Category — Writing

Mozart came up in conversation the other day, as he does from time to time.

Me: Cosi is the only Mozart opera I’ve ever seen.

Dan: I love Cosi.  It’s fantastic.

Me: It’s boring.  So boring.

Dan: What do you mean?

Me: Nothing happens.  For four hours.

Dan: What do you mean nothing happens?  In each act, every part gets an aria, and then each pair of lovers gets an aria, and then each cross-pair of lovers gets an aria…

After some more argument in which I exaggerate Mozart’s already-straightforward plot (basically: “Two guys decide to dress up as Albanians and seduce one anothers’ girlfriends, and this goes about as well for all parties as can be expected, but things come out all right in the end and we reset to starting conditions”), Dan points out that if I come to Mozart opera looking for emotionally effective drama without thinking about the music, I’ll be disappointed.  If I don’t get into the music as music, then of course I won’t appreciate the plot, because the music gives the plot its energy.

Which, of course, got us thinking about the Avengers, where combat works in much the same way music does in opera–to the point where you can imagine an operatic staging of the movie.  (NB: I loved the Avengers, but I can see how someone like my mother-in-law, say, who isn’t a superhero movie kind of person, would be confused by why all these folks tend to duke it out first, and ask questions later.)  Leaving Hawkeye aside for a second, since he’s only a “good guy” for the final fight scene, we’re introduced to five main characters, each of whom has a markedly different personality, power set, and screen presence–and each of whom falls neatly into a different operatic voice.

(These are just my guesses-folks with more opera background should feel free to debate.  I’m especially uncertain about Banner’s voice, but I do like the fact that the deep bass you’d need for the Hulk could drive a nice countertenor.)

We’re introduced to each of these characters alone, as the center of an action scene, or aria.  Captain America vs. the Punching Bags, Thor’s stealing Loki from the hoverjet, Tony Stark’s building of Stark Tower, Black Widow owning three Russian mafiosi while tied to a chair–even Bruce Banner we first see alone, though he doesn’t become the focus of a scene until he Hulks Out in Act II (and when he does, even though Black Widow’s there, she’s just reacting to the Hulk for the first several minutes).

The battles throughout the movie never pit the same group of characters against one another twice, and are careful to pit all the characters against one another at least once, even when (as in the Iron Man-Thor fight scene) the fight makes little sense in context.  We don’t care, watching, because we want to see these characters, with these specific styles, fight–in the same way that even if there’s no real reason for the bass and soprano to be singing together, we won’t frown at an excellently-composed duet.  In fact, it’s these duets that show us the true quality of our characters, and illuminate the tensions between them–tensions which simmer under the surface when they’re in the same room and can’t use violence and action to communicate.

Once everyone has had the chance to duet with everyone else, we get the full-on finale, in which the Avengers reprise their earlier duets, harmonizing with one another this time rather than against one another (Black Widow and Cap vs. Chitauri, Hulk and Thor vs. flying snake thing, Iron Man & Thor vs. the airborne chariots, etc.).  Meanwhile, two choruses throw down in the background (the Chitauri and the people of New York), and in the end Tony Stark takes center stage and spotlight for his death aria, only to have surprise support arrive from underneath in the form of the Hulk’s bass.

Thinking about the movie this way brings out something I hadn’t noticed before: the extent to which voice, the simple act of talking, is dangerous in this film.  Words and dialogue hide traps and barbs.  Some of the best comic moments also turn on the definitions of words and the moral weight we attach to them. (“He’s my brother!” “He killed 80 people.”  ”He’s adopted?”)  When our heroes are talking to one another, they’re at odds, doomed to self-destruction.  Black Widow’s turning-of-tables on Loki is really neat, and/but reinforces this fact: language is a trap, in which even the master trapper can be caught.  Language provides openings for the bad guys–Loki’s spell provokes, and derives power from, argument.  And (SPOILER) Agent Coulson’s fate, being struck from behind while chatting up the big bad (/SPOILER) just reinforces this theme.  When our heroes talk, they squabble and are vulnerable; when they act, they become a team.  Loki, when last we see him, is (SPOILER) bound, and more importantly, gagged (SPOILER). Fascinating angle, especially since Joss Whedon’s often thought of as a master of dialogue (or at least, of a certain kind of dialogue).  I’ll have to puzzle over this some more.

But that all pales before the thought of HOW AWESOME AN AVENGERS OPERA WOULD BE.  Any musicians out there want to help me take a crack at it?

Right now:

• Writing a comic script
• Editing Novel 2
• Typing Novel 3 (This is the one I wrote 40,000 words of longhand because I was having wrist trouble–which was great, but has come back to bite me)
• Pressing forward on novel 3
• Debating convention attendance for this year
• Trying to get my act together enough to send off a short story.

Oh, and see the Avengers, if you haven’t already.  Best version of the Hulk I’ve seen on cinema.  Whedon and Ruffalo beautifully evoke the pain of being forced to build a violent self in order to survive a violent situation–and then trying to live with that violent self later.  I’ve been pondering a post on this for the last couple days, but I’m still stewing over the idea.  More later, I’m sure.

So how do I feel about the sequel series to Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the best American animated shows ever?

Yes, it’s that good.  And the first episode is free, so you don’t have an excuse not to watch it.

Highlights: Korra, the new avatar, is brilliant.  The series creators have maintained the moral center of the world, while updating it and deploying a whole new cast.  World design: amazing! (As always with this team.)  Sound: wonderful!  Fight choreography: stunning!

A more subtle take, for those of you familiar with the first show: This series narrows the gap between the protagonist and the adult world.  In the original Avatar series, the main characters were kids, and the gulf between them and the adult world was absolute.  The adults were immutable forces: Iroh has a powerful history, but it’s hard to imagine him as a boy, or how he felt about his father.  He doesn’t feel contingent, or unsettled, though he does have regrets.  Ozai, Bumi, Jeong Jeong, Pakku, etc. have all similarly found their place in the world.  Aang, Katara, and Sokka are trying to figure out what to do with the world they’ve inherited from this older generation.

At 17, Korra is (intentionally, I think) older than any of the main characters in A:TLA, and is as a result closer to the adult world from the beginning.  She’s become strong, but she still has to learn how to be a part of society.  Meanwhile Tenzin, her airbending trainer, and Lin, the chief of police in Republic City, are both in late middle age–Tenzin, despite being set up as the aged Kung Fu Master of the show, is younger by a decade than any of the members of the White Lotus sect in A:TLA.  The first episode shows Korra discovering Republic City and trying to figure out how to be a part of this weird new world–everything she tries in the city turns out wrong somehow.  Meanwhile, we see just enough of Tenzin to tell that he feels the same way: still striving after thirty years to build and uphold the world his father left him.  They’re both uncertain, imperfect characters in moments of transition, and they’re both trying to do their best by the world with which they feel they’ve been entrusted.  I get the sense that each of them will be growing a lot over the next two seasons, and that dynamic feels fresh and full of possibility.  The first show passes down a powerful inheritance; this new setup stands to build upon that inheritance.

Anyone who falls in love with the 1920s gangsterland vibe of the series, by the way, should check out (the considerably bloodier) Baccano!, as well as Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop, which influenced A:TLA.

Brick, by Rian Johnson, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is one of my road-to-Damascus movies.  My folks introduced me to it, with a “Max, you’ll like this.”  I was skeptical (I’m often skeptical when people tell me I’m going to like something), but I fell in love.  The high school that felt like a high school, the crime, the dialogue, the cinematography, the direction–I could write thousands of words on how cool this movie is.  I’ve seen it around 10 times now, as a result of tracking down my friends who hadn’t seen it yet, cornering them, and forcing (err, that is, politely convincing) them to watch.

So now Johnson and Gordon-Levitt are teaming up again, with Bruce Willis, on a picture about time travel and assassination.  The concept looks great, and I’m stunned by how much Gordon-Levitt and Willis look alike–a resemblance I never noticed before.

So you all know what I’m doing in September, now.  Outside of writing, of course.

Busy weekend!  When PAX comes to town, so do friends and long-lost comrades; there are exhibits to see, costumes at which to gape, and dice to buy.  This year added a nice touch: an open gaming table with GMs on hand to run a range of indie RPGs.  I’m rarely in the mood to drop $40 on an RPG I’ve never played, and even if I do, it’s hard to read a book and know instantly how the rules translate into play.  We pretend, sometimes, as gamers, that the gaming experience resides in sourcebooks and tables and charts, but gaming’s really an oral tradition, with books as a fallback.  We draw ideas off games we’ve played in before, we learn the fine art of timing from all those times we’ve sat around a table waiting for the wizard to figure out which spell she’ll cast; we tune our expectations and desires based on stories our friends have told us about their games, what they liked, what they hated.  At the same time, a tabletop RPG at a con like Pax often feels like a waste of time for me, since there’s so much to see and a tabletop session tends to hover around 4 hours.  Fortunately, the open gaming section had two-hour modules available, so I was sold.

The game we played was called Fiasco, and it’s halfway between a structured improv game and a traditional RPG.  A Fiasco game feels like a small-time caper flick–ranging from the Coen Brothers to Quentin Tarantino.  Starting from a suggestive setting, you and your group build a number of characters, their relationships, and their (often contradictory) goals.  Play proceeds by building tight, dramatic scenes in which these characters strive, struggle, sometimes succeed, and more probably fail.  In about two and a half hours, my play group told an interweaving tale of animal smuggling, bombing, and betrayal at a small town zoo run by a shotgun-happy poacher.  We had a wonderful time–no surprise.

What was a surprise, though, was the amount of fun we all had with inter-party conflict.  Generally I steer away from real party conflict in games–partly on principal, and partly because I have personal issues with betrayal, even in games.  That’s part of the reason I don’t play Diplomacy any more.  But in our Fiasco run, the group was invested in the story more than in our particular characters.  One player spent the entire story working on an elaborate double-cross on his partner’s mink-smuggling operation, and we loved it.  When another character turned out to be planning to bomb the zoo my hapless animal-lover had been fighting to defend all session, I was amazed, and impressed, and didn’t feel even a little of that frustration you get when the thief steals half the boss’s loot and doesn’t tell anyone about it.

The Usual Suspects could be a story told in a Fiasco game.  That by itself isn’t such a surprise–you could tell the story of The Usual Suspects in D20 Modern, if you wanted to.  But I feel that a D20 Modern retelling would lead to players frustrated by the final reveal, while the Fiasco retelling would leave players telling tall tales about the game for years.  They’d feel that all of them had been in some way a part of Keyser Soze’s creation; that the scheme, and the resolution, were something they’d done together, rather than a lie they’d been told by a fellow player.

Now, I’m thinking about writing playsets to go with my books…

Have you had a long week?  Work, stress, schedule, general state of the world getting you down?

I have just the thing.

(Via BBC America, but only follow that link if you’re comfortable with spoilers for the next season of Who.)

Lo, on the horizon!  It burns, like the sun!  As of two days ago, you can pre-order Three Parts Dead from most major online retailers.  Look, I’ve assembled a list of handy links:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes & Noble
• Booksamillion 
• IndieBound
• Powells

Given this, you can probably pre-order the novel from your local brick-and-mortar bookstore, too–I’ll investigate and confirm.  On this very blog I’ve assembled a bunch of book-related info into a dedicated Three Parts Dead page, including the cover, the back-cover summary, and some thoughts on the book by John Crowley, Jerry Pournelle, Carrie Vaughan, and Maggie Ronald that, when I read them, made my head swell up three times its normal size.  I’ve since consulted a doctor and gone through extensive treatment.  Check the page out at the link above, or at the top right.

I’m thinking about redesigning the ol’ webpage here.  Do any of you know of an author site you love?  I’m not talking about sites you just happen to like, or that don’t offend you when you visit them, but sites that make you eager to return.  If some site springs to mind, what about it entrances you?  Design?  Content?  Do you know and like the person on the other side of the site, or does that matter at all?

I really like Molly Crabapple’s essay about the power of crowd-funding for art, and her use of Kickstarter in specific as a means for gathering support for artistic projects.  Other successes like the Order of the Stick Kickstarter ($1.25 million) and the DoubleFine Kickstarter ($3.3 million) show the sheer quantity of financial support that’s available–for artists at the top of their game, with a broad network of folks who care about their success.

I don’t know how well this model would work for people just starting out, but maybe it doesn’t matter.  A Kickstarter campaign is sort of like a promise: “Give me money and I’ll do something awesome.”  It’s easier to believe that promise when it’s made by an artist who has already done awesome things (even if they’re of limited scope).

On a different tangent: since this is all crowd-funding in the cloud, are we living in the crowd-cloud now?  Or are we part of the cloud-crowd?  Or something in between–Clrowd?

My pen did not explode on the airplane, but my bottle of ink did.  Somehow, the cap remained intact and most of the ink remained in the bottle, but the ziploc bag around the bottle was ink-soaked anyway.

After five days, I managed to reduce a childhood’s full of books to six medium-sized boxes that will reach Boston sometime in the next few weeks.  Making choices sometimes felt like tearing off a limb, but it was also a good exercise in letting go, and in life editing.  Which of this box of classic SF novels do you keep?  Which do you pass on to the next generation?  Some of my choices were sentimental, but for the most part I feel better knowing that I’ve released books that helped me out into the world where they can help other people.

Only a few pages of writing done last week, but progress made nonetheless.  Goals for this week: ship thank-you gifts, submit a story that’s been on my shelf for too long, and get back to ~1000 words a day.