I've been blogging here about how we can change the public perception into a respect for Romance in general, and the cross-genre Romance forms in particular.
In exploring that issue, we've examined the whole publishing field and much of the screenwriting world, the writer's business model, and even the esoteric roots of human emotion. But we still haven't solved the problem.
On a #scriptchat focused on the difference between plot and story and how you as a writer can use that difference in screenwriting, there was a quick side-exchange among writers regarding why they are not enchanted with the "romcom" or Romantic Comedy in film.
Today, you can get Romance onto the Big Screen, but usually only in comedy form. Once upon a time, the Adventure-Romance was popular (AFRICAN QUEEN and various WWII flicks, even ROMANCING THE STONE).
Once upon a time, you could get SF onto TV only in comedy form (MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, LOST IN SPACE). Then came STAR TREK and changed all that, and then changed what kind of SF you could get onto the Big Screen and even get Oscar attention.
We're looking for the key to how to achieve that kind of shift in audience size for a serious Romance, dramatic, and preferably mixed-genre Romance.
As I pointed out many times,TV and Big Screen are big budget and therefore involve the whole business model of the fiction delivery system -- how much it costs to make vs. how much you can reap from the audience which depends entirely on audience size.
Today Romance is stuck in a very thick-walled ghetto of small-audience-size. It's a very big audience in the printed-book market, and huge in the e-book market, but those markets are tiny compared to TV or Film markets.
To grab those larger markets we have to look closely at what elements in Romance are turning off folks we know would love this stuff if only they didn't bounce out of it because of some surface detail that annoys or repels a wide variety of people.
Love is universal. Romance is the state of mind in which love first becomes possible -- First Love is a kind of loss of virginity, a baptism of fire. Romance is fun - love is infinitely rewarding, the very purpose of life. How could any living being refuse exposure to that?
The truth is, I don't know. I've been writing SF-Romance since the beginning. Recently, a woman who had read my first award winner, UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER when it came out and just recently read it again discovered that it is (and always has been) Science Fiction Romance -- but at that time, there was no such genre. Now she's looking for more books like that.
Here's her blog post about it.
http://lovecatsdownunder.blogspot.com/2010/05/rachel-needs-book-advice.html
See what you can recommend to her.
So I've been thinking about this genre for a long time. I discussed why we love romance here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-we-love-romance.html
That short post is about how the differences between mundane Romance genre and SFR or PNR mixed genre actually open the genre to vast possibilities and a truly vast audience.
But the marketing hasn't developed the reach the material merits.
So I continue to puzzle over it. That's why this side-exchange about romcom on #scriptchat on twitter caught my attention.
SO WHAT IS #SCRIPTCHAT?
Here in the words of one of those who devised this weekly meeting on twitter, is a description of it #scriptchat.
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Scriptchat was created for the purpose of bringing new and seasoned screenwriters together to learn and grow. We have two chats every Sunday. Mina Zaher (@DreamsGrafter) leads the European chat at 8pm GMT, and Jeanne Veillette Bowerman (@jeannevb) moderates the USA chat at 8pm EST. The same topic is discussed at each chat, which provides an invaluable global network of ideas and philosophies on writing. Just since last October, we have gathered close to 400 screenwriters in our little circle of world domination.
The scriptchat "treefort" consists of Jeanne, Mina, Zac Sanford (@zacsanford), Jamie Livingston (@yeah_write) and Kim Garland (@KageyNYC). The behind-the-scenes details are almost as fun as the chat itself. The team relies greatly on each other to keep topics fresh and the ideas flowing as fast as the tequila. Speaking of, there's only one scriptchat rule: Leave your ego behind and bring your tequila.
Our blog is full of incredible resources for all levels of screenwriters: www.scriptchat.com
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You can read this whole #scriptchat posted as a web page here (along with links to all kinds of writer's resources.)
http://scriptchat.blogspot.com/2010/05/story-vs-plot-may-23-2010.html
As you may remember, I have done a long post on "plot vs. story" on this blog. You can find my take on the subject here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
That post is about what part of a composition is plot and what part is story -- and how theme interacts with those parts -- and how to tell the difference.
So while I was watching these excellent writers (about I think 400 people follow #scriptchat ) explain plot and story in 140 characters or less, I saw the following exchange flow by me.
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Here's how to read this layout.
The top line is the twitter handle of the person posting, then it gives the time, date and the software used to post the comment. The items with # in front are called hashtags - you use them in a search command to sort all the comments on the thread out of the general stream of tweets. You can then see comments by people you do not follow, and they can see your comments in the hashtagged sort. Where @ precedes a word, that word is the twitter handle of someone who is being answered. A comment without an @ in it is an original comment others may answer.
jeannevb
12:55pm, May 23 from TweetChat the whole story vs plot concept I think is why I'm not a huge rom com fan. They're all so predictable #scriptchat
Bang2write
12:57pm, May 23 from web @jeannevb that's what I used to think... But the MANY variations of the same thing in the Rom Com - that's what's masterful. #scriptchat
DreamsGrafter
12:57pm, May 23 from web @jeannevb re rom com, that's a genre issue hon. Rom coms is one of the most prescriptive genres. #scriptchat
ambigfoot
12:59pm, May 23 from mobile web The whole mushy sentimentalized sick inducing slushiness is why I ain't a fan of the romcom @jeannevb oh and fucking hugh grant #scriptchat
jeannevb
1:01pm, May 23 from TweetDeck @ambigfoot mushy predictability makes me barf ;) #scriptchat
DREAMSGRAFTER clarified thusly in a series of tweets to me (@jlichtenberg) the following day:
@JLichtenberg my point was tht rom coms are most prescriptive of genres. room for variations in other genres but >>> (@jeannevb @ambigfoot)
@JLichtenberg w/ rom coms conventions r restricted boy meets girl etc. So it's difficult to find brand new storylines (@jeannevb @ambigfoot)
@JLichtenberg In a way the genre defines the storylines unlike horror/thriller for example. (@jeannevb @ambigfoot)
@JLichtenberg That's just my perception & looking @ history of rom com, there seems to be trends to reflect society (@jeannevb @ambigfoot).
@JLichtenberg There are exceptions such as Sleepless In Seattle and You've Got Mail but >>> (@jeannevb @ambigfoot)
@JLichtenberg How many other ways can you keep boy and girl apart? (@jeannevb @ambigfoot)
@JLichtenberg Whereas thriller/horror are about emotions: thrill/fear. More scope for storylines there. (@jeannevb @ambigfoot)
@JLichtenberg Hope that helps. We shld definitely discuss genres in #scriptchat. So important re selling script. (@jeannevb @ambigfoot)
DreamsGrafter
10:15am, May 24 from Web@Jonathan_Peace @JLichtenberg Will work out w/ #scriptchat #treefort when we can do genre. (@jeannevb @zacsanford @KageyNYC @yeah_write)
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So eventually we'll probably have a #scriptchat where the subject is genres. That should be interesting.
Go back to Bang2Write's comment above - and note that a mind was changed by studying the romcom genre.
Now remember my two posts on THE HURT LOCKER, about how the Indie Film industry unleashed by tech advances in recording devices and audience building services like YouTube is changing the face of film making.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/hurt-locker-indie-films-financing-tv.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/hurt-locker-indie-films-financing-tv_18.html
The Indies, with smaller audiences and lower budgets, are able to explore and invent genres, gather and build audiences - and today, even win major awards. THE HURT LOCKER is very tightly focused war-drama, the story of the effect of war on one man's psyche.
Remember Blake Snyder's identification of classic film "genres" he defined in SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES - none of them identical to publishing genres.
http://www.blakesnyder.com/tools/ -- to find the list of genres and films that are examples of those genres get the pdf file at the top of the /tools/ page. A glance through it will tell you all you need to know for the moment, but you really need Snyder's books if you want to learn to write blockbuster film scripts.
One thing you learn from scrutinizing that list of films divided into genres -- genre is not LIMITING, but LIBERATING
The beatsheet formula the genre formula does not limit a writer's ability to tell a story.
When you have a story in your mind that you want to tell, you want others to have as much fun with it as you are having.
Like a delicious buffet dazzles the eye with food-art and makes the mouth water, the genre formula art dazzles the emotions and raises the appetite for a repeat of a prior enjoyment, but all made new again.
Hollywood wants "the same but different" for that reason.
No two buffet displays with ice scuptures are alike, but if you've enjoyed previous buffets, the mere sight will set your stomach rumbling.
So the writer looks at the story inside the writer's mind and looks at the genres being enjoyed currently, and figures out which genre her story actually belongs to.
You don't change the story to fit the genre, you figure out what genre it is in.
They say, "write what you know" -- and this is how to apply that maxim. Write the genre you read.
Of course, the problems then arise when the story in your head does not fit an extant genre - and you have to be one of the inventors or popularizers of that genre.
The Romance genre (along with many others) has reached a point in development where it is spinning off new sub-genres.
The cinematic RomCom, however, appears to the writers in #scriptchat to have stagnated.
The cinematic RomCom needs SFR and PNR to liberate the underlying message.
Now look at the tweet from @ambigfoot
ambigfoot
12:59pm, May 23 from mobile web The whole mushy sentimentalized sick inducing slushiness is why I ain't a fan of the romcom @jeannevb oh and fucking hugh grant #scriptchat
That reaction is very widespread.
So we have two objections to the cinematic romcom "formula"
1. "sick slushiness"
2. Limited # of ways to keep boy and girl apart
Both of those could apply equally well to most general Romance genre print fiction today.
Indie producers with budgets under one million dollars are still looking for RomCom scripts. A HURT LOCKER success is possible with a Romance.
But to achieve that, the two major objections "slushiness" and "cliche plot" have to be solved in a very low budget way.
One innovative line of thinking may lead one of you to solve this problem and sell such a screenplay.
The basic theme of "Romance" produces both the slushiness and plot-cliche problem.
That theme is Love Conquers All
You can't change that theme and still have a Romance genre Work.
But the theme is the source of the problem.
"Slushiness" comes from Love not having a very hard time conquering All -- the two get together, and they just fall all over each other despite themselves, and then talk about their feelings as if nothing else in the world matters, their inattentiveness generating no consequences of note.
"Plot Cliche" comes from the genre requirement that the PLOT is the sequence of events leading Boy to Girl, and thus the only possible main conflict in a Romance is "Love vs. X" where X is whatever is keeping them apart.
So the THEME is what the major portion of the potential audience objects to, but you can't change it and still have a Romance.
So what do you do? How can you possibly popularize Romance to Big Screen proportion audiences?
Marion Zimmer Bradley taught me the solution.
The solution is to challenge the theme, doubt the thematic statement.
Most themes that work for fiction are, for most reader/viewers, unconscious assumptions about life. They are unexamined, taken for granted, "truths" about normal reality.
GREAT FICTION EXAMINES THE UNCONSCIOUS ASSUMPTIONS OF THE AUDIENCE
The Comedy forms have always been the thin edge of the wedge into commercialization of one of those challenges to the unconscious assumptions of a culture. The romcom, stradling the line between romance and comedy has powerful dramatic potential.
Marion Zimmer Bradley taught me (most especially while I was writing UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER) to use the plot, the characters, the story, and the worldbuilding (most especially the worldbuilding) to DISPROVE THE THEME and thus examine those unconscious assumptions of my readership -- the adolescent male SF reader the publishers market my adult-female fiction to.
Illustrate, she taught me - show don't tell - the opposite of what you are trying to say.
In this case, "LOVE CONQUERS ALL" becomes "LOVE CAN NOT CONQUER ALL." That would knock it out of the genre, so keep working.
Gene Roddenberry taught me a technique that can work for TV and film too.
Most novels state the theme as a statement, as illustrated above. But stated themes lead to cliche plots and slushy characters, and they alienate the audience segment that holds the opposite unconscious assumption, as well as the segment that disagrees consciously.
So instead of merely stating the theme, Gene Roddenberry taught that you must formulate the theme as a QUESTION, and DO NOT ANSWER THAT QUESTION. Force the viewer to wrestle with that question, but don't tell the answer. Show the question, don't tell the answer.
All audience segments - those that agree, those that disagree, those that hold unconscious assumptions, and the undecided, will feel that their viewpoint is represented fairly.
All segments will be engaged by the question.
And here we come to what @DreamsGrafter said:
@JLichtenberg Whereas thriller/horror are about emotions: thrill/fear. More scope for storylines there. (@jeannevb @ambigfoot)
Think about that.
The signature of the horror/thriller is the hairraising QUESTION raised and never totally answered about the nature of reality and the nature of Evil, all expressed in the worldbuilding.
@DreamsGrafter was simply saying that RomCom films DO NOT ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT THE THEME.
And that's true. In Romance genre, the theme is sacrosanct.
And that's dramatically unsatisfying, and very limiting to the writer.
Interesting drama is generated by slaying the sacred cows.
Classic Literature always bears the hallmark of being "disturbing" on some level. A good book, a memorable book, a quotable film, will always hang on or turn on a very disturbing image, motif, character, fate.
The antidote to "slushy" is poetic-justice, very disturbing poetic justice.
The antidote to "cliche plot" is the Thematic Question.
The key to all that is worldbuilding, which I've noted in many posts is the weakest skill in the Romance Writer's toolchest.
That weakness shows up in Romance writers only when they venture into SFR or PNR where they must build a world from scratch rather than research a historical period.
"Reality" comes pre-formulated with all the pieces already illustrating (fairly screaming) LOVE CONQUERS ALL -- because it does. Gather enough historical datapoints and you can't help but see how Intimate Relationships (and hatreds) drive historical events.
Love causes the most collosal failures as well as the most spectacular successes. That's reality.
But when you must build a world from scratch, it's much harder to get the bits and pieces you create in your imagination to fall together into a pattern that readers/viewers will recognize as "real" while it obviously isn't.
So the temptation is to borrow this bit from here and that bit from somewhere else, and the result is that the pattern does not come clear to the reader/viewer.
Interesting and dramatically useful background bits don't always go together to make a pattern, or an artistic whole, just because they're interesting.
We must find, or train, a Romance writing circle who can worldbuild with a proficiency that allows them to pose the LOVE CONQUERS ALL theme as the greatest challenging question, the most disturbing question, a question which is not articulated anywhere in the characters, story or plot but glares at the reader/viewer from the background.
That's essentially what I did in UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER - many conflicting loves, and a price to pay for the choice, but the question is entirely within the worldbuilding.
"After you've lost so much, are you really so very sure that love has any value in life?"
Ask some of those questions yourself, the unthinkable questions, the insufferable questions, the not-quite-sane questions.
Find the right question to disturb the quiet certainty of that majority audience out there, and you may be on the way to formulating a High Concept film that is actually a Romance.
@DreamsGrafter read a draft of this post and elaborated on how the cinematic romcom has developed over decades in terms of asking those hard questions and provided this:
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- Re rom coms, this was a genre that pose thematic questions and also questioned the society around us. Looking back in history the rom coms of the 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's were defined by their decade and women's role in society. You just have to look at the difference between Katherine Hepburn and Doris Day ... very different on the surface but they both aggressively satisfied their sexual roles.
Actually, even in the 80's questions were being asked. But since the 90's and especially in this millenium, we don't have any questions. That might be more to do with women's role in society. On the surface, we don't have to fight as hard as women from previous decades. And that's why the slacker rom coms such as Knocked Up come in. Fact is we have stopped asking questions but so has music and art: apparently, the students coming out of art colleges don't aren't driven to ask questions such as Hirst or Emin.
- On a creative level, I've tried writing rom coms but they always turn out into horror. I think that's because I like to explore the darker side of human nature. But I think that's just a personal thing.
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THE HURT LOCKER move over, here comes something bigger and more powerful than war and bomb-squads.
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Maybe you'll find your Thematic Question here.
Harlequinn has a new website devoted to Paranormal Romance - Once Bitten, Twice as Hungry
http://www.twiceashungry.com/paranormal/
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Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com -- current
http://www.simegen.com/jl/ full bio-biblio
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
WordShaping: Why I Write Fantasy - Rowena Cherry
WordShaping: Why I Write Fantasy - Rowena Cherry
You cannot find a series-worth of heroes in any other genre (other than Fantasy) without seriously messing with real History and/or Geography, or at the least, grafting a branch that does not belong onto British Lord's family tree. Therefore, I set my self-styled, high-tech "gods" in outer space.
A few examples of things I've researched include: whether or not a woman can really shave her legs with a "razor" shell (she cannot, and I had hairy scabs on my legs to prove it); what forms have to be filled out in Britain before a grave can be exhumed and the remains exported (if a loved one is buried on Church grounds, exhumation is much less likely to be permitted); under what circumstances a Magnum (gun) might jam; the top five ways that able-bodied people unintentionally offend people who are confined to wheelchairs; and the physics and chemistry that would have to be in place for a sky to turn green.
Strictly speaking, my novels are all classified by the publisher as "futuristic romance" but readers have termed them everything from fantasy to paranormal to sfr (science fiction romance). The trouble with "futuristic" is that many readers expect futuristics to be set "in the future", but romances fall into the "futuristic" category if space travel --involving spacecraft-- and/or more technologically advanced alien societies are central to the story.
If I had known, I should still have written Insufficient Mating Material pretty much the way it is. Would I have taken a critical scene and relocated it on a spaceship? I honestly don't know. If my editor had requested it, perhaps so. I can be flexible. At the eleventh hour, when I saw the cover art for Insufficient Mating Material, I decided that I had to take apart one third of the novel and re-work it because I believe passionately that what is on the cover should be an illustration of a scene in the book.
There was no "From Here To Eternity" scene in the original Insufficient Mating Material, but it was obvious after seeing the cover that there had to be one. An important chess-playing scene had to be removed (the word count was already set), a beach had to be cleared of dead bodies (LOL!!!), and the ending had to change... because the original ending would have been an anti-climax after the new sex in the surf scene. It follows that if the cover artist had illustrated a wonderfully sinister, looming spaceship reminiscent of Independence Day, I should have revised the text to go with it.
There are many aspects of Fantasy that I appreciate very much, particularly dragons and magic (which I don't have), psychic powers (which I do have), and the potential for unusual solutions to universal problems.
What I do not appreciate in Fantasy or any other genre is when the author stretches my credulity too far, or breaks the rules they have established for their own world.
Heroines get more hero than they bargain for....
The "god-Princes of Tigron" series (also dubbed "The Mating Books") was basically "three royal weddings and a murder". In the first book, a bad-boy Prince abducted the mate of his dreams who happened to be from the black sheep branch of his royal family. Prince Tarrant-Arragon was so pleased with his stolen bride, and with married life, that he decided to trick or force his two greatest enemies into politically disastrous sexual liaisons with liability wives… in other words, to his own controversial sisters.
(When you buy directly from the publisher, the author receives a bigger royalty check)
Welcome Rowena Cherry, whose heroes are larger than life in every way.
Amber: Why do you write fantasy?
Rowena: I write Fantasy because... I want my heroes to be larger than life in every way. The "god-Princes of Tigron" are over seven feet tall, have seven shark-like senses and genie-like powers, all are physically attractive and highly sexed, they're wealthy and powerful and intelligent and courageous and supremely competent... and royal. And faithful.You cannot find a series-worth of heroes in any other genre (other than Fantasy) without seriously messing with real History and/or Geography, or at the least, grafting a branch that does not belong onto British Lord's family tree. Therefore, I set my self-styled, high-tech "gods" in outer space.
A few examples of things I've researched include: whether or not a woman can really shave her legs with a "razor" shell (she cannot, and I had hairy scabs on my legs to prove it); what forms have to be filled out in Britain before a grave can be exhumed and the remains exported (if a loved one is buried on Church grounds, exhumation is much less likely to be permitted); under what circumstances a Magnum (gun) might jam; the top five ways that able-bodied people unintentionally offend people who are confined to wheelchairs; and the physics and chemistry that would have to be in place for a sky to turn green.Strictly speaking, my novels are all classified by the publisher as "futuristic romance" but readers have termed them everything from fantasy to paranormal to sfr (science fiction romance). The trouble with "futuristic" is that many readers expect futuristics to be set "in the future", but romances fall into the "futuristic" category if space travel --involving spacecraft-- and/or more technologically advanced alien societies are central to the story.
Just because I claim to write Fantasy does not mean that I make everything up. I believe there is a limit to how far a reader should have to suspend disbelief. It seems only polite and responsible to give my readers a reason to trust me, therefore, if something can be researched, then I research it.
Here's a dilemma for a futuristic series writer. What happens if one book in a "futuristic" series has no scenes featuring advanced technology and spacecraft? It never occurred to me that this could be perceived as an outrage by review-writing readers until I read a chance remark on a GoodReads.com discussion.If I had known, I should still have written Insufficient Mating Material pretty much the way it is. Would I have taken a critical scene and relocated it on a spaceship? I honestly don't know. If my editor had requested it, perhaps so. I can be flexible. At the eleventh hour, when I saw the cover art for Insufficient Mating Material, I decided that I had to take apart one third of the novel and re-work it because I believe passionately that what is on the cover should be an illustration of a scene in the book.
There was no "From Here To Eternity" scene in the original Insufficient Mating Material, but it was obvious after seeing the cover that there had to be one. An important chess-playing scene had to be removed (the word count was already set), a beach had to be cleared of dead bodies (LOL!!!), and the ending had to change... because the original ending would have been an anti-climax after the new sex in the surf scene. It follows that if the cover artist had illustrated a wonderfully sinister, looming spaceship reminiscent of Independence Day, I should have revised the text to go with it.
Amber: Why do readers love fantasy?
Rowena: I can only answer for myself. I love to read. (Full stop!) I love Fantasy, but I also love Mystery, Suspense, Historicals, History, Anthologies, Cat books, Science Fiction... As far as I am concerned, genre labels are a bit of a nuisance.There are many aspects of Fantasy that I appreciate very much, particularly dragons and magic (which I don't have), psychic powers (which I do have), and the potential for unusual solutions to universal problems.
What I do not appreciate in Fantasy or any other genre is when the author stretches my credulity too far, or breaks the rules they have established for their own world.
Amber: Would you write fantasy even if no one read it?
Rowena: Hah! Yes, I would, but I'd package and market it as something else.
Rowena Cherry has played chess with a Grand Master and former President of the World Chess Federation (hence the chess-pun titles of her alien romances).
She has spent folly filled summers in a Spanish castle; dined on a sheikh's yacht with royalty; been serenaded (on a birthday) by a rockstar and an English nobleman; ridden in a pace car at the 1993 Indy 500; received the gold level of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award; and generally lived on the edge of the sort of life that inspires her romances about high-living alien gods.
Rowena's Mission Statement - My goal as a Romance author is to give good value. I expect to provide my readers with six to eight hours of amusement, a couple of really good laughs, a romantic frisson or two from the sensual scenes, a thoroughly satisfying HEA, and something to think –or talk-- about when the book is finished.
Heroines get more hero than they bargain for....
Rowena's Books
The "god-Princes of Tigron" series (also dubbed "The Mating Books") was basically "three royal weddings and a murder". In the first book, a bad-boy Prince abducted the mate of his dreams who happened to be from the black sheep branch of his royal family. Prince Tarrant-Arragon was so pleased with his stolen bride, and with married life, that he decided to trick or force his two greatest enemies into politically disastrous sexual liaisons with liability wives… in other words, to his own controversial sisters.
1. Forced Mate
Buy Forced Mate direct from Dorchester2. Mating Net (a prequel, only available as an e-book)
Buy Mating Net direct from New Concepts Publishing3. Insufficient Mating Material
Buy Insufficient Mating Material direct from Dorchester
4. Knight's Fork
Buy Knight's Fork direct from Dorchester(When you buy directly from the publisher, the author receives a bigger royalty check)
Watchmen "The Incredibles Meet The Untouchables On Mars"
"Steampunk!" I thought when I saw "Nixon's Third Term" flash across the screen as I was watching "Watchmen" last night. I was expecting The Incredibles Meet The Untouchables.
"Whoa!!!" was my reaction when I saw an actor who gave a whole new slant to the popular term for a computer, Big Blue. My husband commented that only because the guy was blue was so much full frontal male nudity allowed on television. If the character had been any other color, we would not have seen anything like it. Whoa, of course, is not a sub-genre of science fiction. Maybe it should be?
"Cool! Fantasy," was my reaction to Adrian's superhero costume. The guy who dressed up like a man-owl was certainly no Batman, and the superheroine costume was ludicrous. I find it hard to suspend disbelief when the heroine has long hair whipping around her head as she fights. (Which she did, often, in a series of superb Action sequences.) At least let her tie it up in a Lisa Shearin style, goblin battle braid. Even then, I am distracted by worry that a villain could grab the hair and use it against her. Moreover, unless she uses flame retardant hair care products, long tresses should be a liability when rescuing people from towering infernos. As for kicking butt in really high heels, okay. Be aware, though, that stiletto heels ought to get stuck in some villain's chest from time to time.
So much for wardrobe. No malfunctions.
Science Fiction! There was teleportation, not only of truly massive bits of equipment, but also of people. It was a nice gesture to sci-fi conventions that the heroine got queasy and threw up whenever Big Blue teleported her somewhere. There should always be some downside to magic or implausible technology.
With hindsight, it is a pity one of the Star Trek... Oh well. If James T Kirk had blown chunks every time Scotty beamed him up, it probably wouldn't have been called "beaming", and it would be a cliché by now.
There was the superhero flying vehicle, reminiscent of Thunderbird Two, really, but on a smaller scale and garaged in a basement that gave onto an abandoned subway station which ran into a sewer outlet under some large body of water. Convenient, that. It could have been Fantasy or Science Fiction. A couple of odd things about it were that the general public never seemed particularly surprised to see it, and the members of the city's Finest never did get used to the idea that ordinary bullets were ineffective against it.
Science Fiction was the genre when the Blue Guy teleported himself to Mars and floated off the ground in a rather rude lotus position with his back to us, and even more so when he teleported the girl there and she had no trouble breathing or flying around on a very cool looking, red-gold glass, spiky, clock-like contraption.
It wasn't clear to me what she could eat, or drink, or do anything else that we all have to do from time to time but she was there to plead for life on Earth, but the effects were enjoyable and reminded me of Star Gate, and also of the clock theme in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
I should mention that there is a lot of really nasty, graphic, gratuitous, stomach-turning, Horrific violence in this movie, and no one really looks good (apart from Adrian in his costume, and his horned cat). On a scale of 1 - 10 for enjoyment, I gave it a 1. 1 being bad. However, I am still thinking about it today, and perhaps "enjoyment" isn't everything. Fascinating and deeply disturbing moral questions were raised.
Machiavellians should love it!
Did I give a nod to the Erotica? Apart from Big Blue's limp equipment, there was at least one lengthy sex scenes at a supremely inappropriate juncture in the action. There was also Murder, Mystery, Horror, Action, Tragedy...
So to my point. Here is a movie that appears to straddle a great many genres with a fair degree of comfort. I'm sure there are others that cannot be neatly boxed as this genre or that. That might be a good thing for those of us who write speculative fiction or alien romances.
As for my rating, I still give it a 1. I like happy endings, and I like my superheroes to be heroic.Thursday, May 27, 2010
Creation of Life?
You've probably seen news items about the synthetic DNA breakthrough that was announced last week. Here's one article:
Artificial Life
The short-term practical application of these artificial life forms, a development at least four years in the future according to the report I read in the local paper, may result in designer microorganisms bred to eat pollutants and clean up oil spills. (We could use a population of them right now.) We're still a long way from the android heroine of Heinlein's FRIDAY.
If our science could design and breed "artificial" humanoids from synthetic DNA, would they be recognized as people? Or would law and custom classify them as tools or pets? Until nearly the end of Heinlein's novel, Friday buys into her society's labeling of her as a sort of organic robot. Because her "mother was a test tube" and her "father was a knife" and she was brought up in a government creche, then trained for her highly specialized function as an assassin, she considers herself not truly human. Finally, another character makes it clear to her that she's undeniably human, because she has entirely human DNA.
A short story in the decades-old anthology HUMAN AND OTHER BEINGS features a female android protagonist with an origin and upbringing similar to Friday's, although in this story androids have been more or less assimilated into the general population, not reserved for specialized jobs as in Friday's world. A newlywed husband sues his wife for annulment because she concealed her android nature until after their marriage, thereby implicitly lying about her infertility. Androids in this society are universally believed to be sterile. Investigation demonstrates that this belief is mistaken, that in isolated cases android women have conceived and given birth. Thus, their ability to reproduce destroys the last vestige of insistence that artificial people aren't truly human. A clone or a person grown from an embryo produced by recombined DNA would be no less human and "natural" than a normally conceived identical twin (for a clone, of course, is basically an identical twin who's younger than his or her original "sibling").
The media's bedazzled references to the DNA breakthrough as "creation of life" are, of course, misguided. The synthetic DNA was modeled after "blueprints" occurring in nature. The artificially created nuclear material was implanted inside existing bacteria. And even if the bacteria themselves later come to be constructed completely from chemicals in a lab, life will not have been "created." In the strict sense of the word, creation means conjuring something from nothingness. As religious authorities responding to this milestone have rightly pointed out, finite human beings can't create anything *ex nihilo.* In our own field, writing, the author of even the most astonishingly "original" work of fiction draws upon elements already existing in the outside world and in the art of his or her predecessors. So the invention of synthetic life poses no *necessary* ethical or theological threat to the established order. On an abstract level, it's an extension of what human beings and their immediate evolutionary forebears have been doing ever since the making of the first tool.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Artificial Life
The short-term practical application of these artificial life forms, a development at least four years in the future according to the report I read in the local paper, may result in designer microorganisms bred to eat pollutants and clean up oil spills. (We could use a population of them right now.) We're still a long way from the android heroine of Heinlein's FRIDAY.
If our science could design and breed "artificial" humanoids from synthetic DNA, would they be recognized as people? Or would law and custom classify them as tools or pets? Until nearly the end of Heinlein's novel, Friday buys into her society's labeling of her as a sort of organic robot. Because her "mother was a test tube" and her "father was a knife" and she was brought up in a government creche, then trained for her highly specialized function as an assassin, she considers herself not truly human. Finally, another character makes it clear to her that she's undeniably human, because she has entirely human DNA.
A short story in the decades-old anthology HUMAN AND OTHER BEINGS features a female android protagonist with an origin and upbringing similar to Friday's, although in this story androids have been more or less assimilated into the general population, not reserved for specialized jobs as in Friday's world. A newlywed husband sues his wife for annulment because she concealed her android nature until after their marriage, thereby implicitly lying about her infertility. Androids in this society are universally believed to be sterile. Investigation demonstrates that this belief is mistaken, that in isolated cases android women have conceived and given birth. Thus, their ability to reproduce destroys the last vestige of insistence that artificial people aren't truly human. A clone or a person grown from an embryo produced by recombined DNA would be no less human and "natural" than a normally conceived identical twin (for a clone, of course, is basically an identical twin who's younger than his or her original "sibling").
The media's bedazzled references to the DNA breakthrough as "creation of life" are, of course, misguided. The synthetic DNA was modeled after "blueprints" occurring in nature. The artificially created nuclear material was implanted inside existing bacteria. And even if the bacteria themselves later come to be constructed completely from chemicals in a lab, life will not have been "created." In the strict sense of the word, creation means conjuring something from nothingness. As religious authorities responding to this milestone have rightly pointed out, finite human beings can't create anything *ex nihilo.* In our own field, writing, the author of even the most astonishingly "original" work of fiction draws upon elements already existing in the outside world and in the art of his or her predecessors. So the invention of synthetic life poses no *necessary* ethical or theological threat to the established order. On an abstract level, it's an extension of what human beings and their immediate evolutionary forebears have been doing ever since the making of the first tool.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Orson Scott Card a Mormon, Jack Campbell the Writer, and the Chief Rabbi of England all Agree
--------
I can't split this post in half - I tried, but the second half makes no sense without the first.
--------
A Chief Rabbi, Orson Scott Card a Mormon, and Jack Campbell SF-Romance Writer All Agree? ??? !!!
Yes, they agree, but I doubt they all know it or would want to know.
Way back when I was about 3 or 4 years old, I was incensed when networks pre-empted my favorite programs and replaced them with news flashes usually regarding politics and war.
I thought about that very hard. It is hard to think when you're that young and don't have any experience to think with, but I came to a conclusion that I stand by to this day, "Fiction - i.e. story - is more important than war or politics."
What does that mean? It means simply that what makes a difference to you in how you live your life, what you decide to do, to be and to become is tied more closely to fiction than it is to current or historical events.
What is important in life (i.e. Romance, Love, Bonding, Compassion, Sharing, Healing, Faith, children, grandchildren, peace, etc.) is inherent in fiction (even fiction about war) but is not present in news stories about current conflicts in war and politics.
You learn to be who you truly are in your fiction, your inner story, your "his"tory, which sums up to a big component of your Identity.
From the vast outpouring of fiction about TV shows on outlets like fanfiction.net we see clearly that fiction cuts to the quick, to the roots of the Soul.
See my blog post on a writing lesson derived from a bit of fan fiction about the TV show White Collar, illustrating how to transform a "tell" passage into a "show" passage in fiction, so the fiction doesn't remain totally internal to yourself, but can "speak" to others.
That White Collar post is http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com posted May 4th, 2010.
The energy you see pouring out of fanfiction.net is an exchange of ideas, of theories, of passions.
The passions of one writer ignite the passions of another. Yes, people write fan fiction that makes fans of the TV show out of folks who have never watched that TV show (so they watch it streaming or buy the DVD to catch up).
Now go to a political site with news stories and read the comments on the stories. You see a totally different sort of dialogue. Each poster seems to be yelling and screaming (or being very formal and officious) while expressing their own opinion. Those who agree with each other inflame each other's passions on the topic. Those who disagree just loudly and emphatically disagree, inflaming their opposition's passions. But the passion tapped into is rage, hate, rejection, self-righteousness, or the acceptance of being a member of a powerful gang that can beat down all opposition.
I've seen some exchanges on news posting comments where a person drops a URL and another person reads it and says "thank you, that changed my mind on this topic" to the one who dropped the URL.
I've seen that, but it's very rare.
For the most part, people just express their opinions and call those who disagree names. They aren't engaging in a dialogue, sharing a passion and changing minds by providing insights the way fanfic community does.
Such news posts draw comments that are all "tell" and no "show" -- and because the comments are "tell" they don't change anyone's mind. They don't change minds because they're not part of the story. Story is always SHOW DON'T TELL.
"Show" does change minds.
Stories change minds, and even hearts. Stories form opinions, not just express them.
Remember, one of the objectives in my posts on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com
is to discover how to change the public mind on the subject of Romance in general and SF-Romance in particular.
Changing minds is a very dangerous thing to set out to do. You really don't want to implant your ideas, values or attitudes into someone else's mind where they are not native. That would not help them.
You don't want to use any power of yours to override or overshadow the free will choices of another person. Ever. No matter how much your own interests are at stake, no matter how much you stand to lose by their misbehaviors, you never, ever, use expertise, authority, knowledge, or any other power to control or even limit another person's available options. Even if it's for the other person's own good, it's still power abuse.
You only want to offer people more choices from which their free will can select what they wish -- NOT what you wish.
You want to open doors, provide glimpses of new vistas.
OK, "criminals" - that's another matter. The insane - another matter. Each is a problem in its own right. Our current culture is not handling those matters very well yet, but we're a work in progress.
Being forced into jail, hospitals, rehab, is painful, but ultimately the best way we have of opening new opportunities for such people. That's not the sort of person, though, that I'm talking about here. They don't form, shape and energize the main culture's over-arching story.
But in that mainstream of our culture(s), in the center of our river of culture, we are developing so many choices, ever more choices to make every day, that we are overloading the basic human nervous system's ability to make choices.
If a person becomes surrounded by more open doors than they are prepared to deal with, they may become confused and that could be worse than simply being wrong about something. So more choices is not always a benefit - and it's not your place to judge how many choices another should or shouldn't have.
The only way I know of to provide others with a plethora of choices but leave it up to them to decide how many choices to become aware of is to "show" don't "tell."
Really, two people reading the same book will take away two totally different descriptions of that book because each chooses to see different open doors and ignore other open doors as if they aren't even there.
When you "tell" - you hammer your idea into another's mind whether they're ready for it or not.
When you "show" - you invite only those who are ready, to come play in your back yard with your toys, your ideas, your concepts, your passions.
A really good novel (or novel series) invites reader participation in exploring beyond those open doors.
One such series out there stumping for SF-Romance while garbing itself in the guise of plain old Space Opera War Stories is Jack Campbell's THE LOST FLEET series. He's up to #7, THE LOST FLEET: VICTORIOUS
"Victorious" is the name of a ship in the Fleet of one of the interstellar combines engaged in this huge galactic war.
Two Human interstellar governments (each controlling dozens of star systems) are the unknowing victims of an alien species playing "let's you and him fight."
So the war which has been going on for 100 years is based on a trick.
John Geary, our Hero, was in a space battle at the beginning of the war, got stuck in an escape pod in cold sleep for a century, was rescued in book I of this series and catapulted into command of the Fleet when the old commander was ambushed and killed. Now, 7 books later, he has returned The Lost Fleet to it's home base (so it's not technically lost anymore), and set out again to end the war, penetrating deep into "enemy" territory to end the war.
Meanwhile, he's fallen in love with the Captain of his flagship -- they both know they're both in love, but flat refuse to acknowledge it because of chain of command complications -- and Geary is also in lust with a married woman who is a Politician, Co-President of his Alliance.
The story of the politician's husband and Geary's brother, both captives of "the enemy," is a complication worthy of any Romance genre time travel novel.
Jack Campbell, by showing not telling the place of Relationship and Love in the affairs of humankind, in the affairs of war and politics, is making huge inroads into the broader market for a Romance, and the issues of Romance most dear to our hearts.
The Lost Fleet is set in space, in a complex galactic war, but, just like Star Trek, it is about here and now, and life in our crazy world.
This series addresses the issues at the core of the Romance Genre, and the problems created by the modern "Sexual Harassment" laws. It's about Relationship between Equals, and that theme plays out on the personal level and on the interstellar political level.
On the other hand, as Linnea Sinclair pointed out, an action SF-Romance story has a serious problem with the balance between the progress of the relationship (which is the Romance plot) and the progress of the action-conflict which is, in this case, the War plot.
In The Lost Fleet series, the actual science takes place "off-stage" - experts in various parts of the fleet, geeks in closet-sized labs, discover and master new vistas of science that is the foundation of new technologies, and all that advancement affects the politics and the available offensive and defensive armament, thus the tactics and even strategies.
It's masterful worldbuilding, and tight writing that leaps over many of the scenes that would occupy entire novels in other genres.
For example, Geary is given a promotion at a debriefing directly to the highest ranking elected officials (not the equivalent of the Pentagon chiefs, but the equivalent of Congress, not the White House).
At this briefing, it is decided to promote him from Captain to Admiral of the Fleet (not just Admiral, skipping a lot of ranks, but Admiral of Admirals - Fleet Admiral). This rank has never in history been conferred (like Five Star General in WWII). But just by convenient happenstance, the leader of the politicians happens to have the new insignia in his pocket!
All 7 novels so far are riddled with major skips like this. Although the space battles happen with enough back-and-forth between opposing space fleets, and Geary has enough setbacks to show his victories aren't easy, he always wins. That makes it all seem just too hokey, too easy, to corny for a 7 book novel series.
But that's Jack Campbell's solution to the problem of that balance between the relationship-politics-people story and the action-plot. Just SKIP some stuff, and there's enough room for both. So these aren't "perfect" books - but they are a refreshingly different read, and as such raise some interesting issues to think about.
The Lost Fleet series is Art. And it is about the messy turbulence in our world created by a massive change in our culture's "Story."
What do I mean by "our Story?"
Orson Scott Card explains the narrative, the story, of a prevailing culture and pinpoints where we entered the whirling change in this culture that's resulting in a change in our narrative we haven't actually taken notice of.
Here is an excerpt from a speech Orson Scott Card gave before a Mormon group -- it's thus slanted, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater as you read. There are ideas here and a challenge.
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/ideas/100426dismantling.html
Storytelling is the essence of a culture's lifeblood.
Orson Scott Card says the inflection point of change in our world's culture began in the 1960's and hit hard in the 1970's. That seems valid to me, but keep in mind I'm not talking about our "reality" here - I'm talking about a principle behind that reality, the culture's narrative and what that implies about the role of fiction in life.
As Orson Scott Card points out, what has not happened (yet) is a public evaluation of the results of that change that started in the 1960's (flowerchildren) and 1970's (women's lib).
We bemoan a lot of what seems to me to be the direct results of the changes -- disintegrating family, shift in the way employees are treated as temporary, replaceable or self-employed, and a difference in what education is (vocational training only, as opposed to "a Classical Education" teaching how to think not what to think)
And more apparent to me every day is the fragmentation of fiction-audiences (TV, film, books (more titles, fewer readers per title), games (was only D&D, now thousands).
An obvious result of the audience fragmentation is that we haven't got any fictional language in common in which to communicate about intangibles like values.
Many people who see these trends don't see them as consequences of a shift in our national narrative, our STORY, the way Orson Scott Card does.
But if you look closely, and evaluate what we've shucked off against what we've gained, you might begin to see the opening where Romance and especially SF-Romance, seems to fit like the right key in a lock.
Maybe the name of what we've lost is RELATIONSHIP, bonding. Maybe the solution is narrative about how to form bonds strong enough to last a lifetime.
Consider that the fragmentation I've described here might ignite xenophobia among many groups who would then, in fear, strike for domination over other groups.
Or maybe that's not what's actually happening? Orson Scott Card looks at the sweep of history to find how what was good disintegrated into something not so good. But maybe it's really an improvement?
I've written in this blog about the impact of Web 2.0 on fiction and politics as well as the business model of writers. In general, I'm wildly in favor of our new world of connectivity.
Despite where I personally stand at this moment in time, it's an open question for me. Is the change happening now going in a "good" direction -- or a "bad" direction? Is it change itself that makes me uncomfortable? Or is it the valuable elements we've lost (spelling for one thing). Or is the apparent destination of this change disquieting?
How do you make that value judgment?
Card suggests testing the direction of change against the ultimate goal for any culture - self-perpetuation. Can you transmit living values to the children? And they to theirs? Does this culture "time-bind" up and down as well as sideways across probability lines (or into alternate universes).
Is that test of the direction of change valid?
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of England, offers another way to test the product of the changes made in the 1960's and 1970's.
Before he was a Rabbi, he got a Ph.D.in Philosophy and was headed for a teaching career in that arcane field. So when he speaks of Hellenistic philosophy, he knows what he's talking about.
His Lecture is a huge long article, longer than my blog posts even!
Rabbi Sacks has done this 6 part Lecture Series on "Faith" - and the item I'm focusing on is Lecture #2 in the series.
Lecture #1 is
http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical.aspx?id=451
He calls this lecture series a journey of Ideas. SF is the Literature of Ideas.
Here is Lecture #2 in this series:
http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical.aspx?id=1607
#2 is titled:
Faith Lectures: Judaism, Justice and Tragedy - Confronting the problem of evil
At this writing, I find that the Lecture #2 is truncated about in the middle. Perhaps they will fix that by the time you read this. I have the whole text in print.
Here's a quote from #2 as Rabbi Sacks recaps Lecture #1 in the series:
--------QUOTE---------
Friends, I was trying to explain in my first lecture that Judaism, as you will understand from that story, is a religion of multiple perspectives, of many ways of looking at the truth. Some of you who followed that lecture - did any of you follow that lecture? [Laughter]. It was a bit tough going but some of you followed that lecture and understood absolutely correctly that it was nothing whatsoever with the title of that lecture which was "Faith". Listen, I'm sorry. What can I do? The truth is: I will come to faith, I promise you, probably in the third lecture, possibly in the last. One way or another, we'll get there. But first of all I really have to take you with me on a journey to see Judaism as different, as less familiar, as more radical than we ever imagined. If we can do that, we will be able to take things we have known about for ages and see in them something new. We will undergo what I call a 'paradigm shift'.
My thesis in the first lecture, the story so far for those of you who missed it, as far as I can summarise it, is this: that Judaism as I portrayed it was and is a radical alternative not only to the ancient world of myth but to the central paradigm of western civilisation, namely to Greek thought whose characteristic mode is philosophy, at least Platonic, and Cartesian philosophy, and whose master discipline is logic. As I said, the unspoken assumptions of western thought - and of course I am being crude here but you don't want a lecture with footnotes as well - are the following:
That knowledge is cognitive.
The metaphor of cognition is sight. It's a visual matter; truth is something we see. ...
--------END QUOTE-------
What have I been TELLING you in all my posts on screenwriting? Story in pictures. Show don't tell. The metaphor of cognition is sight. hmmm.
After I read that quotation above, I had to read the whole Lecture because, as you know if you've read my published book on Tarot (NEVER CROSS A PALM WITH SILVER), the trick to understanding Tarot is understanding how it's basis (Kabbalah) is so absolutely different from our ambient USA culture which is so thoroughly Hellenistic in all unconscious assumptions.
Took me about three hours to read just Lecture #2, every word, slowly and carefully. I had to set aside reading THE LOST FLEET: VICTORIOUS to get that read in. Then I just had to find it online so you could read it too!
The title of the Lecture doesn't make it sound like it has anything to do with Romance. But it does have to do with the story, the narrative, we share as a culture - not just Jewish culture, but the whole of the world that was involved in World War II. And some of the best Romance I've ever seen has been WWII films!
A good Romance is always fraught with tragedy. Justice in Romance means that the destined couple end up together - after it all. It's Happily Ever After, not Happily In The Beginning. Romance is about overcoming the obstacles to happiness. (News stories are not about happiness, nor about Events that are merely obstacles to happiness.)
Tragedy is rampant in our world today, separating lovers and interfering with family life. That's part of our narrative.
Is Justice just as rampant? And if so, is that a good thing? Is there such a thing as Justice run wild? Can "Justice" turn to evil in the wrong hands?
The 7 novels in The Lost Fleet series do address this problem via the character of the fleet commander, Gear, and his two loves.
Another long series of novels that discusses how Values shape and armor Character is the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher, which I rave about periodically here.
Most of the Urban Fantasy you see these days is based on some elaborate worldbuilding to create a backdrop for a battle between Good and Evil, with the result being a draw, or leaving Evil a bit ahead.
The biggest box office films are Good vs. Evil, clear cut and stark.
So reading up on the philosophy behind our culture's angst over "Good" vs. "Evil" is part of the 7 Endeavors I discussed as training for a writer in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing_27.html
Fiction, I contest, is more important than reality because fiction conveys our cultural narrative, our story. I figured that out when I was four years old, so don't take it as defense of taking up the trade of writing. I had no idea I could or would be a professional writer back then. I didn't know there was such a thing as a "profession."
What so much of our fiction is conveying now is very different from what our fiction written before WWII conveyed.
World War II made "Evil" a newspaper headline. A generation grew up in a world traumatized by a battle against "Evil." (BTW all 3 sides saw the other 2 sides as Evil, just as Terrorists are fighting the insidious Evil of modern culture.)
Now the children of WWII veterans seem to be stuck in a fascination with that battle, replaying it in every fantasy universe in every medium that can carry fiction.
That's what's so interesting about THE LOST FLEET series. The battles there are not against "Evil" at all, just against greed, revenge, invaders, fear, misplaced courage, and an assortment of human motives, and maybe eventually non-human ideas of proprietary rights. There's nothing clear cut about the motives or the stakes in this galactic war.
And The Lost Fleet is a New York Times best seller. There may be something going on here that we need to pay attention to.
Rabbi Sacks talks about the problem of "Evil" - that if G-d is Good, and if G-d exists then how can Evil exist?
Here's another quote from Lecture #2
-------QUOTE--------
...see if we can understand in a new way that most difficult of all problems in religious thought, perhaps in human thought as a totality, namely the problem of evil or the problem of injustice, the thing which we describe when we talk about 'when bad things happen to good people' or what the rabbis said in terms of tzadik vera lo, which is the rabbinic equivalent.
That problem is so deep that it has given rise to a whole theological discipline, primarily a Christian one, a very distinguished discipline. And I please pray of you, all of you, that whenever I contrast Judaism and something else, I am never trying to denigrate that something else. I really mean that. To be a Jew is to make space for 'otherness'. If I were to sum up the whole of these six lectures, it would be in that phrase: "To be a Jew is to make space for otherness". But that means we do our thing and we respect those who do other things. Therefore, Christianity developed a whole theological discipline which so too did the Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages which is called theodicy. It is the whole attempt to understand how if God exists evil exists.
---------END QUOTE-----------
See? To understand what Orson Scott Card talked about as a change in our culture in the 1960's and 1970's, you need to go all the way back to the Middle Ages, before the Mormon's existed as such.
You may also want to use Astrology to trace the effects of Pluto through the 1960's and '70's so read this:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html
"Theodicy" then is what all of modern Urban Fantasy seems to be about. That encompasses a lot of TV shows, and many movies. Action movies and action-romance too, likes to grab that one thing, Good vs. Evil.
This endless outpouring of novels about Good vs. Evil, and about how you survive in a world where both operate, may be due to the concept that the question can not be resolved, but it must be!
Here's another quote from Lecture #2
--------QUOTE---------
Now if that is so, if my interpretation is right, then Judaism begins not in the conventional place where faith is thought to begin, namely in wonder that the world is. Judaism begins in the opposite, in the protest against a world that is not as it ought to be. At the very heart of reality, by which I mean reality as we see it, from our point of view, there is a contradiction between order and chaos: the order of creation and the chaos we make.
Now the question is: how do we resolve that contradiction? And the answer is that that contradiction ..., between the world that is and the world that ought to be, cannot be resolved at the level of thought. It doesn't exist! You cannot resolve it! Logically, philosophically, in terms of theology or theodicy, you cannot do it! The only way you can resolve that tension is by action; by making the world better than it is.
.... When things are as they ought to be, ....- then we have resolved the tension. Then we have reached our destination. But that is not yet. It was not yet for Abraham and it is not yet for us. And from this initial contradiction, from this cognitive dissonance, are born the following four fundamental features of Judaism.
---------END QUOTE-----
WHEW! Is that, or is it not, an accurate description of the entire Romance genre with the emphasis on the HEA ending? What an unexpected place to find such a statement of the objective of the Romance genre, and the nature of the spiritual exercise of reading Romance!
Soul mates finding and bonding to each other changes the world, relieves that tension between Good and Evil by action, by changing the world, the whole world and all it's potential future paths.
The entire Lecture #2 really is needed to put this all into context. But the full text I have in a printed book is not on this website. Maybe it will be by the time you read this.
Making your own world "as it ought to be" is the essence of Romance.
Falling in love is the glimpse of that world of "ought" - when the Honeymoon is over, the struggle to recreate what "ought" to be in the cold light of reality begins. Some couples win that struggle. Others don't make it. Both kinds of couples change the world.
There is one philosophy that assumes it is a given that we will succeed in tinkering the world up to what it "ought" to be.
There are others that assume we will fail.
Is the pivot point of WWII and the subsequent 60's and 70's generational change we have seen a pivot from a vision of "we will succeed" to "it isn't possible to overcome Evil"?
That's the Horror genre premise - that Evil must exist so that Good can exist, and the most the Hero can achieve is to stuff Evil into a sarcophagus and bury it a mile deep behind sigils and signs.
The most Good can achieve against Evil is a draw.
Orson Scott Card is asking if our narrative has shifted from "we will prevail" (which won WWII), to one of "give up; it's a draw" or maybe to one of "give up; it's impossible."
Jack Campbell is answering, "Hell no! We're gonna win this sucker, and then we'll settle your hash, you meddling aliens."
What is the narrative we are passing on to our children? To what great heights will they aspire because of our story?
Rabbi Sacks has an answer to that in a unique analysis of the Passover story - not as about Passover itself, but about NARRATIVE, about story as a necessity for transmitting a culture.
http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical.aspx?id=1623
The title of the piece says it all:
Never underestimate the power of a story to enlarge the moral imagination of a child.
It talks about Africa, Haiti's earthquake, and Rwanda.
Read that very short piece and ask yourself what does our modern cultural narrative spur our children to do?
What do you have to say, to contribute, to our modern cultural narrative? Show don't tell.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
I can't split this post in half - I tried, but the second half makes no sense without the first.
--------
A Chief Rabbi, Orson Scott Card a Mormon, and Jack Campbell SF-Romance Writer All Agree? ??? !!!
Yes, they agree, but I doubt they all know it or would want to know.
Way back when I was about 3 or 4 years old, I was incensed when networks pre-empted my favorite programs and replaced them with news flashes usually regarding politics and war.
I thought about that very hard. It is hard to think when you're that young and don't have any experience to think with, but I came to a conclusion that I stand by to this day, "Fiction - i.e. story - is more important than war or politics."
What does that mean? It means simply that what makes a difference to you in how you live your life, what you decide to do, to be and to become is tied more closely to fiction than it is to current or historical events.
What is important in life (i.e. Romance, Love, Bonding, Compassion, Sharing, Healing, Faith, children, grandchildren, peace, etc.) is inherent in fiction (even fiction about war) but is not present in news stories about current conflicts in war and politics.
You learn to be who you truly are in your fiction, your inner story, your "his"tory, which sums up to a big component of your Identity.
From the vast outpouring of fiction about TV shows on outlets like fanfiction.net we see clearly that fiction cuts to the quick, to the roots of the Soul.
See my blog post on a writing lesson derived from a bit of fan fiction about the TV show White Collar, illustrating how to transform a "tell" passage into a "show" passage in fiction, so the fiction doesn't remain totally internal to yourself, but can "speak" to others.
That White Collar post is http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com posted May 4th, 2010.
The energy you see pouring out of fanfiction.net is an exchange of ideas, of theories, of passions.
The passions of one writer ignite the passions of another. Yes, people write fan fiction that makes fans of the TV show out of folks who have never watched that TV show (so they watch it streaming or buy the DVD to catch up).
Now go to a political site with news stories and read the comments on the stories. You see a totally different sort of dialogue. Each poster seems to be yelling and screaming (or being very formal and officious) while expressing their own opinion. Those who agree with each other inflame each other's passions on the topic. Those who disagree just loudly and emphatically disagree, inflaming their opposition's passions. But the passion tapped into is rage, hate, rejection, self-righteousness, or the acceptance of being a member of a powerful gang that can beat down all opposition.
I've seen some exchanges on news posting comments where a person drops a URL and another person reads it and says "thank you, that changed my mind on this topic" to the one who dropped the URL.
I've seen that, but it's very rare.
For the most part, people just express their opinions and call those who disagree names. They aren't engaging in a dialogue, sharing a passion and changing minds by providing insights the way fanfic community does.
Such news posts draw comments that are all "tell" and no "show" -- and because the comments are "tell" they don't change anyone's mind. They don't change minds because they're not part of the story. Story is always SHOW DON'T TELL.
"Show" does change minds.
Stories change minds, and even hearts. Stories form opinions, not just express them.
Remember, one of the objectives in my posts on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com
is to discover how to change the public mind on the subject of Romance in general and SF-Romance in particular.
Changing minds is a very dangerous thing to set out to do. You really don't want to implant your ideas, values or attitudes into someone else's mind where they are not native. That would not help them.
You don't want to use any power of yours to override or overshadow the free will choices of another person. Ever. No matter how much your own interests are at stake, no matter how much you stand to lose by their misbehaviors, you never, ever, use expertise, authority, knowledge, or any other power to control or even limit another person's available options. Even if it's for the other person's own good, it's still power abuse.
You only want to offer people more choices from which their free will can select what they wish -- NOT what you wish.
You want to open doors, provide glimpses of new vistas.
OK, "criminals" - that's another matter. The insane - another matter. Each is a problem in its own right. Our current culture is not handling those matters very well yet, but we're a work in progress.
Being forced into jail, hospitals, rehab, is painful, but ultimately the best way we have of opening new opportunities for such people. That's not the sort of person, though, that I'm talking about here. They don't form, shape and energize the main culture's over-arching story.
But in that mainstream of our culture(s), in the center of our river of culture, we are developing so many choices, ever more choices to make every day, that we are overloading the basic human nervous system's ability to make choices.
If a person becomes surrounded by more open doors than they are prepared to deal with, they may become confused and that could be worse than simply being wrong about something. So more choices is not always a benefit - and it's not your place to judge how many choices another should or shouldn't have.
The only way I know of to provide others with a plethora of choices but leave it up to them to decide how many choices to become aware of is to "show" don't "tell."
Really, two people reading the same book will take away two totally different descriptions of that book because each chooses to see different open doors and ignore other open doors as if they aren't even there.
When you "tell" - you hammer your idea into another's mind whether they're ready for it or not.
When you "show" - you invite only those who are ready, to come play in your back yard with your toys, your ideas, your concepts, your passions.
A really good novel (or novel series) invites reader participation in exploring beyond those open doors.
One such series out there stumping for SF-Romance while garbing itself in the guise of plain old Space Opera War Stories is Jack Campbell's THE LOST FLEET series. He's up to #7, THE LOST FLEET: VICTORIOUS
"Victorious" is the name of a ship in the Fleet of one of the interstellar combines engaged in this huge galactic war.
Two Human interstellar governments (each controlling dozens of star systems) are the unknowing victims of an alien species playing "let's you and him fight."
So the war which has been going on for 100 years is based on a trick.
John Geary, our Hero, was in a space battle at the beginning of the war, got stuck in an escape pod in cold sleep for a century, was rescued in book I of this series and catapulted into command of the Fleet when the old commander was ambushed and killed. Now, 7 books later, he has returned The Lost Fleet to it's home base (so it's not technically lost anymore), and set out again to end the war, penetrating deep into "enemy" territory to end the war.
Meanwhile, he's fallen in love with the Captain of his flagship -- they both know they're both in love, but flat refuse to acknowledge it because of chain of command complications -- and Geary is also in lust with a married woman who is a Politician, Co-President of his Alliance.
The story of the politician's husband and Geary's brother, both captives of "the enemy," is a complication worthy of any Romance genre time travel novel.
Jack Campbell, by showing not telling the place of Relationship and Love in the affairs of humankind, in the affairs of war and politics, is making huge inroads into the broader market for a Romance, and the issues of Romance most dear to our hearts.
The Lost Fleet is set in space, in a complex galactic war, but, just like Star Trek, it is about here and now, and life in our crazy world.
This series addresses the issues at the core of the Romance Genre, and the problems created by the modern "Sexual Harassment" laws. It's about Relationship between Equals, and that theme plays out on the personal level and on the interstellar political level.
On the other hand, as Linnea Sinclair pointed out, an action SF-Romance story has a serious problem with the balance between the progress of the relationship (which is the Romance plot) and the progress of the action-conflict which is, in this case, the War plot.
In The Lost Fleet series, the actual science takes place "off-stage" - experts in various parts of the fleet, geeks in closet-sized labs, discover and master new vistas of science that is the foundation of new technologies, and all that advancement affects the politics and the available offensive and defensive armament, thus the tactics and even strategies.
It's masterful worldbuilding, and tight writing that leaps over many of the scenes that would occupy entire novels in other genres.
For example, Geary is given a promotion at a debriefing directly to the highest ranking elected officials (not the equivalent of the Pentagon chiefs, but the equivalent of Congress, not the White House).
At this briefing, it is decided to promote him from Captain to Admiral of the Fleet (not just Admiral, skipping a lot of ranks, but Admiral of Admirals - Fleet Admiral). This rank has never in history been conferred (like Five Star General in WWII). But just by convenient happenstance, the leader of the politicians happens to have the new insignia in his pocket!
All 7 novels so far are riddled with major skips like this. Although the space battles happen with enough back-and-forth between opposing space fleets, and Geary has enough setbacks to show his victories aren't easy, he always wins. That makes it all seem just too hokey, too easy, to corny for a 7 book novel series.
But that's Jack Campbell's solution to the problem of that balance between the relationship-politics-people story and the action-plot. Just SKIP some stuff, and there's enough room for both. So these aren't "perfect" books - but they are a refreshingly different read, and as such raise some interesting issues to think about.
The Lost Fleet series is Art. And it is about the messy turbulence in our world created by a massive change in our culture's "Story."
What do I mean by "our Story?"
Orson Scott Card explains the narrative, the story, of a prevailing culture and pinpoints where we entered the whirling change in this culture that's resulting in a change in our narrative we haven't actually taken notice of.
Here is an excerpt from a speech Orson Scott Card gave before a Mormon group -- it's thus slanted, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater as you read. There are ideas here and a challenge.
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/ideas/100426dismantling.html
Storytelling is the essence of a culture's lifeblood.
Orson Scott Card says the inflection point of change in our world's culture began in the 1960's and hit hard in the 1970's. That seems valid to me, but keep in mind I'm not talking about our "reality" here - I'm talking about a principle behind that reality, the culture's narrative and what that implies about the role of fiction in life.
As Orson Scott Card points out, what has not happened (yet) is a public evaluation of the results of that change that started in the 1960's (flowerchildren) and 1970's (women's lib).
We bemoan a lot of what seems to me to be the direct results of the changes -- disintegrating family, shift in the way employees are treated as temporary, replaceable or self-employed, and a difference in what education is (vocational training only, as opposed to "a Classical Education" teaching how to think not what to think)
And more apparent to me every day is the fragmentation of fiction-audiences (TV, film, books (more titles, fewer readers per title), games (was only D&D, now thousands).
An obvious result of the audience fragmentation is that we haven't got any fictional language in common in which to communicate about intangibles like values.
Many people who see these trends don't see them as consequences of a shift in our national narrative, our STORY, the way Orson Scott Card does.
But if you look closely, and evaluate what we've shucked off against what we've gained, you might begin to see the opening where Romance and especially SF-Romance, seems to fit like the right key in a lock.
Maybe the name of what we've lost is RELATIONSHIP, bonding. Maybe the solution is narrative about how to form bonds strong enough to last a lifetime.
Consider that the fragmentation I've described here might ignite xenophobia among many groups who would then, in fear, strike for domination over other groups.
Or maybe that's not what's actually happening? Orson Scott Card looks at the sweep of history to find how what was good disintegrated into something not so good. But maybe it's really an improvement?
I've written in this blog about the impact of Web 2.0 on fiction and politics as well as the business model of writers. In general, I'm wildly in favor of our new world of connectivity.
Despite where I personally stand at this moment in time, it's an open question for me. Is the change happening now going in a "good" direction -- or a "bad" direction? Is it change itself that makes me uncomfortable? Or is it the valuable elements we've lost (spelling for one thing). Or is the apparent destination of this change disquieting?
How do you make that value judgment?
Card suggests testing the direction of change against the ultimate goal for any culture - self-perpetuation. Can you transmit living values to the children? And they to theirs? Does this culture "time-bind" up and down as well as sideways across probability lines (or into alternate universes).
Is that test of the direction of change valid?
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of England, offers another way to test the product of the changes made in the 1960's and 1970's.
Before he was a Rabbi, he got a Ph.D.in Philosophy and was headed for a teaching career in that arcane field. So when he speaks of Hellenistic philosophy, he knows what he's talking about.
His Lecture is a huge long article, longer than my blog posts even!
Rabbi Sacks has done this 6 part Lecture Series on "Faith" - and the item I'm focusing on is Lecture #2 in the series.
Lecture #1 is
http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical.aspx?id=451
He calls this lecture series a journey of Ideas. SF is the Literature of Ideas.
Here is Lecture #2 in this series:
http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical.aspx?id=1607
#2 is titled:
Faith Lectures: Judaism, Justice and Tragedy - Confronting the problem of evil
At this writing, I find that the Lecture #2 is truncated about in the middle. Perhaps they will fix that by the time you read this. I have the whole text in print.
Here's a quote from #2 as Rabbi Sacks recaps Lecture #1 in the series:
--------QUOTE---------
Friends, I was trying to explain in my first lecture that Judaism, as you will understand from that story, is a religion of multiple perspectives, of many ways of looking at the truth. Some of you who followed that lecture - did any of you follow that lecture? [Laughter]. It was a bit tough going but some of you followed that lecture and understood absolutely correctly that it was nothing whatsoever with the title of that lecture which was "Faith". Listen, I'm sorry. What can I do? The truth is: I will come to faith, I promise you, probably in the third lecture, possibly in the last. One way or another, we'll get there. But first of all I really have to take you with me on a journey to see Judaism as different, as less familiar, as more radical than we ever imagined. If we can do that, we will be able to take things we have known about for ages and see in them something new. We will undergo what I call a 'paradigm shift'.
My thesis in the first lecture, the story so far for those of you who missed it, as far as I can summarise it, is this: that Judaism as I portrayed it was and is a radical alternative not only to the ancient world of myth but to the central paradigm of western civilisation, namely to Greek thought whose characteristic mode is philosophy, at least Platonic, and Cartesian philosophy, and whose master discipline is logic. As I said, the unspoken assumptions of western thought - and of course I am being crude here but you don't want a lecture with footnotes as well - are the following:
That knowledge is cognitive.
The metaphor of cognition is sight. It's a visual matter; truth is something we see. ...
--------END QUOTE-------
What have I been TELLING you in all my posts on screenwriting? Story in pictures. Show don't tell. The metaphor of cognition is sight. hmmm.
After I read that quotation above, I had to read the whole Lecture because, as you know if you've read my published book on Tarot (NEVER CROSS A PALM WITH SILVER), the trick to understanding Tarot is understanding how it's basis (Kabbalah) is so absolutely different from our ambient USA culture which is so thoroughly Hellenistic in all unconscious assumptions.
Took me about three hours to read just Lecture #2, every word, slowly and carefully. I had to set aside reading THE LOST FLEET: VICTORIOUS to get that read in. Then I just had to find it online so you could read it too!
The title of the Lecture doesn't make it sound like it has anything to do with Romance. But it does have to do with the story, the narrative, we share as a culture - not just Jewish culture, but the whole of the world that was involved in World War II. And some of the best Romance I've ever seen has been WWII films!
A good Romance is always fraught with tragedy. Justice in Romance means that the destined couple end up together - after it all. It's Happily Ever After, not Happily In The Beginning. Romance is about overcoming the obstacles to happiness. (News stories are not about happiness, nor about Events that are merely obstacles to happiness.)
Tragedy is rampant in our world today, separating lovers and interfering with family life. That's part of our narrative.
Is Justice just as rampant? And if so, is that a good thing? Is there such a thing as Justice run wild? Can "Justice" turn to evil in the wrong hands?
The 7 novels in The Lost Fleet series do address this problem via the character of the fleet commander, Gear, and his two loves.
Another long series of novels that discusses how Values shape and armor Character is the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher, which I rave about periodically here.
Most of the Urban Fantasy you see these days is based on some elaborate worldbuilding to create a backdrop for a battle between Good and Evil, with the result being a draw, or leaving Evil a bit ahead.
The biggest box office films are Good vs. Evil, clear cut and stark.
So reading up on the philosophy behind our culture's angst over "Good" vs. "Evil" is part of the 7 Endeavors I discussed as training for a writer in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing_27.html
Fiction, I contest, is more important than reality because fiction conveys our cultural narrative, our story. I figured that out when I was four years old, so don't take it as defense of taking up the trade of writing. I had no idea I could or would be a professional writer back then. I didn't know there was such a thing as a "profession."
What so much of our fiction is conveying now is very different from what our fiction written before WWII conveyed.
World War II made "Evil" a newspaper headline. A generation grew up in a world traumatized by a battle against "Evil." (BTW all 3 sides saw the other 2 sides as Evil, just as Terrorists are fighting the insidious Evil of modern culture.)
Now the children of WWII veterans seem to be stuck in a fascination with that battle, replaying it in every fantasy universe in every medium that can carry fiction.
That's what's so interesting about THE LOST FLEET series. The battles there are not against "Evil" at all, just against greed, revenge, invaders, fear, misplaced courage, and an assortment of human motives, and maybe eventually non-human ideas of proprietary rights. There's nothing clear cut about the motives or the stakes in this galactic war.
And The Lost Fleet is a New York Times best seller. There may be something going on here that we need to pay attention to.
Rabbi Sacks talks about the problem of "Evil" - that if G-d is Good, and if G-d exists then how can Evil exist?
Here's another quote from Lecture #2
-------QUOTE--------
...see if we can understand in a new way that most difficult of all problems in religious thought, perhaps in human thought as a totality, namely the problem of evil or the problem of injustice, the thing which we describe when we talk about 'when bad things happen to good people' or what the rabbis said in terms of tzadik vera lo, which is the rabbinic equivalent.
That problem is so deep that it has given rise to a whole theological discipline, primarily a Christian one, a very distinguished discipline. And I please pray of you, all of you, that whenever I contrast Judaism and something else, I am never trying to denigrate that something else. I really mean that. To be a Jew is to make space for 'otherness'. If I were to sum up the whole of these six lectures, it would be in that phrase: "To be a Jew is to make space for otherness". But that means we do our thing and we respect those who do other things. Therefore, Christianity developed a whole theological discipline which so too did the Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages which is called theodicy. It is the whole attempt to understand how if God exists evil exists.
---------END QUOTE-----------
See? To understand what Orson Scott Card talked about as a change in our culture in the 1960's and 1970's, you need to go all the way back to the Middle Ages, before the Mormon's existed as such.
You may also want to use Astrology to trace the effects of Pluto through the 1960's and '70's so read this:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html
"Theodicy" then is what all of modern Urban Fantasy seems to be about. That encompasses a lot of TV shows, and many movies. Action movies and action-romance too, likes to grab that one thing, Good vs. Evil.
This endless outpouring of novels about Good vs. Evil, and about how you survive in a world where both operate, may be due to the concept that the question can not be resolved, but it must be!
Here's another quote from Lecture #2
--------QUOTE---------
Now if that is so, if my interpretation is right, then Judaism begins not in the conventional place where faith is thought to begin, namely in wonder that the world is. Judaism begins in the opposite, in the protest against a world that is not as it ought to be. At the very heart of reality, by which I mean reality as we see it, from our point of view, there is a contradiction between order and chaos: the order of creation and the chaos we make.
Now the question is: how do we resolve that contradiction? And the answer is that that contradiction ..., between the world that is and the world that ought to be, cannot be resolved at the level of thought. It doesn't exist! You cannot resolve it! Logically, philosophically, in terms of theology or theodicy, you cannot do it! The only way you can resolve that tension is by action; by making the world better than it is.
.... When things are as they ought to be, ....- then we have resolved the tension. Then we have reached our destination. But that is not yet. It was not yet for Abraham and it is not yet for us. And from this initial contradiction, from this cognitive dissonance, are born the following four fundamental features of Judaism.
---------END QUOTE-----
WHEW! Is that, or is it not, an accurate description of the entire Romance genre with the emphasis on the HEA ending? What an unexpected place to find such a statement of the objective of the Romance genre, and the nature of the spiritual exercise of reading Romance!
Soul mates finding and bonding to each other changes the world, relieves that tension between Good and Evil by action, by changing the world, the whole world and all it's potential future paths.
The entire Lecture #2 really is needed to put this all into context. But the full text I have in a printed book is not on this website. Maybe it will be by the time you read this.
Making your own world "as it ought to be" is the essence of Romance.
Falling in love is the glimpse of that world of "ought" - when the Honeymoon is over, the struggle to recreate what "ought" to be in the cold light of reality begins. Some couples win that struggle. Others don't make it. Both kinds of couples change the world.
There is one philosophy that assumes it is a given that we will succeed in tinkering the world up to what it "ought" to be.
There are others that assume we will fail.
Is the pivot point of WWII and the subsequent 60's and 70's generational change we have seen a pivot from a vision of "we will succeed" to "it isn't possible to overcome Evil"?
That's the Horror genre premise - that Evil must exist so that Good can exist, and the most the Hero can achieve is to stuff Evil into a sarcophagus and bury it a mile deep behind sigils and signs.
The most Good can achieve against Evil is a draw.
Orson Scott Card is asking if our narrative has shifted from "we will prevail" (which won WWII), to one of "give up; it's a draw" or maybe to one of "give up; it's impossible."
Jack Campbell is answering, "Hell no! We're gonna win this sucker, and then we'll settle your hash, you meddling aliens."
What is the narrative we are passing on to our children? To what great heights will they aspire because of our story?
Rabbi Sacks has an answer to that in a unique analysis of the Passover story - not as about Passover itself, but about NARRATIVE, about story as a necessity for transmitting a culture.
http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical.aspx?id=1623
The title of the piece says it all:
Never underestimate the power of a story to enlarge the moral imagination of a child.
It talks about Africa, Haiti's earthquake, and Rwanda.
Read that very short piece and ask yourself what does our modern cultural narrative spur our children to do?
What do you have to say, to contribute, to our modern cultural narrative? Show don't tell.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, May 23, 2010
It's all a matter of perspective (Guest post by K S Augustin)
It's all a matter of perspective.
This is an utterly true story, so please bear with me.
My husband, J, is Polish and he's currently working in Singapore. He occasionally runs into another Pole in the same building where he works. Let's call him Janek. Janek is a physicist. Of course, when you meet compatriots in a foreign country, you tend to get chummier than you perhaps would under normal circumstances. This one day, for reasons that elude J's recollection, the two men began talking about high school and their career choices.
“I had a tough time,” Janek boomed. “It was a challenge becoming a physicist. I was enrolled in the technical high school in Wroclaw (*) and, of course, the time came for me to decide what career I was going to pursue at University.”
(*) In Poland a few decades ago, the high schools were streamed. The one Janek attended was for students with aptitude in hard sciences. Those who leant more to the Arts side of the fence went to a high school specialising in the social sciences or literature, and so on. Also, “Wroclaw” is pronounced “Vrots-wahv”.
“When I told my Physics professor that I wanted to be a physicist, she hit the roof! She told me to stay back after class so we could discuss it. When we were alone, she looked at me and said: 'Janek, why do you want to be a physicist? Physics is for girls!'”
I'll wait here and give you time to pull yourself back into your chairs.
“Why don't you study something more masculine? Like (Polish) literature!”
“It's true,” my husband insisted when I burst out laughing at his anecdote. “Like Janek, all my Physics professors were women as well. It was the same in Mathematics. In my entire school, we only had one male Maths teacher, and he was quite useless. The one time he tried to prove a theorem to us, he got into such difficulties that one of the other professors made up a phone call to get him out of the classroom so he wouldn't end up embarrassing himself. We all knew that if we had a sticky problem to solve, we'd go to a female professor.”
Let me finish Janek's story. It got so bad for the poor guy that even his language teacher called his parents to ask them if they knew he was considering physics for a career instead of literature! But, eventually, Janek got his way and now he sits in Singapore and discusses Minkowski (*) with J over a local coffee.
(*) Minkowski came up with a mathematical foundation for describing non-Euclidean space.
There are a couple of points I'd like to make here. Number one is that, if you met Janek in Singapore, and found out he was a physicist, you would probably nod your head and think “of course, a Polish physicist. That sounds natural.” But what you wouldn't know is that, in fact, it was the most unnatural of choices. So we should all be aware of what conclusions we jump to.
Second, just because it works one way in your environment, never assume it works the same way in others.
And third, if that's how topsy-turvy things can get on Earth, can you imagine what it's like in the rest of the galaxy?
And that is why I love writing science-fiction!
KS Augustin has a hard sf romance (“In Enemy Hands”) due for release on 7 June from Carina Press. Her website is at http://www.ksaugustin.com, her blog is at http://blog.ksaugustin.com and you can find her on Facebook and Twitter under “ksaugustin”. Why not stop and say hi?
COMPETITION: I'm giving away two copies of IN ENEMY HANDS at my blog, Fusion Despatches [http://blog.ksaugustin.com]. To be in the draw, stop by and comment at the Competition post, telling me at which blog you read about my book. You have till 30 June!
This is an utterly true story, so please bear with me.
My husband, J, is Polish and he's currently working in Singapore. He occasionally runs into another Pole in the same building where he works. Let's call him Janek. Janek is a physicist. Of course, when you meet compatriots in a foreign country, you tend to get chummier than you perhaps would under normal circumstances. This one day, for reasons that elude J's recollection, the two men began talking about high school and their career choices.
“I had a tough time,” Janek boomed. “It was a challenge becoming a physicist. I was enrolled in the technical high school in Wroclaw (*) and, of course, the time came for me to decide what career I was going to pursue at University.”
(*) In Poland a few decades ago, the high schools were streamed. The one Janek attended was for students with aptitude in hard sciences. Those who leant more to the Arts side of the fence went to a high school specialising in the social sciences or literature, and so on. Also, “Wroclaw” is pronounced “Vrots-wahv”.
“When I told my Physics professor that I wanted to be a physicist, she hit the roof! She told me to stay back after class so we could discuss it. When we were alone, she looked at me and said: 'Janek, why do you want to be a physicist? Physics is for girls!'”
I'll wait here and give you time to pull yourself back into your chairs.
“Why don't you study something more masculine? Like (Polish) literature!”
“It's true,” my husband insisted when I burst out laughing at his anecdote. “Like Janek, all my Physics professors were women as well. It was the same in Mathematics. In my entire school, we only had one male Maths teacher, and he was quite useless. The one time he tried to prove a theorem to us, he got into such difficulties that one of the other professors made up a phone call to get him out of the classroom so he wouldn't end up embarrassing himself. We all knew that if we had a sticky problem to solve, we'd go to a female professor.”
Let me finish Janek's story. It got so bad for the poor guy that even his language teacher called his parents to ask them if they knew he was considering physics for a career instead of literature! But, eventually, Janek got his way and now he sits in Singapore and discusses Minkowski (*) with J over a local coffee.
(*) Minkowski came up with a mathematical foundation for describing non-Euclidean space.
There are a couple of points I'd like to make here. Number one is that, if you met Janek in Singapore, and found out he was a physicist, you would probably nod your head and think “of course, a Polish physicist. That sounds natural.” But what you wouldn't know is that, in fact, it was the most unnatural of choices. So we should all be aware of what conclusions we jump to.
Second, just because it works one way in your environment, never assume it works the same way in others.
And third, if that's how topsy-turvy things can get on Earth, can you imagine what it's like in the rest of the galaxy?
And that is why I love writing science-fiction!
KS Augustin has a hard sf romance (“In Enemy Hands”) due for release on 7 June from Carina Press. Her website is at http://www.ksaugustin.com, her blog is at http://blog.ksaugustin.com and you can find her on Facebook and Twitter under “ksaugustin”. Why not stop and say hi?
COMPETITION: I'm giving away two copies of IN ENEMY HANDS at my blog, Fusion Despatches [http://blog.ksaugustin.com]. To be in the draw, stop by and comment at the Competition post, telling me at which blog you read about my book. You have till 30 June!
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Romance Is Good for You
Last week, one of our local community freebee magazines contained an article about the importance of relationships, especially good marriages, to personal well-being, which seems to be a popular topic in the media in recent years.
It's been known for a while that fulfilling relationships promote good health. Married people have longer lives and less illness and depression than unattached people, and partnered folks enjoy positive effects on blood pressure, susceptibility to pain, and many other factors. Here's one article on that topic:
Health Benefits of Relationships
Sex has healing powers, too. All those secretions such as endorphins and oxytocin do great things for physical as well as mental health. Not to mention the aerobic exercise:
Health Benefits of Sex
Relationships are vitally important to our welfare. Love is not just a frill. Romance novels deal with one of the most important facets of human life. So why do they get no respect, even nowadays when most genre fiction is taken more seriously than it used to be?
The obvious answer—that romance falls under the trivialized category of "women's" fiction—raises the further question of when and why such a central issue as the forming of intimate relationships became relegated to the feminine sphere, beneath the notice of men aside from its relevance to family dynasties and business alliances? Because women usually have a deeper, more hands-on involvement than men in the care of children, so by extension anything focused inwardly on the family rather than outwardly on commerce, politics, war, etc. (you know, the "important" stuff) has been left to the female half of the population?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
It's been known for a while that fulfilling relationships promote good health. Married people have longer lives and less illness and depression than unattached people, and partnered folks enjoy positive effects on blood pressure, susceptibility to pain, and many other factors. Here's one article on that topic:
Health Benefits of Relationships
Sex has healing powers, too. All those secretions such as endorphins and oxytocin do great things for physical as well as mental health. Not to mention the aerobic exercise:
Health Benefits of Sex
Relationships are vitally important to our welfare. Love is not just a frill. Romance novels deal with one of the most important facets of human life. So why do they get no respect, even nowadays when most genre fiction is taken more seriously than it used to be?
The obvious answer—that romance falls under the trivialized category of "women's" fiction—raises the further question of when and why such a central issue as the forming of intimate relationships became relegated to the feminine sphere, beneath the notice of men aside from its relevance to family dynasties and business alliances? Because women usually have a deeper, more hands-on involvement than men in the care of children, so by extension anything focused inwardly on the family rather than outwardly on commerce, politics, war, etc. (you know, the "important" stuff) has been left to the female half of the population?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The Hurt Locker, Indie Films, Financing TV Part II
I've cut this long post into two parts again as an experiment. Part I was posted Tuesday, May 11, 2010 here.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/hurt-locker-indie-films-financing-tv.html
Now for Part II.
-----------
Introduction
The topic here is "If you want to understand the world, follow the money." And by following the business model and financing sources for the fiction delivery system, we might understand things well enough to boost the Alien Romance field's respectability. So here is Part I, a history lesson in financing fiction, followed by Part II, how that historical root has shaped what's happening now and reveals what might happen next. If you anticipate what's going to happen next, you can turn a profit on it.
---------
Part II
Today, a similar revolution is going on in film to what has happened in SF/F book publishing under the pressure from an exploding fanfic marketplace (and other sorts of pressure we're not talking about this time).
As fanzines were originally produced and distributed at a huge loss to the publishers, eventually publishers learned the business of publishing applied to fanzines as well. And the best fanzines became break-even.
That's right. They weren't allowed to make a profit, but they could break-even, that is cover the expenses with the price of the 'zine. If it were legal, they soon saw, they could indeed make a profit.
The fiction delivery system I've been talking about in these posts is a business model, and it can operate at a profit - if it's legal.
Hence, the pressure on the copyright system that makes it illegal to turn a profit on material copyrighted by others unless you pay the owner. Society is looking for a new model for the ownership of art by its creator.
The Indie Film community is meanwhile, tapping into Indie Writers, first-time screenwriters selling their first script. It's become a voracious market for scripts that could be filmed for way under a million dollars.
Use the LOOK INSIDE feature on Amazon to read the intro to the screenplay of THE HURT LOCKER.
http://www.amazon.com/Hurt-Locker-Shooting-Script-Newmarket/dp/1557049092/rereadablebooksr/
I have the book itself (it's good) and the end-notes or Production Notes at the end tell the story of how this film was funded.
As Indie film makers climb the ladder, they are able to attract investors and increase budgets to where those "fanzine" type flaws can be avoided. It's all about budget.
Really study how THE HURT LOCKER was created, and you'll see something very important is happening.
Now think about this. TV shows (long a product only of big studios) are now searching for and finding "independent financing."
Read this article in Daily Variety:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118016724.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1&query=%22by+Michael+Schneider%22+%2B+Leverage
The TV Show Leverage is looking to leverage some financing from a new source. Remember the original Star Trek was canceled because of low Nielsen Ratings (because there were no ratings boxes on College Dorm TV's), and Nielsen Ratings exist for the sole purpose of determining the sale price of commercial time (eyeballs = revenue). If you don't have at least 3 seasons of shows, you can't syndicate and monetize the investment in the first 2 seasons.
Thus the 3rd season of 16 shows of LEVERAGE are key to monetizing the investment.
In the early 1970's, Star Trek fen hatched the idea that we should buy stock in Paramount and NBC and force them to put Star Trek back on the air. Good idea, before it's time. Shareholders had no say over programming.
If this business model idea had existed then, Roddenberry would have had a ready source of all the cash needed to create a 4th and 5th Season of the original show, and probably most of the derivatives and the movies. Fans were willing (and increasingly able) to raise that kind of money as many went on to very successful careers after college.
Remember always -- it's a business model. Invest and reap more than you invested. That's the only criterion of any interest, and the only thing that determines whether you the audience will have access to any bit of fiction.
EXCEPT -- now we have self-publishing and YouTube. Which are the "fanzines" of yesteryear manifesting in the Web-hubbed world.
Yes, the business model of fanzines was - pay nobody, throw your hobby-money into a fun project - the only profit is a boost to your ego (egoboo another coinage of fandom).
Have you seen the Star Trek Episode WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME -- made with unpaid actors, not paying for the script, out-of-pocket investment.
http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/weat_gateway.html
It's a TV Show Episode fanzine - and it's fabulous Indie Production.
Marc Zicree engineering and produced WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME with all legal permissions. And it's been hugely successful.
Here's one more datapoint to consider.
Wired Magazine featured in March 2010 an article on using Twitter to transfer money person to person -- better and faster than PayPal.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_futureofmoney
The article talks about uninventing "money" as something printed on paper or coined from something of value. Whole new concept of making a business model work. And the concept arises from a new style of thinking, a new internal or mental model of the universe.
This kind of thinking is native to the Web 2.0+ generation.
But it is transforming the business model of the Fiction Delivery System I've been talking about.
I've been following several people on Twitter who are soliciting investors in Indie films.
Yes, for $25 or $50 you can "own" a fraction of a film - which like HURT LOCKER might win an Academy Award or perhaps a lesser accolade, and become worth money. Or it might be a paradigm transforming addition to this new world. There are lots of different sorts of "deals" out there for investing in Indie Films.
Here's one from Twitter:
@FilmCourageWe are 74% Funded, Over $11,000 raised. $3855 left to go & 17 hours left.... http://bit.ly/aVDeQP
And another one from twitter (@syfy is the official syfy channel tweeter)
Syfy Q) @dspringfield Would Syfy ever consider a cost sharing arrangement like Friday Night Lights on DirecTV? A) We'd probably consider it.
And I'm in some Film groups on Twitter where there's a lot of funding activity going on. Innovation in funding procedures will drive innovation in the kinds of fiction that can be delivered to different fractional audiences -- and then those little audiences grow and change the whole world.
The overall thrust of this series of posts on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com is all about presenting Alien and SF/Paranormal Romance to the general audience in such a way as to reveal to them why this kind of story deserves attention and ultimately respect. The boring business of tracing how funding sources changes the whole business model is just one tiny part of this investigation.
So here's another illustration of the results of this kind of thinking, not so much focused on entertainment as on the kind of tech innovation that is pushing the world of entertainment financing (and thus ownership issues such as copyright) in new directions:
An article in Businessweek titled "And Google Begat..." shows how the entrepreneurial training employees at Google absorb even non-verbally is driving a new wave of tech innovation:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_10/b4169039637367.htm
These datapoints are important not only because of their content, but also because of where I found them.
As Star Trek fanfic began slowly to be mentioned in major media, so also these innovative ways of financing the fiction delivery system are surfacing first here-and-there, and now in the hugely influential national media.
The source of financing for the endeavor actually shapes the endeavor, more even than the objective or driving ambition to communicate.
Financing and its sources belong to the Tarot Suit of Pentacles, the World of manifestation. Here is a list of the 10 posts on the Suit of Pentacles I've done on this blog.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
Money is not the root of all evil, but rather the manifestation of whatever (good or bad) has been conceptualized "above" that level.
There is a dynamic tension in play between the established system of profiting from large audiences which is explained here in a Review of a book about the film industry and its business model (you probably should read the book; but I haven't yet):
http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/04/20/noted-journalist-jay-epstein-explains-why-movies-suck/?icid=main|aim|dl9|link4|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.walletpop.com%2Fblog%2F2010%2F04%2F20%2Fnoted-journalist-jay-epstein-explains-why-movies-suck%2F
and the system profiting from do-it-yourself entertainment (Indie Films, YouTube, Self-publishing, and now TV Series independently funded), which is discussed further down in the Review.
The walletpop.com review says:
-------
Independent film financing has collapsed. Studios rarely make money on a film. Although the industry may not be putting out films to your taste, you're still paying tax dollars to support them. And Wal-Mart is one reason skin is so rare in major studio releases.
--------------
And a little further down in the article (which you really should read in whole) it says:
---------
What happened to sex?
There was a time when nudity was almost obligatory in major films. Now, even James Bond's arm candy is modestly attired, and Epstein points out that, of the top 25 highest grossing films since 2000, none have had any sex-related nudity.
There are two reasons for this, according to Epstein.
------------
Remember earlier here I pointed out how the sex scene has replaced the action scene in SF/F - especially kickbutt heroine urban fantasy. And have you looked at Romance covers as a group lately? Two figures, suggestively intertwined -- the artists must be horrendously bored by that order from editors.
But sexuality has disappeared from the big screen - (still a lot of hot stuff on TV, but that may change soon too).
On the third hand, read this article:
'Harry Potter' Star Says Filming a Sex Scene is Hard, Watching It With Parents is Harder
http://www.popeater.com/2010/04/22/rupert-grint-cherrybomb-sex-scene/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+aol%2Fmovies%2Ftop+%28Movie+News%29
Lesson for the writer - if you want a big audience, delete all the sex scenes.
Remember the writing lesson where you are required to write 10 pages, then the instructor tells you to go over it and delete every single adjective and adverb, and you absolutely die over that drill?
Well, do the same thing with your sex scenes. Delete them all and see if you still have a story in there somewhere. See what that does to the story you are telling. Maybe you have a major motion picture on your hands. Or an Indie.
I have no reason to suspect that what this review on walletpop.com says about Indie Film financing or the 10 items in the big screen blockbuster formula is not currently true. But to the kind of thinkers the Wired article referenced above talks about, that is an opportunity not an obstacle.
I recall my grandparents remembering the days before radio when families would gather in the living room in the evening and play piano, violin, and sing-along, entertaining themselves.
Perhaps we're headed back to that life rhythm on a new arc. Families sitting around concocting a YouTube video; what an image.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/hurt-locker-indie-films-financing-tv.html
Now for Part II.
-----------
Introduction
The topic here is "If you want to understand the world, follow the money." And by following the business model and financing sources for the fiction delivery system, we might understand things well enough to boost the Alien Romance field's respectability. So here is Part I, a history lesson in financing fiction, followed by Part II, how that historical root has shaped what's happening now and reveals what might happen next. If you anticipate what's going to happen next, you can turn a profit on it.
---------
Part II
Today, a similar revolution is going on in film to what has happened in SF/F book publishing under the pressure from an exploding fanfic marketplace (and other sorts of pressure we're not talking about this time).
As fanzines were originally produced and distributed at a huge loss to the publishers, eventually publishers learned the business of publishing applied to fanzines as well. And the best fanzines became break-even.
That's right. They weren't allowed to make a profit, but they could break-even, that is cover the expenses with the price of the 'zine. If it were legal, they soon saw, they could indeed make a profit.
The fiction delivery system I've been talking about in these posts is a business model, and it can operate at a profit - if it's legal.
Hence, the pressure on the copyright system that makes it illegal to turn a profit on material copyrighted by others unless you pay the owner. Society is looking for a new model for the ownership of art by its creator.
The Indie Film community is meanwhile, tapping into Indie Writers, first-time screenwriters selling their first script. It's become a voracious market for scripts that could be filmed for way under a million dollars.
Use the LOOK INSIDE feature on Amazon to read the intro to the screenplay of THE HURT LOCKER.
http://www.amazon.com/Hurt-Locker-Shooting-Script-Newmarket/dp/1557049092/rereadablebooksr/
I have the book itself (it's good) and the end-notes or Production Notes at the end tell the story of how this film was funded.
As Indie film makers climb the ladder, they are able to attract investors and increase budgets to where those "fanzine" type flaws can be avoided. It's all about budget.
Really study how THE HURT LOCKER was created, and you'll see something very important is happening.
Now think about this. TV shows (long a product only of big studios) are now searching for and finding "independent financing."
Read this article in Daily Variety:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118016724.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1&query=%22by+Michael+Schneider%22+%2B+Leverage
The TV Show Leverage is looking to leverage some financing from a new source. Remember the original Star Trek was canceled because of low Nielsen Ratings (because there were no ratings boxes on College Dorm TV's), and Nielsen Ratings exist for the sole purpose of determining the sale price of commercial time (eyeballs = revenue). If you don't have at least 3 seasons of shows, you can't syndicate and monetize the investment in the first 2 seasons.
Thus the 3rd season of 16 shows of LEVERAGE are key to monetizing the investment.
In the early 1970's, Star Trek fen hatched the idea that we should buy stock in Paramount and NBC and force them to put Star Trek back on the air. Good idea, before it's time. Shareholders had no say over programming.
If this business model idea had existed then, Roddenberry would have had a ready source of all the cash needed to create a 4th and 5th Season of the original show, and probably most of the derivatives and the movies. Fans were willing (and increasingly able) to raise that kind of money as many went on to very successful careers after college.
Remember always -- it's a business model. Invest and reap more than you invested. That's the only criterion of any interest, and the only thing that determines whether you the audience will have access to any bit of fiction.
EXCEPT -- now we have self-publishing and YouTube. Which are the "fanzines" of yesteryear manifesting in the Web-hubbed world.
Yes, the business model of fanzines was - pay nobody, throw your hobby-money into a fun project - the only profit is a boost to your ego (egoboo another coinage of fandom).
Have you seen the Star Trek Episode WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME -- made with unpaid actors, not paying for the script, out-of-pocket investment.
http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/weat_gateway.html
It's a TV Show Episode fanzine - and it's fabulous Indie Production.
Marc Zicree engineering and produced WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME with all legal permissions. And it's been hugely successful.
Here's one more datapoint to consider.
Wired Magazine featured in March 2010 an article on using Twitter to transfer money person to person -- better and faster than PayPal.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_futureofmoney
The article talks about uninventing "money" as something printed on paper or coined from something of value. Whole new concept of making a business model work. And the concept arises from a new style of thinking, a new internal or mental model of the universe.
This kind of thinking is native to the Web 2.0+ generation.
But it is transforming the business model of the Fiction Delivery System I've been talking about.
I've been following several people on Twitter who are soliciting investors in Indie films.
Yes, for $25 or $50 you can "own" a fraction of a film - which like HURT LOCKER might win an Academy Award or perhaps a lesser accolade, and become worth money. Or it might be a paradigm transforming addition to this new world. There are lots of different sorts of "deals" out there for investing in Indie Films.
Here's one from Twitter:
@FilmCourageWe are 74% Funded, Over $11,000 raised. $3855 left to go & 17 hours left.... http://bit.ly/aVDeQP
And another one from twitter (@syfy is the official syfy channel tweeter)
Syfy Q) @dspringfield Would Syfy ever consider a cost sharing arrangement like Friday Night Lights on DirecTV? A) We'd probably consider it.
And I'm in some Film groups on Twitter where there's a lot of funding activity going on. Innovation in funding procedures will drive innovation in the kinds of fiction that can be delivered to different fractional audiences -- and then those little audiences grow and change the whole world.
The overall thrust of this series of posts on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com is all about presenting Alien and SF/Paranormal Romance to the general audience in such a way as to reveal to them why this kind of story deserves attention and ultimately respect. The boring business of tracing how funding sources changes the whole business model is just one tiny part of this investigation.
So here's another illustration of the results of this kind of thinking, not so much focused on entertainment as on the kind of tech innovation that is pushing the world of entertainment financing (and thus ownership issues such as copyright) in new directions:
An article in Businessweek titled "And Google Begat..." shows how the entrepreneurial training employees at Google absorb even non-verbally is driving a new wave of tech innovation:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_10/b4169039637367.htm
These datapoints are important not only because of their content, but also because of where I found them.
As Star Trek fanfic began slowly to be mentioned in major media, so also these innovative ways of financing the fiction delivery system are surfacing first here-and-there, and now in the hugely influential national media.
The source of financing for the endeavor actually shapes the endeavor, more even than the objective or driving ambition to communicate.
Financing and its sources belong to the Tarot Suit of Pentacles, the World of manifestation. Here is a list of the 10 posts on the Suit of Pentacles I've done on this blog.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
Money is not the root of all evil, but rather the manifestation of whatever (good or bad) has been conceptualized "above" that level.
There is a dynamic tension in play between the established system of profiting from large audiences which is explained here in a Review of a book about the film industry and its business model (you probably should read the book; but I haven't yet):
http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/04/20/noted-journalist-jay-epstein-explains-why-movies-suck/?icid=main|aim|dl9|link4|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.walletpop.com%2Fblog%2F2010%2F04%2F20%2Fnoted-journalist-jay-epstein-explains-why-movies-suck%2F
and the system profiting from do-it-yourself entertainment (Indie Films, YouTube, Self-publishing, and now TV Series independently funded), which is discussed further down in the Review.
The walletpop.com review says:
-------
Independent film financing has collapsed. Studios rarely make money on a film. Although the industry may not be putting out films to your taste, you're still paying tax dollars to support them. And Wal-Mart is one reason skin is so rare in major studio releases.
--------------
And a little further down in the article (which you really should read in whole) it says:
---------
What happened to sex?
There was a time when nudity was almost obligatory in major films. Now, even James Bond's arm candy is modestly attired, and Epstein points out that, of the top 25 highest grossing films since 2000, none have had any sex-related nudity.
There are two reasons for this, according to Epstein.
------------
Remember earlier here I pointed out how the sex scene has replaced the action scene in SF/F - especially kickbutt heroine urban fantasy. And have you looked at Romance covers as a group lately? Two figures, suggestively intertwined -- the artists must be horrendously bored by that order from editors.
But sexuality has disappeared from the big screen - (still a lot of hot stuff on TV, but that may change soon too).
On the third hand, read this article:
'Harry Potter' Star Says Filming a Sex Scene is Hard, Watching It With Parents is Harder
http://www.popeater.com/2010/04/22/rupert-grint-cherrybomb-sex-scene/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+aol%2Fmovies%2Ftop+%28Movie+News%29
Lesson for the writer - if you want a big audience, delete all the sex scenes.
Remember the writing lesson where you are required to write 10 pages, then the instructor tells you to go over it and delete every single adjective and adverb, and you absolutely die over that drill?
Well, do the same thing with your sex scenes. Delete them all and see if you still have a story in there somewhere. See what that does to the story you are telling. Maybe you have a major motion picture on your hands. Or an Indie.
I have no reason to suspect that what this review on walletpop.com says about Indie Film financing or the 10 items in the big screen blockbuster formula is not currently true. But to the kind of thinkers the Wired article referenced above talks about, that is an opportunity not an obstacle.
I recall my grandparents remembering the days before radio when families would gather in the living room in the evening and play piano, violin, and sing-along, entertaining themselves.
Perhaps we're headed back to that life rhythm on a new arc. Families sitting around concocting a YouTube video; what an image.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Click fraud: The adword you should never use
Do you think the ebook pirates are sticking it to the man? You betcha.
Here's what at least one ebook pirate site is requesting:
It makes sense, doesn't it? If thousands of people are willing to "steal" books, they probably aren't above click fraud.
So, guess what? Not only is Penguin books (among others) being ripped off because the pirates are "sharing" ebooks that at least some of them (judging by some of the comments posted on pirate forums) honestly would have purchased, now it is the victim of click fraud on the same sites that "share" Penguin authors' books.
How does this happen?
I don't believe for a moment that Penguin, Xlibris, Tate, Kobe and others would deliberately pay good money to undermine their own business.
I suspect that they've got some kind of automated advertisement placement, and if they are spending their advertising dollars asking pirates to buy ebooks on a site that makes the idea of paying for ebooks ridiculous... they must be using adwords.
Maybe "ebook", "e-book", "eBook"... You think?
We ought to have a publishing wide list of words NOT to pay to use. We ought to check out tag clouds (I'm not sure if they are available) on pirate sites, to see which words the search bots are most likely to link with sites where dishonest people go to read free ebooks and share.
What do you think Penguin pays per click? .20 cents? .50? $2.75 for popular words?
What is that going to cost the publishers who can afford to advertise if several thousand happy and dutiful pirates click their banners (top and bottom) once a day?
I don't say "don't advertise using the word 'ebook'. Obviously not. I say, don't pay per click. At least starve the pirate sites of funds from clicking on advertisements.
Other stuff.
Once upon a time, I wanted a particular view of Stonehenge for a projected cover for one of my alien romance books. That's how I made the acquaintance of Scott Merrill.
We renewed our acquaintanceship recently, when Scott recorded Mating Net as an audio book. This is the first chapter, and I commissioned the talented Marianne Arkins to record a video track to go with it.
If you like the sound of Scott's voice, you might consider his talents for a voice over on your own 2 minute book video. I'm sponsoring an auction item in Brenda Novak's annual fundraiser for her Diabetes charity. Scott will record a 2 minute excerpt or blurb as long as the winning bidder provides the text.
Marianne will purchase photographs, and create a video. I will pay for it. (Up to an estimated $500 value.)
http://brendanovak.auctionanything.com/Bidding.taf?_function=detail&Auction_uid1=1773459
The auction runs through May. If you don't want to bid for a book promotional piece, check out the myriad other auction items.
Here's what at least one ebook pirate site is requesting:
"Help the site grow, Click a Banner Ad (at the top or bottom of site) once a day, or click this link to donate."
It makes sense, doesn't it? If thousands of people are willing to "steal" books, they probably aren't above click fraud.
So, guess what? Not only is Penguin books (among others) being ripped off because the pirates are "sharing" ebooks that at least some of them (judging by some of the comments posted on pirate forums) honestly would have purchased, now it is the victim of click fraud on the same sites that "share" Penguin authors' books.
How does this happen?
I don't believe for a moment that Penguin, Xlibris, Tate, Kobe and others would deliberately pay good money to undermine their own business.
I suspect that they've got some kind of automated advertisement placement, and if they are spending their advertising dollars asking pirates to buy ebooks on a site that makes the idea of paying for ebooks ridiculous... they must be using adwords.
Maybe "ebook", "e-book", "eBook"... You think?
We ought to have a publishing wide list of words NOT to pay to use. We ought to check out tag clouds (I'm not sure if they are available) on pirate sites, to see which words the search bots are most likely to link with sites where dishonest people go to read free ebooks and share.
What do you think Penguin pays per click? .20 cents? .50? $2.75 for popular words?
What is that going to cost the publishers who can afford to advertise if several thousand happy and dutiful pirates click their banners (top and bottom) once a day?
I don't say "don't advertise using the word 'ebook'. Obviously not. I say, don't pay per click. At least starve the pirate sites of funds from clicking on advertisements.
Other stuff.
Once upon a time, I wanted a particular view of Stonehenge for a projected cover for one of my alien romance books. That's how I made the acquaintance of Scott Merrill.
We renewed our acquaintanceship recently, when Scott recorded Mating Net as an audio book. This is the first chapter, and I commissioned the talented Marianne Arkins to record a video track to go with it.
If you like the sound of Scott's voice, you might consider his talents for a voice over on your own 2 minute book video. I'm sponsoring an auction item in Brenda Novak's annual fundraiser for her Diabetes charity. Scott will record a 2 minute excerpt or blurb as long as the winning bidder provides the text.
Marianne will purchase photographs, and create a video. I will pay for it. (Up to an estimated $500 value.)
http://brendanovak.auctionanything.com/Bidding.taf?_function=detail&Auction_uid1=1773459
The auction runs through May. If you don't want to bid for a book promotional piece, check out the myriad other auction items.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Primate Relations
The prevailing scientific consensus about the relationship between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals has been reversed, as reported in this article:
Humans Did Indeed Mate with Neanderthals
I've always been disappointed by articles and TV programs in which evolutionary anthropologists expressed near-certainty that no Neanderthal DNA had crept into the human genome. Of course, that didn't necessarily mean occasional matings that left no permanent trace never occurred, but the hypothesis seemed to disprove major plot elements in one of my favorite novels, CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR. Now I can rejoice that Ayla's half-Cro-Magnon, half-Neanderthal baby could have existed.
Recent developments indicate that the human family tree is much more tangled than the diagrams in older books suggested. Several kinds of early hominids coexisted, rather than one species or subspecies following the last in orderly progression. I always found the idea of crossbreeding between "modern humans" and their close kin an intriguing possibility—if not that, at least close interaction between our kind and the "missing links." In the 1939 story "The Gnarly Man," by L. Sprague de Camp, a man in a sideshow claims to be the last of the Neanderthals. Isaac Asimov's "The Ugly Little Boy" portrays a Neanderthal child kidnapped by near-future scientists with a time machine. I don't remember reading any stories about surviving colonies of Neanderthals among us, but surely some author must have written one. I'd like to believe a Bigfoot population exists in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, and if so, I imagine them as a species of hominid displaced by our conquest of the Earth but not driven to extinction. And now we know about the "hobbits," an extinct, diminutive not-quite-human island-dwelling people.
One thing I don't like about that article on Neanderthal-human interbreeding—the writer's contrast between "Neanderthals" and "people." It has long been established that they were no less intelligent than the "modern humans" (Cro-Magnons) living alongside them in Ice Age Europe, even if their minds worked a bit differently, so they were "people" too. It's exciting to imagine the plot possibilities of sharing the planet with a different humanoid species. Civil rights for Neanderthals? Would racism and speciesism slip into society's treatment of them under the guise of "protecting" creatures who don't look quite like us and therefore are clearly a "lower" species of primate? I've just finished Charlaine Harris's latest novel, DEAD IN THE FAMILY; in her alternate universe, the legal rights of vampires are limited, and there's a push for legislation to force all were-creatures to register with a government agency. Our society's past track record with interracial relations, not to mention the current plight of gorillas and chimpanzees, hints that "cave men" among us wouldn't fare much better. By the way, did anybody watch the short-lived TV series by that title? From the reviews, it sounded so dumb I didn't bother. What a cool premise that could have been if treated seriously!
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Humans Did Indeed Mate with Neanderthals
I've always been disappointed by articles and TV programs in which evolutionary anthropologists expressed near-certainty that no Neanderthal DNA had crept into the human genome. Of course, that didn't necessarily mean occasional matings that left no permanent trace never occurred, but the hypothesis seemed to disprove major plot elements in one of my favorite novels, CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR. Now I can rejoice that Ayla's half-Cro-Magnon, half-Neanderthal baby could have existed.
Recent developments indicate that the human family tree is much more tangled than the diagrams in older books suggested. Several kinds of early hominids coexisted, rather than one species or subspecies following the last in orderly progression. I always found the idea of crossbreeding between "modern humans" and their close kin an intriguing possibility—if not that, at least close interaction between our kind and the "missing links." In the 1939 story "The Gnarly Man," by L. Sprague de Camp, a man in a sideshow claims to be the last of the Neanderthals. Isaac Asimov's "The Ugly Little Boy" portrays a Neanderthal child kidnapped by near-future scientists with a time machine. I don't remember reading any stories about surviving colonies of Neanderthals among us, but surely some author must have written one. I'd like to believe a Bigfoot population exists in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, and if so, I imagine them as a species of hominid displaced by our conquest of the Earth but not driven to extinction. And now we know about the "hobbits," an extinct, diminutive not-quite-human island-dwelling people.
One thing I don't like about that article on Neanderthal-human interbreeding—the writer's contrast between "Neanderthals" and "people." It has long been established that they were no less intelligent than the "modern humans" (Cro-Magnons) living alongside them in Ice Age Europe, even if their minds worked a bit differently, so they were "people" too. It's exciting to imagine the plot possibilities of sharing the planet with a different humanoid species. Civil rights for Neanderthals? Would racism and speciesism slip into society's treatment of them under the guise of "protecting" creatures who don't look quite like us and therefore are clearly a "lower" species of primate? I've just finished Charlaine Harris's latest novel, DEAD IN THE FAMILY; in her alternate universe, the legal rights of vampires are limited, and there's a push for legislation to force all were-creatures to register with a government agency. Our society's past track record with interracial relations, not to mention the current plight of gorillas and chimpanzees, hints that "cave men" among us wouldn't fare much better. By the way, did anybody watch the short-lived TV series by that title? From the reviews, it sounded so dumb I didn't bother. What a cool premise that could have been if treated seriously!
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The Hurt Locker, Indie Films, Financing TV - Part I
I'll cut this long post into two parts again as an experiment.
-----------
Introduction
The topic here is "If you want to understand the world, follow the money." And by following the business model and financing sources for the fiction delivery system, we might understand things well enough to boost the Alien Romance field's respectability. So here is a history lesson in financing fiction, followed by how that historical root has shaped what's happening now and reveals what might happen next. If you anticipate what's going to happen next, you can turn a profit on it.
---------
Part I
The world of commercial fiction has been turned inside out, upside down, and backwards by the advent of the Web, and especially Web 2.0 with Web 3.0 and even 4.0, all going mobile.
iPhones, iPads, TV sets that hook up to your home network and let you fish for TV shows and films posted online, with or without a fee, nevermind Kindle and now iPads that can access Kindle's library.
The result of all this technology is a world which closely resembles the world STAR TREK fanzine writers really wanted to create.
And I don't mean in their fiction. Most portrayals of The Enterprise in STAR TREK fanzine stories was less futuristic than the 1960's TV show itself.
I mean in the ability to participate in joint story creations, to communicate instantly, to collaborate and share, all to the purpose of expressing in fiction what is nearest and dearest to the heart. To share universes.
In order to create and purvey their pastiche fiction based on a TV show, fan writers invented an entirely new world.
But they didn't do it all by themselves out of nothing.
Here's how it happened, and I'll show you below what all this has to do with The Hurt Locker (the film about a bomb squad in Iraq that won an Academy Award in 2010).
This also relates to the transformation of the artist's business model by the re-defining of "copyright" erupting from the whole Open Source software movement, and Creative Commons Licensing.
And that copyright issue can be traced back to Star Trek fanzine writers too. Oh, what a tangled web!
Before 1966 and Star Trek, in the 1930's, science fiction magazines connected readers of science fiction and basically invented modern SF as well as SF fandom. In fact, the very people who invented modern SF and created that community (called First Fandom) actually invented the word "fandom" out of "fanatic" and "domain" or "Kingdom."
Science Fiction fans, a bunch of guys, mostly in New York and Philadelphia, got together (physically met in one physical place), and kept meeting regularly and irregularly and created "conventions" as the events where the most of them would turn up.
They admired the writers in the magazines and the very few books. As it became hard to get together physically, they began writing to each other about the stories in the magazines and books, and about the writers, and about each other, and about the most recent gatherings. They invented an entire language to discuss these matters.
There came to be more and more of them, so they needed many copies of their letters to each other, and invented "fanzines." At first these were a few pages filled with letters and essays, copied on a spirit duplicator (which printed in purple ink), and later on mimeograph (decades before xerox copiers were invented), and stapled, then mailed to each other via the Post Office. Yes, snail mailed.
The letters would typically be a few weeks or a few months old by the time you got to read them.
At first, nobody charged money for these fanzines. You got them by contributing a letter or article. The publisher footed the expense out of pocket.
Some 'zines became so large that publishers asked non-contributors to pay a fee for paper, printing and postage. Audiences grew.
I have a fanzine of this variety with a letter from me in it, and my contributor's copy took more than 3 years to catch up with me, what with all the forwarded addresses.
I joined SF snailmail fandom when I was in 7th grade and have been a member of the N3F ever since (National Fantasy Fan Federation - founded by damon knight who also founded SFWA, the profession SF writer's organization where I'm also a Life Member).
Into this world of SF Fandom, Star Trek was born. The show captured the attention of SF Fen (the plural of fan is fen). They discussed it in fanzines.
Devra Langsam and some other New York fen who were captivated by Star Trek started a Star Trek fanzine called Spockanalia -- on mimeo, paper now totally disintegrated, ink faded, and I still have my copies. I had an article MR. SPOCK ON LOGIC, in the 4th issue.
The idea caught on, and suddenly Spockanalia was publishing fiction.
SF 'zines usually didn't publish fiction except as send-ups, spoofs, farces and gotcha's.
But suddenly, dozens of Star Trek fanzines were publishing fiction and articles and letters of comments on the fan written fiction and articles. A whole new world of Star Trek was born.
And Star Trek conventions where fanzines were sold, and story ideas concocted for more fanzines.
I created the Star Trek Welcommittee (modeled on the N3F Welcommittee which had welcomed me into fandom)to answer fan mail from STAR TREK LIVES! ST Welcommittee connected thousands of new and isolated Star Trek fans to the snailmail network. It's being reincarnated on facebook by another fan now.
Today that snailmail world of fanfic and letters of comment on fanfic lives and grows online. Last week here (May 4th, 2010) we derived a writing lesson in SHOW DON'T TELL from a bit of fanfic based on the TV show White Collar published on fanfiction.net.
What has SF Snailmail Fandom to do with Indie Films?
Star Trek fandom produced (is still producing) billions of words of fiction derived from a TV show. It connected thousands of writers and readers in a network that spanned the globe and discussed life in terms of fiction.
The content of that fanfiction violated all the "rules" and requirements of published SF, but was in most cases actually SF.
For a quick overview of classic Star Trek fanfic and some prime examples you can read free see:
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/
The SF-Romance was, I believe, first explored in one of those fanzines, an Inspirational SF Romance.
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/showcase/
Those first classic ST fanzines sold and traded at Star Trek conventions gave rise to the "genzine" -- 'zines that contained not just Star Trek but pastiche derived from other TV shows (Man From Uncle, The Professionals). Then whole 'zines devoted to other shows (Dr. Who, etc).
Today, fanfiction.net has almost every TV show's fans posting fanfic.
These original TV spinoff fanzines had to be non-profit (and able to prove it) because of violation of copyright. At first, Star Trek, and other shows tried to stop fanzines being printed and circulated with actual legal cease and desist notices for copyright infringement.
This led to a clarification of the copyright law called today "fair use" and with a proper disclaimer and proof you make no profit, you can distribute fanfic.
That re-energized the fanfic community, and now a whole generation has grown up with a very different idea of what copyright is and what it's for.
Remember, Star Trek gathered, connected and energized whole communities of very geekish tech-minded young people. Out of that community's attitudes and activities has arisen the "Open Source" software movement and Creative Commons licensing.
Now we have a whole philosophy of life based on the "Open Source" concepts.
Meanwhile, also out of the (mostly) women fiction writers and readers arose another boundary shattering behavior.
The women who wrote TV pastiche wanted SF-Romance, and wouldn't let the traditional publishers deny it to them. They wrote it themselves.
At that time, you could not sell (professionally) any original SF or Fantasy that had even ONE sex scene in it.
Fanzine markets grew explosively after STAR TREK LIVES! was published by Bantam.
Then you could have go-to-black sex scenes in prof SF/F novels but human/non-human sexual relationship was considered, well, ...kinky?
1985, my SF Romance DUSHAU won the first Romantic Times Award for SF. (3rd novel in that trilogy gets right down to the sexual issue)
For Kindle edition and free chapters see
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
November 16, 1986 issue of The New York Times Book Review published (now famous traditionally published SF author) Camille Bacon-Smith's article SPOCK AMONG THE WOMEN featuring Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg's Star Trek fan fiction.
Then you could have chaste, non-anatomical-language sex scenes in prof SF/F novels.
Academic books mentioned ST fanfic, other newspapers, TV interviews, the internet -- online fanfic explosion.
And now you can hardly sell SF or Fantasy without fully orchestrated, every detailed action revealed, sex scenes. And prof Romance novels use sex scenes the way SF novels once used action-scenes -- as a pacing, punctuation between plot developments.
As the teen fanfic writers and readers grew up, the professional market accommodated their demand for more sex in their adventure fiction (i.e. mixing genres).
Now the biggest professional market is kickass heroine fantasy with combat punctuated by sex scenes. SF without sex isn't selling so well.
SF Snailmail Fandom formed the basis of ST snailmail fandom which created a market which is now served by traditional publishers.
The Indie Film community is following the same developmental path.
The Hurt Locker is an Indie Film. (Independent Film; not a product of Disney, Warner Brothers, big studios).
It's not even the first Indie to win that kind of major attention. Low budget, non-studio films, have done this before.
And that's not a new path. The women's Gothic Novel, once circulated in handwritten manuscripts woman-to-woman, eventually emerged into professionally printed novels.
What young teen fans do quietly on their own, even privately, eventually (used to take 40 years; now it may be only 10 years) emerges to dominate the adult world.
The Indie Film was essentially a fanzine until recent years, and at some levels still is. Most of the indies made are made by beginners or amateurs just for the fun of it.
YouTube has unleashed a flood of talent among the youngest people, learning to entertain an audience with a video, just as young people learned to entertain readers with fanfic and moved on to become professional writers and editors -- who now publish material with those same quirks professionally.
Recent works, like The Hurt Locker, are blazing a trail for works done as much from love of the subject and the medium as for the profit, are reaching award levels.
You must see this one, starring Nichelle Nichols -- click this link to see all the very interesting awards this film won --
Lady Magdelene's
(if you've got 2 or 3 hours - you can watch it on amazon video on-demand for $3)
http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Magdalenes/dp/B002XKK3ZM/rereadablebooksr/
Clicking that link won't force you to pay. You can see all about the movie.
This is a well marketed indie film.
I loved it because the flaws don't bother me any more than the flaws in a fanzine. It showed me a lot about what's happening in the low budget, indie film market, and what real professional skill used in a bare-bones budget film can achieve.
And this one won a number of film festival awards besides the one listed on imdb.com
The point here is that Indie Films have become the modern fanzine, even more than text pastiche on fanfiction.net
And the off-beat, violate-all-the-rules content of these films is becoming mainstream because these indie films are creating an audience.
This Indie Film audience is like the readers of SF in the 1970's who stopped buying traditionally published SF to spend their time and money on Star Trek fanzines.
And then, when Star Trek novels were published by Pocket, they might read those novels, but flatly refuse to follow the professional SF authors who wrote those novels into the author's other SF/F universes.
The publishers concluded that Star Trek fans were not interested in SF/F.
They were wrong.
It was the traditional publisher's rules that turned the readers off.
----------
So here I'll cut you off in suspense. Look for Part II next Tuesday.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
-----------
Introduction
The topic here is "If you want to understand the world, follow the money." And by following the business model and financing sources for the fiction delivery system, we might understand things well enough to boost the Alien Romance field's respectability. So here is a history lesson in financing fiction, followed by how that historical root has shaped what's happening now and reveals what might happen next. If you anticipate what's going to happen next, you can turn a profit on it.
---------
Part I
The world of commercial fiction has been turned inside out, upside down, and backwards by the advent of the Web, and especially Web 2.0 with Web 3.0 and even 4.0, all going mobile.
iPhones, iPads, TV sets that hook up to your home network and let you fish for TV shows and films posted online, with or without a fee, nevermind Kindle and now iPads that can access Kindle's library.
The result of all this technology is a world which closely resembles the world STAR TREK fanzine writers really wanted to create.
And I don't mean in their fiction. Most portrayals of The Enterprise in STAR TREK fanzine stories was less futuristic than the 1960's TV show itself.
I mean in the ability to participate in joint story creations, to communicate instantly, to collaborate and share, all to the purpose of expressing in fiction what is nearest and dearest to the heart. To share universes.
In order to create and purvey their pastiche fiction based on a TV show, fan writers invented an entirely new world.
But they didn't do it all by themselves out of nothing.
Here's how it happened, and I'll show you below what all this has to do with The Hurt Locker (the film about a bomb squad in Iraq that won an Academy Award in 2010).
This also relates to the transformation of the artist's business model by the re-defining of "copyright" erupting from the whole Open Source software movement, and Creative Commons Licensing.
And that copyright issue can be traced back to Star Trek fanzine writers too. Oh, what a tangled web!
Before 1966 and Star Trek, in the 1930's, science fiction magazines connected readers of science fiction and basically invented modern SF as well as SF fandom. In fact, the very people who invented modern SF and created that community (called First Fandom) actually invented the word "fandom" out of "fanatic" and "domain" or "Kingdom."
Science Fiction fans, a bunch of guys, mostly in New York and Philadelphia, got together (physically met in one physical place), and kept meeting regularly and irregularly and created "conventions" as the events where the most of them would turn up.
They admired the writers in the magazines and the very few books. As it became hard to get together physically, they began writing to each other about the stories in the magazines and books, and about the writers, and about each other, and about the most recent gatherings. They invented an entire language to discuss these matters.
There came to be more and more of them, so they needed many copies of their letters to each other, and invented "fanzines." At first these were a few pages filled with letters and essays, copied on a spirit duplicator (which printed in purple ink), and later on mimeograph (decades before xerox copiers were invented), and stapled, then mailed to each other via the Post Office. Yes, snail mailed.
The letters would typically be a few weeks or a few months old by the time you got to read them.
At first, nobody charged money for these fanzines. You got them by contributing a letter or article. The publisher footed the expense out of pocket.
Some 'zines became so large that publishers asked non-contributors to pay a fee for paper, printing and postage. Audiences grew.
I have a fanzine of this variety with a letter from me in it, and my contributor's copy took more than 3 years to catch up with me, what with all the forwarded addresses.
I joined SF snailmail fandom when I was in 7th grade and have been a member of the N3F ever since (National Fantasy Fan Federation - founded by damon knight who also founded SFWA, the profession SF writer's organization where I'm also a Life Member).
Into this world of SF Fandom, Star Trek was born. The show captured the attention of SF Fen (the plural of fan is fen). They discussed it in fanzines.
Devra Langsam and some other New York fen who were captivated by Star Trek started a Star Trek fanzine called Spockanalia -- on mimeo, paper now totally disintegrated, ink faded, and I still have my copies. I had an article MR. SPOCK ON LOGIC, in the 4th issue.
The idea caught on, and suddenly Spockanalia was publishing fiction.
SF 'zines usually didn't publish fiction except as send-ups, spoofs, farces and gotcha's.
But suddenly, dozens of Star Trek fanzines were publishing fiction and articles and letters of comments on the fan written fiction and articles. A whole new world of Star Trek was born.
And Star Trek conventions where fanzines were sold, and story ideas concocted for more fanzines.
I created the Star Trek Welcommittee (modeled on the N3F Welcommittee which had welcomed me into fandom)to answer fan mail from STAR TREK LIVES! ST Welcommittee connected thousands of new and isolated Star Trek fans to the snailmail network. It's being reincarnated on facebook by another fan now.
Today that snailmail world of fanfic and letters of comment on fanfic lives and grows online. Last week here (May 4th, 2010) we derived a writing lesson in SHOW DON'T TELL from a bit of fanfic based on the TV show White Collar published on fanfiction.net.
What has SF Snailmail Fandom to do with Indie Films?
Star Trek fandom produced (is still producing) billions of words of fiction derived from a TV show. It connected thousands of writers and readers in a network that spanned the globe and discussed life in terms of fiction.
The content of that fanfiction violated all the "rules" and requirements of published SF, but was in most cases actually SF.
For a quick overview of classic Star Trek fanfic and some prime examples you can read free see:
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/
The SF-Romance was, I believe, first explored in one of those fanzines, an Inspirational SF Romance.
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/showcase/
Those first classic ST fanzines sold and traded at Star Trek conventions gave rise to the "genzine" -- 'zines that contained not just Star Trek but pastiche derived from other TV shows (Man From Uncle, The Professionals). Then whole 'zines devoted to other shows (Dr. Who, etc).
Today, fanfiction.net has almost every TV show's fans posting fanfic.
These original TV spinoff fanzines had to be non-profit (and able to prove it) because of violation of copyright. At first, Star Trek, and other shows tried to stop fanzines being printed and circulated with actual legal cease and desist notices for copyright infringement.
This led to a clarification of the copyright law called today "fair use" and with a proper disclaimer and proof you make no profit, you can distribute fanfic.
That re-energized the fanfic community, and now a whole generation has grown up with a very different idea of what copyright is and what it's for.
Remember, Star Trek gathered, connected and energized whole communities of very geekish tech-minded young people. Out of that community's attitudes and activities has arisen the "Open Source" software movement and Creative Commons licensing.
Now we have a whole philosophy of life based on the "Open Source" concepts.
Meanwhile, also out of the (mostly) women fiction writers and readers arose another boundary shattering behavior.
The women who wrote TV pastiche wanted SF-Romance, and wouldn't let the traditional publishers deny it to them. They wrote it themselves.
At that time, you could not sell (professionally) any original SF or Fantasy that had even ONE sex scene in it.
Fanzine markets grew explosively after STAR TREK LIVES! was published by Bantam.
Then you could have go-to-black sex scenes in prof SF/F novels but human/non-human sexual relationship was considered, well, ...kinky?
1985, my SF Romance DUSHAU won the first Romantic Times Award for SF. (3rd novel in that trilogy gets right down to the sexual issue)
For Kindle edition and free chapters see
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
November 16, 1986 issue of The New York Times Book Review published (now famous traditionally published SF author) Camille Bacon-Smith's article SPOCK AMONG THE WOMEN featuring Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg's Star Trek fan fiction.
Then you could have chaste, non-anatomical-language sex scenes in prof SF/F novels.
Academic books mentioned ST fanfic, other newspapers, TV interviews, the internet -- online fanfic explosion.
And now you can hardly sell SF or Fantasy without fully orchestrated, every detailed action revealed, sex scenes. And prof Romance novels use sex scenes the way SF novels once used action-scenes -- as a pacing, punctuation between plot developments.
As the teen fanfic writers and readers grew up, the professional market accommodated their demand for more sex in their adventure fiction (i.e. mixing genres).
Now the biggest professional market is kickass heroine fantasy with combat punctuated by sex scenes. SF without sex isn't selling so well.
SF Snailmail Fandom formed the basis of ST snailmail fandom which created a market which is now served by traditional publishers.
The Indie Film community is following the same developmental path.
The Hurt Locker is an Indie Film. (Independent Film; not a product of Disney, Warner Brothers, big studios).
It's not even the first Indie to win that kind of major attention. Low budget, non-studio films, have done this before.
And that's not a new path. The women's Gothic Novel, once circulated in handwritten manuscripts woman-to-woman, eventually emerged into professionally printed novels.
What young teen fans do quietly on their own, even privately, eventually (used to take 40 years; now it may be only 10 years) emerges to dominate the adult world.
The Indie Film was essentially a fanzine until recent years, and at some levels still is. Most of the indies made are made by beginners or amateurs just for the fun of it.
YouTube has unleashed a flood of talent among the youngest people, learning to entertain an audience with a video, just as young people learned to entertain readers with fanfic and moved on to become professional writers and editors -- who now publish material with those same quirks professionally.
Recent works, like The Hurt Locker, are blazing a trail for works done as much from love of the subject and the medium as for the profit, are reaching award levels.
You must see this one, starring Nichelle Nichols -- click this link to see all the very interesting awards this film won --
Lady Magdelene's
(if you've got 2 or 3 hours - you can watch it on amazon video on-demand for $3)
http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Magdalenes/dp/B002XKK3ZM/rereadablebooksr/
Clicking that link won't force you to pay. You can see all about the movie.
This is a well marketed indie film.
I loved it because the flaws don't bother me any more than the flaws in a fanzine. It showed me a lot about what's happening in the low budget, indie film market, and what real professional skill used in a bare-bones budget film can achieve.
And this one won a number of film festival awards besides the one listed on imdb.com
The point here is that Indie Films have become the modern fanzine, even more than text pastiche on fanfiction.net
And the off-beat, violate-all-the-rules content of these films is becoming mainstream because these indie films are creating an audience.
This Indie Film audience is like the readers of SF in the 1970's who stopped buying traditionally published SF to spend their time and money on Star Trek fanzines.
And then, when Star Trek novels were published by Pocket, they might read those novels, but flatly refuse to follow the professional SF authors who wrote those novels into the author's other SF/F universes.
The publishers concluded that Star Trek fans were not interested in SF/F.
They were wrong.
It was the traditional publisher's rules that turned the readers off.
----------
So here I'll cut you off in suspense. Look for Part II next Tuesday.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Sunday, May 09, 2010
Racism and Romance, Speciesism And Subplot
Sometimes, the nastiest topics make for the best stories. Horror, Murder, forbidden love... almost every taboo.
Book Four of the Raine Benares Novels got me thinking about racism and speciesism. And Romance.
I feel I ought to say that Lisa Shearin has been an auto-buy for me since I read her first book in the series, Magic Lost, Trouble Found. I've enjoyed all four of Raine's adventures to date, and am pleased to hear that there will be two more books. I finished Bewitched and Betrayed in the small hours of Wednesday, and have not yet quite recovered.
Yes, it was a page-turner, and I was thoroughly self-indulgent/irresponsible to stay up half the night to finish it. I'm too old for that! Moreover, as I painted a ceiling yesterday, I found myself reciting the name of one of the fascinating male characters. Now, I'm really too old for that!!!!
Spoiler alert.
I'm going to try to avoid a spoiler.... but I suppose most of Lisa Shearin's avid readers and followers know that Lisa announced on her blog that there would be a decision made regarding Raine's love triangle.
Moreover, Lisa Shearin's world-building, characterization, and creativity is so enchanting that I cannot believe that the primary reason people read books two, three and four was because they wanted to know how the love triangle would be resolved.
Possibly, a menage would have been more interesting as a solution. Definitely, actually.
Which brings me back to speciesm.
To my way of reading this series, everything boils down to the simmering hatred that the goblins have for the elves and vice versa. It's like Iran and Israel. The insane and evil goblin King and his current administration would like to purge the world of elves. The elves would like to exist. If they are attacked, they will defend themselves vigorously.
Everyone wants the ultimate weapon, even the undead. (Which reminds me of Harry Potter and The Sorceror's Stone on steroids, because the only safe person to have the weapon --a stone-- is the one person who does not want to use it.)
Not every goblin is bent on world domination. There are broad-minded goblins. There are goblins who are sexually attracted to elves. Society disapproves of inter-species liaisons, but lust rules --or at least, it rules the loins of goblin dark mages-- so there are half-breeds, and the half-breeds tend to be badly treated by both high elves and old goblins.
There are also evil-minded elves who favor pre-emptive strikes and ethnic cleansing. One can be beheaded for having a mismatched pair of parents, or for marrying into the wrong race, provided more reasonable charges can be trumped up for a legal figleaf.
Pun intended, goblins come in all shades of grey. The elves run the entire moral gamut, from the darkest of elven dark mages to bright white avenging archangels.
Traditionally, do forbidden love stories have to either end badly? Could an elven Juliet ever expect to live happily ever after with a goblin Romeo? Would Shakespeare's play have been classed a successful comedy if the nice, virtuous Paris (Juliet's father's choice for her) had been a little more proactive?
Master Plot #15 in Ronald B Tobias's "20 Master Plots (And How to Build Them)."
Forbidden love stories never end well. Abelard was lucky. He only got castrated.
Much as I would like to read a forbidden love story with a happy ending, Raine's is not a forbidden love story at all. The racism and speciesism are background and motivation for the bad guys.
Pity! Then again, off the top of my head, I cannot think of any good examples of SFR where an alien hero's people seriously want to wipe out the human heroine's people.
Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed Bewitched and Betrayed, and recommend it highly.
Book Four of the Raine Benares Novels got me thinking about racism and speciesism. And Romance.
I feel I ought to say that Lisa Shearin has been an auto-buy for me since I read her first book in the series, Magic Lost, Trouble Found. I've enjoyed all four of Raine's adventures to date, and am pleased to hear that there will be two more books. I finished Bewitched and Betrayed in the small hours of Wednesday, and have not yet quite recovered.
Yes, it was a page-turner, and I was thoroughly self-indulgent/irresponsible to stay up half the night to finish it. I'm too old for that! Moreover, as I painted a ceiling yesterday, I found myself reciting the name of one of the fascinating male characters. Now, I'm really too old for that!!!!
Spoiler alert.
I'm going to try to avoid a spoiler.... but I suppose most of Lisa Shearin's avid readers and followers know that Lisa announced on her blog that there would be a decision made regarding Raine's love triangle.
Moreover, Lisa Shearin's world-building, characterization, and creativity is so enchanting that I cannot believe that the primary reason people read books two, three and four was because they wanted to know how the love triangle would be resolved.
Possibly, a menage would have been more interesting as a solution. Definitely, actually.
Which brings me back to speciesm.
To my way of reading this series, everything boils down to the simmering hatred that the goblins have for the elves and vice versa. It's like Iran and Israel. The insane and evil goblin King and his current administration would like to purge the world of elves. The elves would like to exist. If they are attacked, they will defend themselves vigorously.
Everyone wants the ultimate weapon, even the undead. (Which reminds me of Harry Potter and The Sorceror's Stone on steroids, because the only safe person to have the weapon --a stone-- is the one person who does not want to use it.)
Not every goblin is bent on world domination. There are broad-minded goblins. There are goblins who are sexually attracted to elves. Society disapproves of inter-species liaisons, but lust rules --or at least, it rules the loins of goblin dark mages-- so there are half-breeds, and the half-breeds tend to be badly treated by both high elves and old goblins.
There are also evil-minded elves who favor pre-emptive strikes and ethnic cleansing. One can be beheaded for having a mismatched pair of parents, or for marrying into the wrong race, provided more reasonable charges can be trumped up for a legal figleaf.
Pun intended, goblins come in all shades of grey. The elves run the entire moral gamut, from the darkest of elven dark mages to bright white avenging archangels.
Traditionally, do forbidden love stories have to either end badly? Could an elven Juliet ever expect to live happily ever after with a goblin Romeo? Would Shakespeare's play have been classed a successful comedy if the nice, virtuous Paris (Juliet's father's choice for her) had been a little more proactive?
Master Plot #15 in Ronald B Tobias's "20 Master Plots (And How to Build Them)."
Forbidden love stories never end well. Abelard was lucky. He only got castrated.
Much as I would like to read a forbidden love story with a happy ending, Raine's is not a forbidden love story at all. The racism and speciesism are background and motivation for the bad guys.
Pity! Then again, off the top of my head, I cannot think of any good examples of SFR where an alien hero's people seriously want to wipe out the human heroine's people.
Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed Bewitched and Betrayed, and recommend it highly.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Vision and Intelligence
About a week ago I saw a TV show on the Science Channel about animal intelligence. I'd heard about most of the phenomena before, such as the evidence that parrots don't merely "parrot" words but apply them in the proper context. For instance, a parrot won't say "goodbye" when a person is arriving. A parrot on this program actually knew how to add, or at least to count cumulatively, which is basically the essence of adding. While the trainer was testing another bird on identifying numbers, the older bird spoke up with "two" when the first two items were shown. When another pair of items was shown, instead of "two," the older bird said "four." And when yet two more items appeared, he said "six." There was no chance of cues from the trainer, as is the usual explanation for animals who "count," because the trainer was trying to get the less experienced bird to say "two," not even interacting directly with the older one.
One feature on this program was completely new to me, though: Monkeys can recognize—and count—objects in pictures. The experimenters put out two boxes, one with a picture of an apple, the other with a picture of one and a half apples. The monkeys consistently went to the box with the image of a larger amount of fruit. A further experiment tested whether they knew the difference between an image and a real object, which human babies don't, at first (below a certain age, a baby will try to pick up a pictured object off a page). Monkeys do know the difference; they always went for a real fraction of an apple taped on a box rather than box with a picture of whole apples. (It was not explained how the experimenters ruled out the possibility that the animals identified the real fruit by smell rather than by three-dimensionality.)
Suppose, however, we meet aliens with eyes or brains so different from ours that, although intelligent, they don't recognize that a two-dimensional image is supposed to represent an object? Remember the rabbits in WATERSHIP DOWN, who are presented as living and thinking like rabbits but with a human degree of self-awareness. Like those potential aliens, they are baffled by another rabbit warren's attempt to portray events from their myth cycle in the medium of two-dimensional mosaics. How can colored stones stuck on a wall "be" the rabbit god? Human beings are so used to learning and teaching by means of pictures that this difference might present a major impediment to recognizing the other species' intelligence or, at least, communicating with them. In a different medium, suppose those ETs had literally no concept of or capacity for nonfactual speech? Imagine the alienness of trying to communicate with a species that couldn't understand stories or even hypothetical examples.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
One feature on this program was completely new to me, though: Monkeys can recognize—and count—objects in pictures. The experimenters put out two boxes, one with a picture of an apple, the other with a picture of one and a half apples. The monkeys consistently went to the box with the image of a larger amount of fruit. A further experiment tested whether they knew the difference between an image and a real object, which human babies don't, at first (below a certain age, a baby will try to pick up a pictured object off a page). Monkeys do know the difference; they always went for a real fraction of an apple taped on a box rather than box with a picture of whole apples. (It was not explained how the experimenters ruled out the possibility that the animals identified the real fruit by smell rather than by three-dimensionality.)
Suppose, however, we meet aliens with eyes or brains so different from ours that, although intelligent, they don't recognize that a two-dimensional image is supposed to represent an object? Remember the rabbits in WATERSHIP DOWN, who are presented as living and thinking like rabbits but with a human degree of self-awareness. Like those potential aliens, they are baffled by another rabbit warren's attempt to portray events from their myth cycle in the medium of two-dimensional mosaics. How can colored stones stuck on a wall "be" the rabbit god? Human beings are so used to learning and teaching by means of pictures that this difference might present a major impediment to recognizing the other species' intelligence or, at least, communicating with them. In a different medium, suppose those ETs had literally no concept of or capacity for nonfactual speech? Imagine the alienness of trying to communicate with a species that couldn't understand stories or even hypothetical examples.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
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