Dexter Morgan, the hero and narrator of Jeff Lindsay’s novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, is a guy with a problem: while he doesn’t exactly know what’s “right” and what’s “wrong,” he’s a serial killer who’s known from a young age both what he is and that murder is generally considered “wrong.” His foster father, a cop, trained him how to channel his impulses toward a fairly narrow set of victims: other serial killers.

In his day-to-day life, the one where he pretends to be human and interacts with humans with complete incomprehension of what they’re thinking, Dexter is a blood splatter analyst for the Miami police department. His foster sister, Deborah, is a cop who really wants out of vice and into homicide. There’s a serial killer preying on the hookers on the Tamiami Trail, and Deb knows this could be her ticket to a detective’s badge. She needs Dexter to give him one of his famed “hunches.” Dexter often has hunches when serial killers are on the loose, because he knows how to think like them better than anyone. But the Tamiami Trail killer is different—not only does Dexter highly admire the killer’s technique, if not his aims, but the killings seem almost like they’re meant to communicate something specifically to him. Dexter, you see, has been having strange, incomprehensible dreams, and he’s been sleep walking. The question he faces is: has he been sleep killing?

I started reading this at 10:30 last night and finished the entire thing shortly after 12, so I rate this one, Two thumbs, way up.

What I especially love in this book is how Lindsay keeps Dexter in character all the time, showing us Dexter’s point of view at all times. Dexter finds humans utterly incomprehensible. For example, there’s the female detective in charge of the Tamiami Trail case who seems to treat Dexter in the oddest way:

She finished with a few threats and sent the man away. “Indio,” she spat, as he lumbered out of earshot.

“It takes all kinds, Detective,” I said. “Even campesinos.” She looked up and ran her eyes over me, slowly, while I stood and wondered why. Had she forgotten what I looked like? But she finished with a big smile. She really did like me, the idiot.

“Hola, Dexter. What brings you here?”

“I heard you were here and couldn’t stay away. Please, Detective, when will you marry me?”

She giggled. The other officers within earshot exchanged a glance and then looked away. “I don’t buy a shoe until I try it on,” LaGuerta said. “No matter how good the shoe looks.” And while I was sure that was true, it didn’t actually explain to me why she stared at me with her tongue between her teeth as she said it. “Now go away, you distracting me. I have serious work here.”

Lindsay builds the suspense very nicely—Dexter knows he’s off, but how off is he?—and maintains a great balance between humor and horror. Dexter is a great narrator: ironic, charming, confident of his abilities, pathetic in his inhumanity. The ending has a few problems, but the thrill ride to get there, and the unexpected emotional punch of the unusual choice Dexter has to make, make it worthwhile.

The sequel, Dearly Devoted Dexter, is due out next month. I don’t know how long Lindsay will be able to keep up this balancing act, but I’m definitely picking up this book. And according to Lee Goldberg, Showtime has ordered a pilot for a series based on this book. To which I say, !!! I don’t know how they’d do it. Can you show the hero of a series killing people every week in a particularly inhuman manner?—well, I guess cop shows have been doing that for years. I’d at least tune in for one episode.

Lee Goldberg is the center of all things fanfic at the moment. He’s virulently anti-fanfic; several posters to his blog on this entry and this entry and this entry and a few others besides (these are just the posts in the past week) give a few impassioned discussions on both sides of the fanfic debate.

Tamara Siler Jones (no permalinks! and she’s moving her blog! augh!) has a nice summary of my feelings on the matter:

No matter how good the reflection, it won’t be real because there are multitudes of aspects to the characters and the world that no one knows but The Author. In my own work, my themes and structures and details are distinctive and no one writes like I do. My authorial voice is mine alone. To try to publish without knowing the layers or having my voice cheapens the experience. It mars the carefully constructed three-dimensional reality and, frankly, it can’t compare.

(Yeah, I know. “You got anything people want to do fanfic about?” Oh, shush.)

The primary argument against fanfic is that it’s stealing. A creator came up with these characters and this world and the fanfic writer is just stealing it all to create something that may not only be a terrible use of the characters and the world

I know most of the fanfic I’ve seen has a disclaimer as to the effect that such-and-such belongs to the Copyright holder, and the fanfic author is just borrowing it for a little while. I have no idea about how well that disclaimer would hold up in a court of law. Apparently this page discusses the legalities of fanfic, but I find it an ugly page to read and haven’t made it through it all the way. Ahem. Moving on.

A secondary argument against fanfic that not a few people bring up is that it’s godawful. And I gotta say: yeah. The vast majority of is terrible writing. I’ve seen a few people argue that fanfic is a way of learning to write; I would respond, “There are better ways.” Stretching the imagination on your own stuff will teach you far more about how to write than writing about someone else’s world. Because all you can come up with is a reflection of what the original creator came up with, or worse, come up with something completely antithetical to what the creator intended (e.g. Harry Potter does Hogwarts).

I understand the impulse to write and read fanfic—you want to live in this wonderful world as much as you can, and twenty-four hours a year or one book every two years or whatever just isn’t cutting it for you. There are several novel series that I am forever hoping will just happen to have a new installment at the bookstore every time I check. But fanfic is like a steak dinner made out of meringue—might look the real thing, but it’s not really going to fill you up.

That said, some of the anti-fanfic arguments made in the threads at Lee Goldberg’s blog annoy me.

The big one for me is, if using someone else’s characters is absolutely wrong, then what about work such as Wide Sargasso Sea (the story of the mad wife of Rochester from Jane Eyre), or The Seven-Percent Solution (Sherlock Holmes via Nicholas Meyer), or Rosencrantz & Guildenstern (Tom Stoppard)? It is simply because they’re well-written? I don’t know if Meyer had to get the Doyle estate’s permission to write The Seven-Percent Solution (is Holmes still under copyright? I don’t think so). Is it just because the authors whose characters are used here are dead that it’s a different case? Or is it just because they were written by “real writers” that it’s okay to do?

Nobody’s given a satisfactory answer to that one.

There are also several discussions of what a “real” writer is, and since I’ve suffered several discussions along that line at Wordplay, I won’t get into that other than to say, “Augh!” and “Noooooo!”

Later: It’s 4:30am here in the House of the Rising Fun. I’ve been awake since one of the kids woke me up, around 4. Urg. Anyhow. As I was lying awake, I started thinking about this issue some more.

All of the works cited above are based on much older texts. I can’t judge their popularity at the time they were originally printed, but obviously they’ve come down to us through the ages, whereas so many of their contemporaries have not. Bram Stoker’s creations: still with us; Marie Corelli’s: not so much. Since they’ve lasted so long, they have achieved “mythic resonance.” (I am sure I am not the first person to call it that, and I’m also sure there’s a better term. But you know: 4 am.) Most people who know Hamlet are going to remember the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, even if they don’t remember which one’s which.

However, this mythic resonance only comes after years of, well, surviving. And while Sherlock Holmes might have inspired fanfic at the time the stories were first appearing, the fact that he and his world (Moriarty, Baker Street, etc.) have survived so long and entered the lexicon means that there’s something more there than just current popularity. After a hundred years or whatever, a writer is not going to be swept up in the excitement and passion of a fan’s love for the material; you have time to consider it, to have new takes on it, to use the characters to explore different facets of the world they live in without adding something new to the characters that violates their spirit: Sherlock Holmes abusing cocaine in The Seven Percent Solution, check; Holmes and Watson slash fiction, not so much.

You can’t help but have a perspective and interpretation of works published a century or so ago. A lot’s happened. We’ve found out various things that were happening at the time that many people living in that age weren’t aware of. In seventy or a hundred years time, someone may be able to use Mulder and Scully for an evaluation of both the society that gave rise to them and perhaps a commentary on whatever’s going on in their current society. When the X-Files was first on, though, there’s no perspective or commentary possible, because you’re living at the same time. Chris Carter’s vision is the only interpretation possible at the moment. What you get is fan fiction that just has a lot of boinking.

One of the integral factors in being able to use mythic characters and stories is they’re available to use. Meaning, they’ve passed out of copyright. Work needs to pass out of copyright so that others can build upon it. Either a story and character are going to survive the ravages of time, and therefore be interesting mythic material for a storyteller to work with, or it will have disappeared and no one gives a damn.

Commence the firing squad on length of copyright, I guess. My take on it: Disney’s need for absolute and total hold over all elements of its creation since the start of the company is going to destroy modern copyright. And that’s a bad thing.

Ever wondered how shy, retiring Bruce Wayne became the psychopathic Batman? Wonder no longer: Batman Begins tells you how.

We start with young Bruce getting scared by bats, move on to parents getting killed (tied in inextricably with fear of bats in a nice way), move on to Bruce “finding himself” and as a young man (Christian Bale) goes off to understand the criminal mind. He gets thrown in an Asian jail, and after he fights off a ridiculous number of inmates who attack him—showing that he already has the rad moves—he’s rescued by Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson) who takes him to the super-secret (and multi-ethnic) ninja cult the League of Shadows. There he learns all sorts of super-secret ninja moves and decides to go back and save Gotham. Well, after he destroys the League. You’ll understand when you see it.

Wayne assumes the persona of a completely unconcerned party boy billionaire by day (or early evening), while fighting crime and kicking asses at night. He finds an inventor genius (Morgan Freeman) in the basement of Wayne Enterprises who makes him cool gadgets. He fights the evil crime lord of Gotham, Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson, with a hilarious accent), and the evil psychiatrist Dr. Crane (Cillan Murphy). He helps out Detective, soon to be Lieutenant, James Gordon (Gary Oldman). And he’s really, really conflicted about what to do about friend-from-childhood-turned-grownup-babe Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), who’s the incorruptible Assistant DA. Meanwhile, the guy who’s running Wayne Enterprises (Rutger Hauer) is attempting to run it right off the edge of a cliff.

It’s good stuff. Very cool photography, from the mysterious Asian lair to the streets of Gotham—I thought the panoramas of Gotham were quite good, because you’re expecting New York. Some of the fight sequences were annoying, because you can’t quite tell who’s doing what to whom, but in a few cases it really works—such as when we see Batman’s effect on bad guys from the perspective of the bad guys (who really don’t understand what’s going on). The visual effects and gadgets: excellent. The script: I thought it was extremely stylized in all the right ways—people in a comic book do not stand around having “How are you?” conversations; they have grandiose statements of purpose.

You know, the more I think about this movie, the more tempted I am to see it again. But I only get one movie a week these days, and I can’t waste it on repeats. But I totally would, that’s how much I enjoyed it.

Now, on to the questions foremost in your mind:

Christian Bale: hot. I’ve always thought he’s kind of weird looking—still do, actually—but in this movie, definitely hot. Hot, and creepy. (Anyone else think of Patrick Bateman at least once during this film? Show of hands.) But more than that he’s totally believable as a guy who seriously has more on his mind than where his next party is.

Katie Holmes: yick. I know that the whole TomKat way-too-overexposed relationship has predisposed me not to like her (mostly because I think, “Hon, there’s something you oughta know”) but also because she’s 26 and looks, oh, 17. Bale is 30 and looks like he’s a decade older than her—do Asian crime vacations really age a man so much? She’s the Assistant DA by way of the prom. I know she can’t help look girlish and therefore unserious. I just think she’s horribly miscast here.

Supporting cast: totally excellent, even with Wilkinson’s accent. Although I’m confused by one thing: a commenter on Smart Bitches) mentioned Cillan Murphy as an archetypal Regency hero and I gotta say: thank you for playing, but no. Talk about your creepy guys. Brrr.

Best line of the summer: I’m willing to wager there will be no lines to top, “You know how it is, you’re at a party, someone passes around the weaponized hallucinogen…”

But wait! This movie also contains the second best line of the summer, which the newspaper headline about Wayne’s birthday party.

Worst line of the movie: this is a spoiler, so be warned!

When Batman dispatches the Main Villain at the end of the movie, he says, “I won’t kill you. But I don’t have to save you.” And the Main Villain goes to his death. Really left me thinking, What the fuck? Is this part of the Batman mythos? Have they, in fact, excised any compassion from Bruce Wayne? Is he finally being judge, jury, and executioner? It bothered me very much.

Other than that? Definitely much more worthwhile than a “summer movie.” Check it out.

It was just last night, I think, that I was IM’ing with a friend and I said, “Next week Simon starts going to school for 3 days extended (until 3pm) and Sophia starts swim camp! I won’t know what to do with my free time! But I’m willing to find out.”

You know the old saying: “Man plans, God laughs.”

Today I got a call from the preschool telling me that Sophia had broken her arm.

It happened on the playground. I imagined she had fallen off the monkey bars or something, but no: she had been sitting at the Art Table, and as she was getting off the bench she slipped and fell on her arm. She was being very brave when I came to get her—no tears, stoically holding her arm covered in ice packs. She had cried, she told me. All of the teachers were quite amazed at how brave she was being. I took her to the doctor and from there to the pediatric orthopedic doctor. She started to lose her composure, though, after she had finally gotten the X-rays (“Like Curious George got when he went to the hospital”) and we had to wait in the exam room.

“I want to go home now,” she said. “I wish I’d never hurt my arm.”

The ortho tech came in to give her a splint (she’ll have a splint for a couple of days and then get a cast on Thursday), and can I tell you how worrisome it is to have an ortho tech who is a dead ringer for Ian McShane as Al Swearengen wrapping up your daughter in gauze? (I’m totally serious. He didn’t have grease in his hair, and he didn’t have the little beard under his lip, but other than that: yup.)

So now she’s on the couch, watching “Dragontales” with her arm propped up on a pillow (to keep it above the heart). She’s eating a couple of cut-up apples and cheese sticks (“because that’s all I can eat now, Mommy”).

She’s upset because she’s not going to be able to do all the swimming she was planning. I’m upset because my little girl got hurt. I assume that after a day or so we’ll adjust to the new regimen. Of course, she can’t go to her last day of preschool tomorrow, because they’re having “Water Days,” and she can’t get wet.

The weather’s finally gotten extremely hot around here, and she can’t get her splint (and in a few days, her cast) wet. Neat.

I’ve never broken anything (knock on nearest wood sprite)—does it affect your outlook on life? She has an adventuresome spirit and I hope she’s just as energetic after this little incident as she was before. At the moment she’s even lost her sense of humor.

At the moment I hate Movable Type in a way I have never, ever hated it before. I would move to WordPress in a second, except I cannot figure out how to use MySQL on our server (our server runs Mac OS X, in case anyone out there can give me a clue what to do to create a MySQL database). All I wanted to do was install a little doohickey to show my current word count, and after saving and rebuilding the Main Index about 3000 times, what I ended with was a ridiculously bollixed up thermometer, when all I wanted was:

50,295 / 80,000 (62.0%)

(Damn. Still messed up! I don’t know what the deal is.)

One of my biggest problems with doing anything on our server at the moment is that when I ask the IT guy for our server for any help, he responds with something like, “Does this have anything to do with OpenSource???” Unless I get an account on #irc, I have to figure this out myself.

Anyhow. I’m very frustrated, because I really dislike Movable Type at the moment and there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it.

§

I have continued writing, although as you can see from my word count that I haven’t made significant progress since November. Well, I have—it’s just that I rewrite so severely I haven’t managed to move too far upstream.

I have to stop doing that. I need to finish. If for no other reason than at this point, to prove to myself that I actually can. I still wonder if there’s some marvelous secret out there that I’ve never found out.

I’m not even trying to write the Great American Novel. I really just want it to be entertaining. And coherent. Sigh.

§

On Wordplay, Terry Rossio has often talked about using index cards and a corkboard to outline his projects. Pin the index cards to said board, see how it all falls out. Easier to rearrange index cards than gigantic chunks of text.

I bought the corkboard, but I bought it so long ago I may have been childless. Never used it. Wasn’t even sure how to use, really—am I just supposed to lay everything out in order? That doesn’t tell me much about the structure, does it?

I knew I was really, really frustrated with my rewrite of my novel when I whipped out the index cards and the corkboard. Because at the moment, I’m ready to try anything. I feel like I’m the only person in the world who can’t do this.

(This is actually the board from the middle of May, when I originally took this picture and wrote this entry. Things have changed somewhat since then.)

Before even approaching the board, I arranged the cards in the best order I could. And it didn’t take that long to see the problem. It’s an Act II problem, of course.

If I ever figure out a way to make Act II my friend, I am going to make millions of dollars. Because everyone (with the possible exception of Toni, who has been heard to claim to have fewer problems with Act II than Act I) has problems with Act II. It’s the Sahara Desert of the story.

A popular summary of story structure is:

• Act I: Get your hero up a tree.
• Act II: Throw rocks at your hero.
• Act III: Get your hero down out of the tree.

Okay. Throw rocks = Complicate things. But not randomly: the complications have to be story-related, of course. And it can’t just be “one damn thing after another,” they have to make things much, much worse for your hero. Within the boundaries of the storyworld.

I broke down and arranged my story in the 8 sequences of the USC story structure. (This division works out quite well with a screenplay: each sequence has roughly 15 pages, and a 15 page chunk is a heck of a lot easier to tackle than a 120-page monster, fer shur. And of course the eighth sequence isn’t going to be as long as the others, because these days you end the movie and get out—no long wrap-ups for our audiences, no sirree.) It’s clear as day where the pacing in my story falls apart, where I’m plot heavy, where I need to figure things out some.

One thing that was bugging me was the end of Act 2. It wasn’t strong enough, the way I had it, and I really needed something to send me off into the final wrap-up of Act 3.

One “tip” I heard somewhere—USC? Wordplay?—is that the end of Act 2 is the alternate ending of the movie: that is, if your movie ends happily, the end of Act 2 is where you show us how things would end if they ended badly. (And likewise, if your movie ends tragically, give us the happy ending here.) It’s where the lovers in the rom-com are separated or realize they can never be together or whatever. In Macbeth, it’s where he realizes that he’s safe, he’s gotten away with it, because no one can ever defeat him—only a man not born of woman can beat him and hey, no such thing. (Boy, does he have a surprise coming!)

§

Anyhow. I have vowed to myself to send my work out this year, start racking up the responses. I definitely have to get this one out the door before November, because I am so looking forward to doing NaNoWriMo again.