Nobody Knows Anything

Via Bookslut, I found this interview with Frank Peretti, a Christian horror novelist (strangely, that’s not meant the way I’d normally read it) about his new novel, Monster, which is about Bigfoot and evolution. Hmm, you say. Whatever could he possibly want to say about a big topic like evolution?

“My goal is to make them think about evolution,” he said. “Evolution as a philosophy makes monsters out of all us. It removes all that makes us human - morals, virtue, love, honor, self-sacrifice. All those become illusory. I’m trying to raise some questions. Who is the real monster here? I do it through a monster story.”

So, because he doesn’t understand something, he makes a horror story out of it.

American Christians—and this is overwhelmingly an American problem—are determined to be loud and proud about their ignorance. I don’t get it. Whatever happened to being interested in finding out about stuff? No no, might upset us a little; let’s crawl into our hidey-holes.

Sigh.

I bought myself a printer this week—an HP 1012, designed pretty much just for b&w printing. I have made a few promises to myself: I am going to finish the rewrite of my novel this month, and I am going to get the Final Rewrite (let’s be Hollywoodesque and call it a “polish”) done soon. One of my big goals for this year is to start getting some Real World feedback on my writing.

Getting the Real World feedback is the scary part, of course. On the other hand, it’s the most useful, too.

I’ve been reading the amazingly great “Learn Writing with Uncle Jim” thread over at Absolute Write—it’s insanely long, but well worth the effort—and one of the things James McDonald says, over and over and over again, is

If you’re capable of writing two consecutive pages of grammatical English prose with standard spelling, you’re already in the top ten percent of the slush heap.

Terry Rossio, over at Wordplay, says much the same thing. People forever quoting the same statistics about how many screenplays are written per year versus how many get bought and assuming that any given screenplay has x% chance.

No, says Terry: it’s pretty much all or nothing:

For some reason, folk are unwilling to think of screenwriting in terms of being a very ‘performance based’ profession, like hitting baseballs, or performing open heart surgery. In those professions, people never talk about odds, they just ask, ‘can you do it?’ And if you can, you are employed.

People understand that there’s a difference between a good script and a bad one, and that a good script can improve their odds. But there’s also this residual belief that there are a lot of scripts out there that are all relatively the same, some will get chosen just out of luck.

I don’t think that category is statistically significant. I actually think that there are some folk who have ability, their work is so good, and they have so much talent and drive, that the odds of them selling is near 100%. And other folk who just will never get it, and their odds are closer to 0%.

Over time, you can look back and figure odds with enough data concerning a group of people. But on an individual basis, I think it falls out more along the lines of the 100%/0% division.

This seems intuitive, although of course it isn’t, because people always want to know how big the pool of potential rivals is. Your pool is ONE: you. You’ve either written something that people want to buy (or at least see more of from you), or you haven’t.

When it comes to sending my baby out into the world, my fear is not that I will get cease-and-desist letters from agents or editors. No, my fear is that no one will notice. You know: my stuff isn’t even interesting enough to send a form letter back about. I don’t know why I’d fear that—if I’m going to be brutally honest (and I will, thanks), I have never gotten a lack of interest on my writing. I sold the first short story I ever sent out (for $400!—and then I promptly stopped sending out short stories). I got a well-known manager with the first script I ever wrote. Of course, we all know how well I’ve parlayed that into a career.

But I’ve been in my little cocoon for so long. When we first moved back to NoCal, I wanted to join a writing group mostly so I could meet other adults. But I decided that I didn’t really want to join a group, because I’ve found, overall, writing groups to be more harmful than useful for my writing process—I would get feedback on something before I honestly had any clue what I was working on. Writing groups and classes are good for setting deadlines to make you write something, but (for me) they’re deadly to the nascent work.

There was a gigantic pitched battle on Wordplay on this very topic recently. There were two camps: you need feedback from others to grow as a writer and truly understand your writing, and You Must Be Your Own Expert and not accept what anybody else tells you. (And varieties of each stance, of course.) I’m not quite as virulent in my opinion of the either/or as some of the do-it-yourselfers, but over time I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to make my own assessment of my work before getting opinions from the outside.

So, my goal this year is to a)finish this novel and b)start sending it around. Whoops, forgot the last one: c)start writing something else. Because that’s what this is all about, of course. You don’t just get to do this once. You do it over and over again.

This has been a test of the MacJournal 3.1 posting system. If this had been an actual entry…well, you know, it could happen.

I’ve been having trouble for the past week getting back into the flow of my writing—if Darin takes any more vacations (and then promptly falls ill), I’ll probably be done for.

Beyond that, however, I had the weirdest experience last week while writing.

I described it to a friend of mine this way: You know how when you’re driving, you zone out, and suddenly you come to and think, Why am I in Pasadena? (She lives in LA. It’s far more likely she’d end up in Pasadena than, say, I would.)

I had the same thing happen to me last week while writing.

I had the weirdest feeling of suddenly “coming to” and realizing that everything I was writing was MADE UP.

This was not my usual self-flagellation—I wasn’t on my own case for untrue stuff. This was more along the lines of suddenly realizing that writing fiction is the act of making shit up.

I’ve been writing fiction since I was 4. (Yes. This is true. I wrote—in my own handwriting—a short story for my grandparents about a magic well.) And only last week did I have any sense of how deeply odd this little occupation of mine is. These images in my head? Not really there! These words I put down on the page? Describing things that are beyond not true—they’ve never happened!

It was easily the weirdest out-of-body experience I’ve ever had.

I’ve gotten over it. Well, not the point where the words are flowing again—more like being expelled, one bloody painful syllable at a time, instead of my usual typing mania—but I don’t feel quite so strange about it.

Still: I remember the sensation of looking at the screen and thinking, What the hell? No wonder people believe in possession. When your POV switches like that, it’s deeply disconcerting.

Maybe everyone else in Christendom has already read this, but I don’t read Slashdot as a rule, so I hadn’t. Via Rachel Caine, I read a great interview with Neal Stephenson, which happens to include one of the funniest answers to a question I’ve ever read. I had tears in my eyes:

#4: In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

You don’t have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson’s Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson’s arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head.

Read the whole thing. Trust me.

I have a new criterion for evaluating someone’s critical taste. I will ask, “Did you see Van Helsing?” If the answer is “Yes,” I will ask their opinion of the movie. If they say anything other than, “Wow, that was irredeemable trash, wasn’t it?” I will have no respect for this person and need never listen to a damn thing they have to say on the subject of movies, stories, or the best way to spend two hours of one’s life.

Good God, what a bad, stupid, insulting movie. Seriously. Terrible script. Terrible. No story. Awful acting—and not in a fun sort of way either. No sense of pacing. Nothing fun to do with the beloved monsters of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Wolfman. Nothing makes sense—and not in a fun sort of way either.

Ugh. Unbelievable that this made any money at all.

Later: I posted on a mailing list more details about why this movie bugged me so much. Here’s basically what I posted (edited a bit):

(Sorry if there are any spoilers in what follows, but seriously — if
this movie can be spoiled for you, it should be.)

The movie wants to make use of the Big 3 Universal monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Wolf Man. Okay, that lends itself to diluting the overall thrust, so we’ll divvy them up: one will be the good guy, one will be the bad guy, and one will be…hmmm. Something.

Dracula will be the main bad guy. It’ll turn out that he can only be killed by the Wolf Man. That’s kind of an addition to the mythology, but since other things we know about the Wolf Man—how you turn into one, for example—are the same, we’ll allow it. Also, this allows us a reason why Our Hero becomes one of the three monsters. So, while the Wolf Man isn’t good, he’s necessary to kill Dracula. Frankenstein’s Monster will be a good guy. He’s intelligent, he’s scared of Dracula, he wants to help Van Helsing.

So far, it’s okay. Nothing terrible, nothing special.

Then the movie goes off the deep end.

In Van Helsing, Dracula desperately wants to get his hands on Frankenstein’s Monster. Something about how Frankenstein’s Monster was raised is important, which is why Dracula needs to get his claws on him.

And why is that? Turns out Dracula needs the tech used to make the
Monster in order to create his offspring.

I’m sorry…what the fuck?

We all know vampire mythology — we know how Dracula makes his “children.” We know, in fact, that that’s how he does it in this movie too, because one plot point involves Dracula threatening to turn Princess Black Latex into one of his wives. So what’s all this crap with electricity and Frankenstein’s Monster and sacs of bats (seriously)…? Why was that again?

(When we saw the sacs of batlings, Darin said, “I know the queen Alien is around here somewhere.” It was that obvious a rip-off of Aliens. I responded, “What are we supposed to use, harsh language?”)

So the entire point of this movie, ostensibly to use the three stars of the horror movie canon, comes up with a stupid and completely unnecessary addition to vampire lore as the engine of the story.

Oh yes: and everything else about the movie sucked too. But it’s hard to rise above complete stupidity, so that’s not that surprising.

I went to the ATM today, as I haven’t been in a while. The branch of my bank I went to had a snazzy new ATM setup, with Hi Tech Graphics and touch screens and everything but a back massage. Neat. I put my card in, I type in my PIN, I go through the rigamarole.

While the ATM counts out the money and prints my receipt and all, I glance at the picture of the ATM card that they put underneath the card slot and I think, “That’s not the card I put in there.”

The cash door pushes money at me and the receipt prints out and then my card comes out. Indeed, I did not put my bank card in there; I put my regular ol’ Visa in there. I have no idea what my Visa’s card PIN is; I have never used it for cash. The receipt in no way mentions that this was a Visa cash advance, although of course it doesn’t have my bank balance on there either.

What happened?

1. Dude! You got lucky! Free money! Where’s that bank?
2. In fact, you have beaten the 1-in-10000 odds (probably slightly less than that) and, in fact, your bank card and your Visa card have the exact same PIN.
3. The bank could frickin’ care less as to whether you have the PIN for a Visa card. Have Visa card, get money. In which case: where’s that bank?

To: Time

I can only assume with your choice of Ann Coulter as the cover at the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing that you are either woefully stupid or want to up sales by pandering to the right-wing extremists that Ms. Coulter appeals to. Stupid or venal: which is it? In either case, you shouldn’t be running a newsmagazine.

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”
–Ann Coulter as quoted in the New York Observer, Aug. 20, 2002

“RE: McVeigh quote. Of course I regret it. I should have added, ‘after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.’”

–Ann Coulter, from an interview with Right Wing News

Rob and I have decided we need to do a race a month in order to keep up our interest in training. We’re not particularly interested in doing a marathon—I want to do a marathon, just not right now. Right now, I want to run regularly and have a good time at it.

So this morning we went to do the HP Up and Running race, which is a good-sized fun run (you don’t get trampled by thousands of people). The downside in a race like this is, when you’re the back of the pack, you’re the back of the pack. There may have been people behind us. I steadfastly refused to look back to confirm or deny. We did the 10K in about 80 minutes, which comes out to about 13 minutes a mile (strangely, the 10K has mile markers; go figure). Not great, but it’s the longest distance either of us has run in a while, and we both felt tired but pretty good at the end. And I felt a hell of a lot better than I did last year, when my foot started hurting something awful around mile 4 and I basically had to hobble in to the finish.

Or we did. Rob and Laura were supposed to come over after the race, but Rob said he was feeling exhausted. Combination of a lot of running and a lot of late-night World of Warcraft, I suspect. I can definitely understand the tiredness: I’m sitting here feeling tired. Not as bad as the first time I ran the Bay to Breakers, when I fell asleep on my mother’s couch immediately upon sitting down. But tired.

The up side of Rob and Laura not coming over was: more cinnamon rolls for us! I made cinnamon rolls, mostly to prove that I could do it. The last time I tried to make cinnamon rolls at home, I didn’t know what I was doing, the dough was too soft and puffy, and the entire process ended up in a stupid doughy heap that I threw away. This time: I know a little bit more, and last night I made a brioche dough that sat in the fridge all night and was nice and cold to work with. I rolled the dough up into its spiral, but then forgot to seal the edges, so all of the rolls opened at the ends. Well, this is how you learn.

I used Nancy Silverton’s brioche recipe from Baking With Julia and the cinnamon sugar recipe from the Sur La Table class I took a couple of weeks ago. Of course, the SLT recipe makes about 8 times too much, so I sealed the remained in Tupperware for the next roll-making occasion. The roll dough was perfect. I need to add more butter (yes! more butter!) to the interior next time to make the roll soft and gushy, but it was pretty damn good as it was.

Yum.

Via Return of the Reluctant, I have found this treasure trove of hilarious comic book covers. Vote for your favorite!

(Rated I, for Immature audiences.)