It's almost time for Arisia again! And that means ... panels! Reading! Parties! Boston in January!
Come join me!
Arisia is New England's largest sci-fi/fantasy con, and is held at the Westin in Boston early every year. I'm going for what I think is the sixth time, and again I'm honored to have been invited to participate on panels. I'll also be running directly from one panel into the tail-end of the awesome Broad Universe "Rapid Fire Reading" in order to share a new story of mine, which makes it even more exciting.
So for those of you who are thinking about attending, here's what you need to know about the con ... and here are the panels/readings in which I'll personally have a hand. Or voice. See you there!
Saturday 1/17, 7 p.m. / Alcott "Fan Etiquette: How Not to Be That Fan" You're a fan of something, I'm a fan of something. But nobody really wants to be the scary, creepy or downright embarrassing fan ... at least, hopefully that's not a goal. During this panel (I'm moderating) we'll talk about how to come across as a devotee, not a stalker.
Sunday 1/18, 11:30 a.m. / Alcott "TV Year in Review" Man, there have been so many great TV shows in the genre field this year, who can keep track? Five of your fellow esteemed panelists will try running through our favorites (and ones that aren't quite so favored) while soliciting comments from the audience. See how many we can get through an hour and fifteen minutes!
Sunday 1/18, 11:30 a.m. / Douglas Broad Universe "Rapid Fire Reading" Yeah, I've got access to the TARDIS but even I can't be in two panels at once. While other great Broads do short readings of their new work, I'll be over in the TV Year in Review panel, then heading into the RFR in the last few minutes to gasp out my own work. Let's see if I can violate both space and time in the process.
Sunday 1/18, 1:00 p.m. / Alcott "TV Writing: Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror/Genre" As anyone who reads my Curiosity Quills column "Between the Lines" knows, there's a lot of great ways to tell story on TV ... and a lot of ways to mess it up. With former Syfy Network excecutive Thomas Vitale moderating, we'll be discussing what makes for great writing on TV, and what the challenges of telling supernatural stories on the small screen are.
Come on by and say hello at the panels, and if you miss me there, check out the Broad Universe table, where we'll be selling copies of our latest work. Have a great con!
On my way to the World Fantasy Convention in Crystal City, Virginia last weekend, I had a chat with an editor, who sighed with dismay that she’d initially packed only four or five books to bring with her for the long weekend. She wondered if that was enough.
I began to wonder if I just wasn’t serious about this reading thing – I’d only brought one, plus the new issue of New York Magazine.
Turns out, both of us over-packed: On arrival, everyone got a lovely canvas tote bag packed with … you guessed it, books. Why did I ever think I’d need reading material at a convention devoted to writers?
Then again, I’m new to all this and the WFC is just-turned 40. There was a lot of expertise in that hotel. In just a few brief days it packs in live readings, panels, a dealer’s room (filled with booksellers, natch), an awards ceremony, a tribute to WWI (complete with faux poppy pins) and an ice cream social. It is enough to make a word nerd’s head ‘splode with joy and overscheduling. What it tends to have almost nothing to do with is television.
Which is why I made it my mission to track down several of the more fascinating authors in attendance and quiz them all about the one thing they probably weren’t thinking about for approximately 72 hours – the small screen, and the writing that goes on there. It was a simple mission, and the answers were surprising: What’s the best writing you know of on TV today?
Here’s what I learned:
Sarah Pinsker Author and musician Pinsker won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short fiction of 2013 with her short story, “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind.” Show of Choice: Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black “The way they set about using this Trojan horse of a white middle class character to tell these stories about the other women in the jail on the show – they’re all given weight, and thought, and backstory in a way I’ve never seen on a TV show. The women all have reasons [for their plight] and are sympathetic – or not – but there’s lots of gray.”
Danielle Ackley-McPhail McPhail’s most recent book (co-written with Day Al-Mohamed) is Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn. Show of Choice: ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. “It’s not jut an action show; there’s depth to the characters and the situations. I’m not sure how much of that is lent from the comics and how much is the actual show, but it’s handled very well whether you care about the deeper characterizations or you like the action, there’s enough of both integrated so it carries you through the episode. You’re not left confused even if you just came in, having missed a few episodes.”
James Chambers Speculative fiction and horror author Chambers’ latest book is Three Chords of Chaos, a Bad-Ass Faerie Tale. Show of Choice: AMC’s Breaking Bad “Breaking Bad is the closest thing I’ve seen to a novel played out on television. It was one of the first shows I’ve seen in a long time that gave the audience credit for having an attention span that lasted more than two weeks. Character development, subplots, plotlines that played out over the entire course of the show – and some very in-depth and well-observed characterizations that made it the peak of television writing in the last decade or so.”
Steampunk writer McDougal so far has one cracking book: Songs for a Machine Age. Show of Choice: Also Breaking Bad “There are shows you enjoy, and ones you think are well-written. This was a show I didn’t enjoy, but it was so well-written that it actually made me watch it for a few episodes because I was so fascinated by the writing. The way the characters interact, the way they’re pulled into weird situations – not that you haven’t seen it all before, but the way it’s put together is different. They’re not afraid of silence, of filling every scene up with emotions. They leave gaps where the emotions should be and you fill it in. Which might be part of why I didn’t keep watching. Ultimately, I couldn’t stand what was happening, so I had to stop.”
And for the contrary view – the most disappointing writing on television right now:
Lawrence M. Schoen The creator of the ongoing Amazing Conroy series has a new novella published as a standalone book, Calendrical Regression, which is part of the Conroy universe. Show of Choice: ABC’s Forever “The saving grace of this show is the supporting character, played by Judd Hirsch. Otherwise, the show is trying to be many other shows all at the same time. You’re seeing all these tropes of other shows, and it’s doing them all together badly. It’s not going to survive and it’s frustrating because the writing is so transparent and superficial. The writing is not helping the actors. You can tell everything that’s going to happen from the very first moment – that’s my greatest disappointment in genre shows this season. It could be done better!”
Said anyone who ever read a book before watching a movie or TV adaptation of said book.
“The Leftovers,” the HBO series starring Justin Theroux and Liv Tyler, met “The Leftovers,” the literary novel with genre pretensions by Tom Perrotta at the end of June and … the streak remains unbroken.
Now, fact is it’s virtually impossible for the book to not be better. (Worthy companion books written to tie in with a screenplay are another story, another column.) Novels just have the time and the space and the leeway to occupy readers’ imaginations. We get to make a movie in our head from the book, and anything that deviates from that is going to get judged.
But most of the time if we read a book there’s a span of months, if not years, before the TV or movie version gets made. That movie we made in our heads settles, dissipates. It’s easy to look at “Game of Thrones” if you’re years away from the first reading of that book; not that it’s stopped purists from noting the significant changes between the books and the show. It’s less easy to ignore the differences, though, if you’re fresh from reading the book and diving into the series.
One summer, I spent my days lounging around the pool, reading “The Twilight Zone.”
Not watching. For one thing, “The Twilight Zone” reruns were on way late at night. I wasn’t quite a teenager, VCRs were in other peoples’ homes, and the Internet was still a good decade or so away. So I’d only seen a handful.
And those shows, when I could catch them, were potentially very scary. It was safer to read the summaries of every one of the 156 episodes, all neatly collected in Marc Scott Zicree’s “Twilight Zone Companion.” Little did I know how much his book, and that series, would define a style of storytelling I would prefer above all others.
Call it what you like: Twist in the tale, surprise ending, gotchas. “Zone” sent me to the works of Richard Matheson (a “Zone” writer but also well-known for his fiction, including the novel “I Am Legend”) and Roald Dahl (his grown-up, nasty stuff); I watched lesser series like “The Outer Limits” and “The Darkroom.” I loved “The Sixth Sense” (and no, I did not see it coming, thank you).
But on the road to becoming an expert in the “Twilight Zone” style of story, something unexpected happened: My antennae got a little too finely honed to be surprised any more. Getting a “Sixth Sense” surprise is so rare these days. And I’m not alone – in general, TV and movie audiences have watched enough of these twists in one form or the other that it takes a truly different shift to catch us unawares. The ones that fail feel like they ought to have the “sad trombone” music playing as credits roll. Bad twists undercut storytelling and cheapen the whole story.
To read the entire Between the Lines post, check it out here at Curiosity Quills!
“Into the Woods” fans, brace yourself: The Disney adaptation of the award-winning, long-running, grown-up thinking fairy tale musical by Stephen Sondheim – one of the stage’s pre-eminent writers – is getting neutered.
As the New Yorker reported recently, during a master class in New York City Sondheim told the audience of high school drama teachers that characters that are killed in the musical are not in fact dead and that sexual liaisons that occur are either not happening or probably not happening. C’mon folks, it’s Disney, right? What do you expect?
Somewhere along the line – and it was probably starting as far back as 1937, when Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was released – Disney became the de facto, go-to home for anything that even whiffed of childhood. In the ensuing years, the company has refashioned, retold and co-opted just about every fairy tale known to Western civilization, and some (hello, “Aladdin”) from other cultures entirely. The stories are their stories, the way they want to tell them, and that means the way the most adults and children want to consume them. And if that means smoothing out the rough parts and neutering anything that whiffs of controversy, supplanting all of it with sentimentality and tired moralistic and gender tropes, then so be it. The people don’t know better, do they?
The thing is they could. Fairy tales have been having a good run on TV and in the movies in recent years, even with Disney backing. From ABC’s “Once Upon a Time” series to NBC’s “Grimm” and even Fox’s “Sleepy Hollow” (a blend of folk and fairy tale), these stories are not just for children any more – not that they ever really were in the first place. Original, undiluted fairy tales are dark, scary beasts big on retribution and less big on telling a big moral story or dispensing justice. They were warnings, not advisories.
Check out the rest of my new "Between the Lines" column over at Curiosity Quills!
Harlan Ellison, that irascible love-him or hate-him genius of speculative fiction, lawsuits and storytelling, turns 80 today. While covering the South by Southwest Festival in 2008, I got a chance to talk with him in person (there's a video I'll turn up one of these days), and before that, on the phone. Here's just the opening salvo of our extended phone chat, which had us talking testicles, knock-knock jokes and grammar strictures in just the first few seconds.
Me: So are you rooting for the Giants or the Patriots this season?
Harlan Ellison: I really don’t care. I don’t give a fuck about either one of them. The Pats have an unblemished record and that’s kind of interesting to watch but if they win you say, “Well, okay they had an unblemished record and not it’s unblemished-er.” And the Giants, I like (quarterback) Phillip Rivers. I think he’s got, as we men who touch our soft side say, he has balls.
Me: So long as you don’t touch his soft side.
Ellison: Now you see, I finally figured that out. When you talk about a woman who has balls, you obviously can’t, it’s a dichotomy. So you have to say she’s got great eggs.
Me: Saying she’s got ovaries doesn’t have the same oomph to it.
Ellison: I got a great one; you ready? Knock-knock.
Me: Who’s there?
Ellison: Objective Case.
Me: Objective Case who?
Ellison: No, no. That would be Objective Case whom?
Me: I felt that one coming.
Ellison: See, you are too smart for your own good. What are you doing working for the (publication)?
Me: No one will pay me more.
Ellison: And having to deal with the schmendricks you deal with everyday.
Me: Well, because every so often I have the opportunity to call someone like Harlan Ellison.
Ellison: Oh you silver-tongued devil you. What can I do for you?
Of course, there's lots more; I'll find a way to put that in at some other point. Happy birthday to the original silver-tongued devil, in all senses of the phrase.
One of these days I'll write a longer post about the joys of discovering the fiction Roald Dahl wrote for adults, rather than children (most of us only know him by his "Matilda" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" books). It's twisty, detailed, tightly-written and often delightfully nasty.
But for now, I'll send you to one of his greatest: "Lamb to the Slaughter," which seems to be following me around this weekend: The New York Times Education Life section featured a psychology quiz that cited the story, and my fellow TV writer Marc Berman (of TV Media Insights) noted that today in 1958 "Alfred Hitchock Presents" aired the (very well done) televised version of the story.
In the tale, a mousy, pregnant housewife dispatches her husband by clonking him on the head with a leg of lamb and then finds an ingenious way to get rid of the evidence.
Read it here, or watch the episode here. You'll be doing yourself a favor, particularly if you're spurred to hunt down more of Dahl's short stories.
I have fallen off the posting wagon, not for lack of things to say, but time to say them in. So in honor of my recent "Dune" posting, I'll just leave you with this. "Dune," in gummi worms.
It is, as one wag in the comments notes, a dessert planet.
Finding the right book club feels like dating. Many will be tried, few will succeed. At least, that's been my experience.
Over the years I occasionally feel a need to actually share my reading experiences, which are wide and varied and as much about finding book-lovin' folk as it is to talk about the specific book we read. I remember one group that met a few times in a bookstore, and we'd agreed that each meeting a new person would pick the book for everyone to read. The only limitation was that it wouldn't be more than 300 pages because apparently some people have lives/read slowly/get scared of big books.
When it was my turn, I picked "The Wasp Factory" by the late Iain Banks and despite the slim nature of that volume, the group died immediately afterward. Some people just aren't ready for the books I love.
But here are the real major issues I've found with most book clubs:
Hyper-focused Book Selection. The closest I want to get to limitations on what we can/can't read are nonfiction vs. fiction. I get that nonfiction books can be as awesome as fiction, but to me that's a different meeting. But so many of the groups I've been involved in descend into non-fiction only, or (worse) insist on the NYT flavor of the month/literary darling. Someone should have a darn good reason for picking a book to foist on ten other people, and it shouldn't largely be connected to their placement on a bestseller/Oprah list. What we end up getting are bland, self-important works that may look good and often have little to say.
Corollary to the Above: Fear of Genre. No, I don't want to read more than one western or romance in a row. But I would try it. Because you never know. Which means I'd like to find a group that can live with a sci-fi, fantasy or horror book that isn't solely dedicated to those three genres. Variety, spice of life and all that.
Let's Be Social! Yes, book clubs are social gatherings. And it's great that we get to talk about other things going on in your lives. But the book comes first. There should be at least a 3:1 ratio of book talk to "stuff" talk. Clubs I've been in give up on the book after a few mealy-mouthed "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" and ... zzzzz.
Entropy Takes Over and Oh! A Shiny Thing! Official book clubs sponsored by companies or paid professionals have their place; they keep things going and organized, but often exert a firm hand over everything else. I can be won over with a nice cheese plate, but it's nice when the participants can have a say in the organization. That said, worse are the book clubs organized by regular folk (hello, Meetup.com!) that peter out after two or three meets because the organizer can't fit it in any more, or the people taper off. And I get it: Life happens. Shinier things beckon. But it's a problem.
Last night, I went to my first book club in a while, held at the Mashable.com headquarters. Good group, smart folk. (And so very young most of them.) I saw my first Google Glass, my first 3-D printer, and my first handsome young gazillionaire internet CEO (no, he wasn't in the club with us, sorry folks). We read "The Un-Americans," or rather, most of us read some of it because we only had a few days after the book was announced, and while it wasn't quite my type of book, it had merit. Plus, the author Skyped in and took our questions, which was a nice bonus. There wasn't much book talk beyond that interview with her, but a few of us lingered and had a terrific chat about both book and real world (howdy there, Sassy Peach!). So, a nice start.
We'll see, of course: This is a story that shall be continued.
Recently, a link popped up all over my Facebook thread, informing me how I could begin breezing through books at a much more rapid rate than I do. If I don't know anything more about that particular link, it's because, f that noise. I see no need to read faster. I probably need to read better, but definitely not faster.
I tend to read pretty quickly as it is. And by that, I mean I'm not a read-every-word of a book. I don't have some plan, where I skip through huge chunks or paragraphs, but I know th at my patience is such that I tend to want to move things along. More than once I've had to go back and re-read something to discover what the future segment was talking about, but that's not a common thing. I'm reading and getting the most out of the book as it is.
That said, reading a book aloud, to someone else, is definitely the way to go if you want to make sure you read every. Single. Word. Almost since we got together, I've read books aloud to M, because I love reading aloud and I'm so incredibly lucky that he likes to be read to. Occasionally, we revisit some favorites of ours, and that's how I'm learning just how much I skip or skim over in many of my favorites.
Which brings us to "Dune." I first picked up the Frank Herbert classic in 9th grade, which means that even as a precocious reader it was going to go way over my head in a bunch of places. It was the hardest book I ever read by that age, but I got through it. Why? Because I wanted to see the David Lynch movie and understand it. Okay, fine: Because Sting was in the David Lynch movie without many clothes on and I wanted to understand what I was watching. Happy now?
Years later I went on in the series, and here's your heads up: While you don't have to read all of Herbert's original series (and you can absolutely skip the "prequels" written from his notes), to enjoy the books you should go until at least the third novel. Preferably the fourth. After that are some major shifts, and you've gotten the most bang for your buck.
Those three books -- "Dune," "Dune Messiah," "Children of Dune" and "God Emperor of Dune" -- actually changed the way I think. Sure, lots of folks come away from reading them having memorized the Litany Against Fear, and finding that as a mantra it's quite effective. But those books gave me a fresh new perspective on religion, and myth, and how they develop and why some folks need them. It's instructive and thoughtful and an incredible combination of storytelling, world building and philosophy.
M has never read any "Dune" books, despite being a general fan of the genre. He saw the Lynch film, saw the missteps, and didn't go back to see if the books were worth it. So we're now about 3/4 of the way through "Dune" and ... well, there's a lot of stuff in there I either don't remember or never read closely enough. It's been a real education doing a close reading of that book, seeing the details and the descriptions and even some plot points that I'd clearly missed in my previous go-arounds.
It's been less fun feeling critical of the text. Which is ridiculous: It's a classic no matter what I say, and anything I have to comment on will tarnish its image by exactly zero percent. But it's surprising to learn that a classic can feature many, many scenes in which point of view switches from one character to the next, within the same scene. That's a no, as I've been told! Herbert also doesn't seem to like the conjunction "and" -- people will "stand up, speak" a lot rather than "stand up and speak." And so forth. And as M noted, Herbert is really, really in love with his own language. While his descriptions don't got on and on and on, they are incredibly flowery in places, sometimes veering all the way into pretension. It's nice that he had a liberal editor. It's just ... surprising.
But the real surprise to me this go-around, now that I finally understand everything that I'm reading, is just how slow it is. Events are taking place over a relatively short period of time, and there's a lot of gazing out over the sand basins. Characters repeatedly remind themselves of revelations they had some pages ago, and the endless descriptions of Paul's prescience make me want to roll my eyes. We get it. He has some kind of foresight, and he's conflicted about it. M has become concerned that P is actually a thinly-disguised Mary Sue, but I disagree: He's got some super powers, but we know largely where it all came from. In fact, the constructed nature of his messiah-hood is one of the more interesting aspects of the bok to me, now that I'm getting this close read. I'd missed that before.
Is there a point to be had here? You can't go home to Arrakis again for the first time? Maybe. I won't say that "Dune" has been downgraded in my heart as a great novel and a great story. I'm even tempted to re-read the next three books (even though M will not want them aloud). It's just interesting how over time, the stories change for us even if the words remain the same. And also, that slower reading is more eye-opening in the end than rushing through.
Writer. Reader. Never enough time for either. Author of collection of short stories "Home for the Holidays" and co-author of "The Law & Order: SVU Unofficial Companion." (Both available on Amazon.)
randeedawn.com
One summer, I spent my days lounging around the pool, reading “The Twilight Zone.”
Recent Comments