanity has spread out to the stars following some war with itself that left in its wake a unified government ending unrest and ushering in a period of

G.P. Putnam’s & Sons

prosperity. The political system of this unified government is a democracy, but one where the right to vote and run for office, the civil franchise, is restricted solely to those who have served in the armed forces.

This ‘only veterans’ franchise is often labeled by the novel’s critics as ‘fascist’ and a system of military rule. While I think the system proposed actually would never work in practice and the author hand-waved his way past serious political and practical issues, both critiques miss the mark.

Fascism has no simple, agreed upon definition. It is often hurled as a charge towards a political system, movement, or person that someone intensely disagree with. The left hurls it at the right and right throws it back. Setting aside the definition of childish tantrums, to me Fascism is a species of the political right, obsessed with a distorted and false view of history, former ‘glory,’ centralized authoritarian government, and most importantly of all the philosophy that the individual’s only value is what the state can extract from them.

The novel gives very little to no description of the culture surrounding its political system. What little history that is presented is fed to the reader as exposition to explain the political system and how it arose with nothing that glorifies some idealized historical vision.

Equally unexplored is the actual details political system. We know that military service is required for the franchise and that active-duty personnel do not have the vote but how centralized is thew power is a question that is never addressed. The closest the reader comes to understanding the culture and the government is the barbaric punishment of flogging is a common judicially ordered punishment. This predilection for cruelty as punishment is the most fascistic aspect of the novel’s setting.

Many critics point to required military service as a fascistic aspect, but I think it doesn’t meet that criterion. Fascist regimes such a Fascist Italy or NAZI Germany treat the people as something that had an obligation to the state. An obligation that could not be refused. Their service to the state was something required not chosen. The system in Starship Trooper is an inverse of that philosophy. Service is given, always at the choice of the person, and in fact the novel gives the impression that people are dissuaded from choosing to serve as more than one character attempts to talk to the protagonist out of volunteering. This plays into the novel’s philosophy of graded level of morality and I’ll speak to that and its error later in the piece. The core central issue here is that in a fascist setting the power is with the state, a state that compels service and here the power is with the individual choosing to serve.

One of the novel’s many exposition heavy scenes also display the frantic handwaving to make this political system work. An instructor asks the class why does the system work and after the students offer possible answers based on the limitation on the franchise, better people, chosen people, and so on, the teacher simply answer it works because it does. Utterly circular logic. It works because the author wants it to work.

Elsewhere in the work it is put forward that there are levels of morality with morality defined as the willingness to put oneself in danger for a goal or purpose. The lowest and most base level is self-interest. ‘I look out for number one and no one else.’ The system then progresses through family, friends, and loved one with the ‘highest’ level of morality being expressed when someone serves and risks all for their community.

Heroic self-sacrifice is a common trope in adventure fiction and something that is nearly universally admired. We need to look no further in the genre than Spock’s solution to Kobayashi Maru test in The Wrath of Khan to see this presented as noble. That said it, in my opinion, is a lousy system to base your politics upon.

The logic in Starship Troopers is that those who volunteer to place their lives on the line by serving in the military are exhibiting a ‘higher’ level or morality and thus are ‘worthy’ of the franchise and political power. This is flawed for several of reasons.

First, while the novel goes out of its way to make clear that no one can ever be denied the chance to serve it is also clear that military discipline is in effect and people are ‘mustered out’ of the service and thus forever lose the chance to exercise the franchise. That means on a practical level the military while forced to accept every as a recruit can still eliminate anyone it does not want to have the franchise. It is far too easy for a military to expel members to use service as a qualification for the franchise.

Second, it presumes the motive for joining the military is a desire to serve. This ignores the possibility of enlisted to learn a trade, experience adventure, escape an unpleasant home, or even to live the thrill of combat and killing.

Another reason this is a terrible idea is that it sees the only meaningful way to serve your community is by way of the military. Teaching, local services, research, and healthcare, the last having its own unique dangers all too well know with the current COVID pandemic, are all ways to place your own needs second to your fellow citizens’.

While I cannot agree with those who hurl ‘fascist’ at the novel’s philosophy, nor can I endorse it. Between handwaving and some very broad and simplistic assumptions it simply ignores the world as the way I have experienced it working.

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My Mysterious Comedic Weekend

Went out to the cinema twice this weekend, both times to see comedic mysteries.

Saturday, I saw Confess, Fletch the third film to be adapted from the series of novels centered on Investigative Reporter I.M ‘Fletch” Fletcher, (Fletch and Fletch, Lives in the 80s both starring Chevy Chase.) with Jon Hamm as Fletch.

Fletch finds himself. while trying to recover stolen art as part of a bizarre kidnapping, suddenly a suspect in a young woman’s murder. Dodging Boston police and an assortment of eccentric characters Fletch untangles the confusing case while retaining his own mysterious secrets and motivations.

Hamm worked better for me in this role than Chevy Chase, but that may simply be my own bias at work. I have never been a real fan of Chase’s comedy and tend to find most of his project forgettable. Over all I found the film a perfectly acceptable hour and a half diversion that kept me entertained and amused. I hope that Hamm is given more opportunities to play this character in further feature films.

Sunday my sweetie-wife and I went out to catch a screening of See How They Run, a comedic take of Agatha Christie mysterious set in the early fifties around the stage production of The Mousetrap. The film mixes reality. Richard Attenborough starring in the play and the production incredible longevity as a stage production. When the director of a proposed film adaptation is murdered and his corpse left on the stage Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and novice constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) are thrown together to solve the mystery.

Self-aware and playing at the 4th wall See How They Run hangs multiple hats on worn tropes of the mystery genre but sadly for me most of the humor provoked only smiles and rarely laughter. (Though the first flash-back was actually funny.) Adding to my inability to lose myself in the story is the cast of Harris Dickinson as Richard Attenborough. Dickinson is s shade over six feet one in height while Attenborough, perhaps best known to modern audiences as John. Hammond from the Jurassic Park franchise, was just 5’7″. Dickinson towering over the rest of the cast continually pulled me about of the film’s reality. But the movie’s biggest failure was that the comedy simply wasn’t funny enough. Rockwell, a performer that makes scenery chewing a treat for audiences, gave a restrained and quite performance. Ronan continued to be charming and a delight to watch but the plot needed to be centered on her if she were to carry it and it wasn’t.

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Enigmatic Estonian Folk Horror: November (2017)

By way of the YouTube channel Dark Corners Streaming Review my Sweetie-Wife and I discovered the Estonian film November.

Adapted by writer/director Rainer Sarnet from the novel Rehepapp ehk November by Andrus Kivirähk November set in an isolated Estonian village in the 19th century and the story

Homeless Bob Productions

principally concerns a love triangle between Liina (Rea Lest-Liik) a peasant girl, Hans (Jörgen Liik) a peasant boy Liina adores, and the baroness (Jette Loona Hermanis) daughter of the local baron and with whom Hans is deeply infatuated. Both Liina and Hans, desperate for the love and attention turn to supernatural aid to win the attention of their loves.

Films often break down into two vast categories when dealing with the supernatural. In one case the supernatural is in intruding, unknown, force that shatters to the existing order and introduces chaos which by the end of the tale must be dispelled to restore or create a new order. A Vampire moves in next door and until it is destroyed there is chaos.

The other great category is a subtle one where the events can be interpreted as possibly taking place in reality, though the evidence is quite thin, or possibly the tale is the product of a deranged mind and there is no supernatural at all. Are there ghosts haunting the children or has the nanny gone mad?

November defies both categories.

From the film’s opening scenes, it is clear that the supernatural exists and is a part of the peasants daily life. The dirty, squalid, and tenuous lives of the peasants is infused with the supernatural. Ghosts, werewolves, devils, witchcraft, and animated golem-like creations composed of farm equipment are all routine and accepted by the peasant as ways of surviving their brutal environment. Visitations by the dead is as routine as stealing from the Baron.

Curiously the supernatural’s integration doesn’t extend to the local lord. At no point in the story does the Baron or his daughter make use of or acknowledge to spirit world with the same level of acceptance as the peasantry.

Cinematographer Mart Taniel captures the world of November is stark, high contrast, black and white. Fog glows with a spectral inner light, moonlight is diffuse, and the shadows are dark, deep, and threatening. I suspect that Taniel and director Sarnet also employed filters in a manner similar to Eggers’ The Lighthouse so that the skin of the peasantry took on a dark and unhealthy appearance while keeping the nobility clean and pristine further dividing the classes.

November is far from a standard horror film. It is atmospheric and moody focusing more on tone that scares. It almost but not quite follows a nightmare or dream logic reminiscent of David Lynch but with a more linear and straightforward narrative. It is not a film that gets your adrenaline pumping and one that sets your heart racing, but one that rather lingers in your mind like a half-forgotten dream.

November is available on VOD, Kanopy in the US, and Amazon Prime in the UK.

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