My book club will be discussing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on Saturday so I thought I’d write out my discussion topics beforehand. Which is why this may read like a rambling and unfocussed sort of thing than a proper essay.
If you had not told me that Blade Runner was based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I would have been hard pressed to guess that as the source material. “Loosely” based is an understatement. Riddley Scott may have glanced at the book sitting on a shelf. Once. Someone related to the film, possibly the second Grip or Best Boy’s third assistant, may have read the book and told someone a half-remembered plot synopsis. The book and movie overlap in that some characters share names and there are human-like androids hunted by bounty hunters. and that’s it.
Normally, this would be a sticking point for me but Blade Runner is such a good movie and Androids such a weird book that I don’t mind that they are essentilaly two different things. I’m glad Riddley Scott changed the title,[1] because it would have been confusing otherwise. Anyone sitting down to watch Blade Runner and expecting to see anything about Mercerism and Empathy boxes and Deckard’s preoccupation with owning a live animal would have been massively disappointed.
I could talk about the film all day long. It’s a classic that has held up remarkably well for a movie that is almost 30 years old. Few sci-fi films from the 80s can say that.
So. The book has a whole subplot about how fallout from the nuclear war[2] has made whole species and phyla already extinct, while the remaining real animals are highly sought after status symbols. Deckard, being just a poor cop who shoots androids for a living can only afford an electric sheep. Ersatz robot animals fill the need for the less fortunate and poor to own an animal, to have something to devote themselves to, as caring for a living creature is a sign of compassion and one of the dominant precepts of Mercerism, a new religion that Deckards wife, Iran is heavily into.[3]
Mercerism is such an obviously fake religion, even more so than Scientology, if you can imagine it. Over the course of the story, it’s even proven to be false, the empathic scenerio poeple experience when they use the empathy box to commune directly with mercer turns out to be just a series of short films made years before. It’s like a cult that watches clips of Charlie Chaplin films and builds a religion out of being kind to tramps. Very odd.
The whole Mercerism scam is uncovered by a popular radio/TV show host named Buster Friendly who is very clearly an android and runs a show that most poeple watch religiously. So it’s sort of a low grade religious war between Pop culture cults, The Little Tramp Vs. Coco. And, keep in mind, this is all just the subplot material.
The Andies[4] are depicted as grim, nihilistic sociopaths. You aren’t rooting for them in any way. Roy is barely there at all, certainly not the leering somber poetic replicant from the movie, who just wants more life. He and the rest of the Andies are pretty much resigned to the fact that they’re going to be hunted down and shot by Deckard and are just trying to prolong this from happening as much as they reasonably can, whicvh is not long at all. Pris shows up early and hangs out, manipulating a chicken head named Isadore.[5] Isadore really just wants to be liked and since he can’t even afford fake animals, he adopts the Andies and tries to take care of them.
As with many of Dick’s later novels, androids has a weird, anticlimactic mind fuck of an ending, in which the ghost of Mercer, the debunked ersatz prophet helps him shoot the Andies, then make shim drive to the deserted foreboding land of Oregon where Deckard finds a toad that he at first thinks is real, until he take sit home and his wife shows him that it’s electric. The End.
The movie bares so little resemblance to the book it was based on that it’s almost impossible to say that you prefer the book over the movie. That Blade Runner came from Androids, even in some weird distorted way, is one of those weird achievements of cinematic history that we’ll just have to marvel at. If pressed, i’d say I like the movie better, if only because it’s ambiguity and narrative structure is a lot more thought out and elgantly conveyed. Philip K. dick was not exactly a prose stylist and some of his sentences are clunkier than they aught to be, some of his ideas even more so.
Not that the book is without merit. Androids has some really great examples of those oddly charming anachronisms you find in mid-20th century sci-fi. The cops use laser guns but carry around blurry printouts of duty sheets. Videophones are in every home and flying car. There are weird, borderline telepathic mood enhancing machines, ubiquitous celebrity driven programming but no internet, and of course it’s 2019, and the Soviet Union is still alive and kicking. A strange and halucinatory mixture of the profound and the kitsch, all duking it out to save your soul, so long as you’re human and can prove it.
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1. There’s an interesting story in itself: there apparently is another book titled Blade Runner, about futuristic black market organ trading, (which sounds an awful lot like Repo Men, quite honestly). Scott apparently bought the film rights to that now-obscure book solely because he liked the title. I wonder how the author of this now obscure book feels about that? Searching any bookstore oronline will land you hip-deep in a nest of the movie’s fandom.
2. That, in good old Phildickean fashion, no one really remember. The details are all a bit fuzzy for the characters, even the ones who aren’t chicken heads, but it’s generally regarded as this unavoidable natural disaster that happened int he past and is just one of those things. The slow death of a planet caused by humanity’s uncontrollably need to destroy things.
3. Oh right, Deckard has a wife. She’s not in the movie, as it would be too complicated. He still sleeps with Rachel though, but the dynamics of that relationship are completely reversed. Rachel in the book is an emotionally manipulative sociopath who pretty much seduces Deckard (who in tern lets her for reasons that are only slightly creepy) because she cana nd then kills the goat he baught with the bounty money he earned offing a few other androids. Deckard and Rachel don’t run off together but neither does Deckard rape Rachel, as he doe sin the movie.
4. They’re only called Replicants in the movie, and referred to as Andies or Androids in the book.
5. Isadore fills the role of JF Sebastianin the movie. Chicken heads are basically people who are too damaged genetically to be allowed to immigrate to the off-world colonies. Isadore is a retarded manchild who realizes a little too late that he’s being jerked around by Pris and Roy. He’s not a super smart geneticist with a disorder like Sebastian but just a not too bright guy who works for a fake animal hospital, pickign up and repairing malfunctioning electric pets. He has one of the saddest scenes in the book, where he picks up a sick real cat and doesn’t realize it’s owner thought they were a real vet until the animal dies.
Over at io9, Charlie Jane asks a very good question:
Is science fiction uniquely suited to blockbuster movies, because it’s a genre that lends itself to explosions and rampant breasts? And conversely, is the Hollywood version of science fiction too action-oriented ever to spawn more quirky, arty shows like Mad Men or Glee?
The question arose because of Entertainment Weekly’s Mark Harris, who pointed out the inescapable conclusion that TV shows are generally of higher quality than movies. He reached this conclusion by comparing the abysmal movie selection in the theaters with the stellar selection of dramatic television programming starting up their summer seasons. But this isn’t a recent problem. Going back years, maybe even decades, there’s certain expectations that arise when it comes to science fiction.
In the minds of most people, Sci-fi is just a shallow mess of cliches that lead to boobs and explosions. Literate people know differently but we’re not exactly Hollywood’s target audience.This isn’t entirely the fault of Hollywood execs, as movie goers still pay money to see movies like Transformers. As long as we’re letting the trash be the only example on the Big Screen, no one will give a rats ass about good sci-fi movies.
And until there’s a sci-fi show that doesn’t blow it’s wad of goodwill and potential on an ending that isn’t A)quasi-mystical, B) incoherent, or C) Both then no one will take it seriously on TV.
What we need to prove Sci-fi in a visual medium isn’t shallow is a science fictional equivalent of Mad Men or The Wire. Something that can get people talking and not be silly.
(I’d settle for the sci-fi equivalent of True Blood, a soap opera with T&A that has tight storytelling and good acting, but only as a stepping stone.)
As for what to do about good sci-fi movies, I’m out of ideas. Until the franchises and remakes die off, there’s really no hope for original sci-fi movie making. The inglorious demise of Moon proved that. What should have been the biggest Science Fiction film since Star Wars or Blade Runner was swallowed whole and shat out by the likes of Transformers and Avatar.
As Charlie Jane suggests, this may be the result of the cognitive demands of a mythos-heavy genre show:
[...] maybe the thing that’s making television more ambitious, and a denser experience for audiences, is harder to do with genre shows because it’s asking too much of viewers. We can handle genre elements within the predictable formula of the self-contained story — but if you’re going to tell us a long, twisty story where every installment just takes you further into the world of the characters, then that’s asking enough, right there. You can’t expect the average viewer to deal with long-running narrative complexity and grapple with aliens or time travel. Or maybe the model of the long-running serialized drama doesn’t work with genre elements, because the mythos becomes too confusing for the average person.
This sounds like a compelling argument and there may be a microgram of truth to it but I think there’s something more fundamental goign on here.
There’s nothing original anymore. This isn’t just a cynical complaint, it’s an operating principal for being a successful creative person. Understand this principal and move on to creating an interesting well developed story that uses the tropes and hooks we’re familiar with to do something with a satisfying dramatic arc. Dollhouse wasn’t too original for it’s own good. It was dicked around with by the usual suspects at Fox. Had it been on Showtime or HBO it’d be starting it’s 3rd season now. But that’s neither here nor there.
Let’s use True Blood as an example: this is a story that uses familiar tropes (vampires and werewolves exist). But what sets it apart from Twilight is the characters and how the writers develop that concept into a compelling story. You could do a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon style retrofuturist sci-fi series, complete with ray guns and rockets with a contemporary spin on it and not only would people love it, they’d demand more. The catch is, the writing and characters. There’s no intrinsic difference between vampires and aliens or werewolves and robots. They’re just different flavored metaphors.
But to do a successful show with either, they have to be up to the standards of good TV writing we’ve come to expect. That was not the case with the recent Flash Gordon series but it very well could have been, if someone had been put in charge who had vision. Syfy cut corners though, and that’s the first step towards doom, regardless of medium.
So I watched the final episode of Lost last night and man, that was some week shit. Really just some of the worst storytelling I’ve ever seen on Television.
The best analogy I can come up with is that it was like watching 5 episodes of Star Wars, being pumped, wanting to find out how it ends and then, when you start the 6th episode, you discover that all that stuff about the Empire and the Rebellion, Luke and his father, the Force and the Jedi didn’t mean a thing, that what the story was really about this whole time were these two ewoks and a magic cave. And you can’t pull the plug out of the tub in the magic cave or something unspeakably bad will happen. But it doesn’t matter anyway because what really happened is everyone died n a Pod Race back in episode 1.
Now all you Losties who made fun of us BSG fans for being disappointed can suck it because, wow, you got conned.
The new novel is going quite well, so naturally I took a couple of weeks off to write a short story. This makes more sense than it would at first seem.
When doing some rather detailed world building, i find it helpful to do some beta testing of that world. Work out the kinks and maybe explain some back story as to how things got that way. Even if it doesn’t make it into the finished manuscript, at least you know why, say, the Exposition Empires took hold. A short story can be a good way to explore this, and in away that doesn’t interfere with the main plot of your novel.
My plan of attack for this particular a short story was to look at the quasi-steampunkish[1] world from a different perspective. To keep things simple, i borrowed a fairly well known story structure. Basically, the short story was going to be a Doctor Who adventure with the serial numbers filed off. Ix-nay on the time travel bit, just focus on the crazy mad Captain Ersatz of The Doctor and his assistant fighting some weird monster in the setting. Seemed simple enough.
Half way through I discovered something tangentially interesting that had been bothering me for a while but that I couldn’t quite figure out. Namely, that the Doctor is a really lousy character. I mean relaly, he warps meta-fictional reality around him wherever he goes. This makes writing a good story with him as the central character nearly impossible. Which is why the best Doctor Who stories of the last few seasons have been the ones where he’s hardly in it at all (”Blink”) or not the protagonist (”Girl in the Fireplace”). The problem with The Doctor is that he’s evolved over the last nearly 40 years into a force of nature.[2] Stories about him feel trite and silly, because he’s essentially a walking avatar for the author. He knows everything, can fix any plot hole with a magic wand[3] and warps the dramatic stakes out of kilter.
What I mean by the later is, the presence of The Doctor introduces a randomizing factor into the story. He either brings aliens to well known historic events,[4] or shows up at important moments to alter events so that they concur with the consensual time line.[5] That is, civil drama– all the minutia of daily life, the sort of stuff that makes up romantic comedies and period dramas — is either reduced to meaningless theatrics or amped up to high melodrama — the stuff of action adventure stories with high stakes, political intrigue and cosmic importance. The Doctor is a hurricane of plot coupons, in other words. Stuff happens because he is there. He doesn’t have to do anything but show up to make stuff happen. This seriously challenges storytelling.
I got around this problem with my short story by simply cutting the lawyer-friendly Doctor-type character. This forces the normal human type characters to fight an existential enigma without resorting to magic wands or staying one step ahead of the monster by knowing everything instantly. They have to discover, along with the reader, why these weird things are happening and then react against that drama in a human way. But I can do that because I’m not actually writing a Doctor Who story. Stephen Moffett, author of the two good Doctor stories I mentioned above, can’t really leave the Doctor out of Doctor Who, because then it’s Random People Running Around Fighting Monsters. Which still works, but would cost him his job. He gets around it though in an interesting way. Or rather, two interesting ways.
In “Blink” Moffett removes the Doctor form the main plot. The Weeping Angels feed on potential energy, zapping people out of their time, into the past and feeding on the momentum they leave behind. Not only does this create one of the more genuinely frightening monsters in the show (killer angel statues that only move when you turn your back!), it removes the Doctor from the plot in a legitimate way, while still keeping his presence in the story. It’s up to someone else to figure out what is happening and save The Doctor. It also allows for some really nifty timey wimey shenanigans, which is great and novel for a show where time travel is usually just an excuse for changing the setting.
In “The Girl in the Fireplace”, The Doctor has a more active role but the story isn’t about him, it’s about Madame de Pompadour and her relation to this “imaginary friend” who intersects her life in a few crucial instances. Again, this plays with the meta-narrative of the show’s concept in a way that is unique and adds some much needed variety to the story. Instead of showing The Doctor palling around with the king, saving the day in his usual know-it-all way, he’s struggling to stay one step ahead of an enigma. This makes him almost human (up until the end when he pulls the usual “I can do anything because I’m secretly a God” stunt but even then it backfires poignantly.
In both stories, the Doctor is challenged by being put in positions outside of his normal know-it-all comfort zone.[6] He is forced to make dramatically relevant sacrifices, something he normally is not allowed to do by nature of him being a know-it-all space god/force of nature. Which, from a storytelling perspective is something to keep in mind. If things are going to easily, remove your Doctor and let everyone else squirm or switch the focus so it’s someone else who has to deal with this mad bad and out of control force that is outside of their normal comfort zone.
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1. Steampunk is an evocative sub-genre but it means very little as a nomenclature. It’s curiously light on steam and rarely has anything punk about it. My version is even more so, which makes it kind of hard to really explain what the world is like. It’s neither Victorian nor altogether steamy. It’s more Interwar period post-steampunk retrofuturistic. Raygun Gothic, without the ray guns.
2. And in the hands of lazy or not too terribly skilled writer, a walking Deus Ex Machina.
3. The sonic screwdriver can do pretty much anything the plot calls for, short of killing a person directly or reversing the flow of time. When they blew it up at the start of season 5, I had hoped they would leave it gone. But alas, no. The TARDIS just made him a new model, with the added ability that it now serves as an all purpose medical scanner/tricorder type know it all sensor.
4. Like the killer clockwork robots who show up at the court of Louis XV.
5. As in “The Fires of Pompeii” where he blew up the volcano in order to save the world. It makes sense in context. Sort of.
6. Alas, this can’t happen in every episode, for some reason. It’s still fun to see the Doctor save the day by being brilliant and impossible, but I’d like to see him do it by being human and having to make sacrifices just a little more often.
This is everything that is wrong with the global economy, all in one tidy little package. And yes, it comes from the UAE, which along with Dubai, is emblematic of late stage capitalism in all it’s horrific beauty. It’s the perfect mix of traditional values and unregulated commerce that US Conservatives are always going on about but don’t have the balls to act out. There’s a gross pageantry in that part of the world that still finds medieval displays of ostentatious wealth to be just fine and dandy. In Europe, they made sumptuary laws against this sort of thing for a reason. So, if there’s some grandiose manifestation of opulent greed run amok, it will shimmer into existance in that crass little pocket of decadence, like a heat mirage filtered through Donald Trump’s libido. I’m not one to go in for supernatural explanations when human agency is good enough at explaining things but fucking hell, a gold-dispensing vending machine? There is clearly an evil force at work here. Probably a Djinn. Maybe a wizard. An evil, evil wizard.
There’s really only one thing you can pay for with gold. Or rather, one class of thing and none of it wholesome. You can’t drop by the corner market in Abu Dubai and pick up a gallon of milk, paid for with a gold dabloon. An ingot will not buy you a candy bar, or even a meal at a posh restaurant. The staff just doesn’t have the wherewithal to handle that sort of transaction. Where do you stack the bars where the busboys won’t trip over them? Counting out a till full of gold dust at the end of the night brings a fresh hell to the dreams of anyone whose ever worked retail. You just can’t spend gold anywhere, is what I’m getting at. That’s why we have paper money and electronic accounting. Lugging around a purse full of pieces of eight instills one to levels of pomposity we tend to find a bit gouche. A fist full of gold inspires one to dress the part. Before long, you’re wearing poet sleeves unironically, carrying around snuff and whipping out silk hankies. That’s why this shit goes down over in the UAE. They’ve already got the fancy wardrobe for that sort of thing. You see a man in caftan and mirror shades, accompanied by an entourage of thugs in thousand dollar shoes and you expect that man to have on his person a velvet lined bag full of precious metals. Well, not on his person. He has someone who handles the carrying of such things for him. Probably a eunuch.
But why? Why convert a chunk of your walking around cash into a piece of gold?* Just to have something fancy to fondle when you get bored of belittling the peasants?
The sort of man who would want gold from a dispenser at any hour of the day is the sort of man who wouldn’t think twice about buying a person. ” Buying as person what? A fancy watch? A painting?” No. That sentence didn’t end prematurely. You deal in gold when you want to purchase a human life, but don’t want to mess around with the sticky legal contrails paper currency and digital transactions leave behind.
Gold is the perfect currency for human trafficking. Child prostitutes. Slave labor. What have you. And if you’re not into the buying and selling of other people, there’s always good old fashioned money laundering. Gold is untraceable. It’s also a commodity with a proven, intrinsic value and while the price fluctuates, it’s never not going to be in demand. Which of course makes sense why they’d install the first gold vending machine in the UAE. Not exactly a nice neighborhood, even if everyone’s driving Lamborghinis and dressed like CEOs.
And of course, there’s the other end of that queasy supply and demand transaction. That repugnant slave trader you met in some abandoned parking garage at 2am may have some even less savory business ventures he’d like to fund with that gold of yours. There’s always someone else looking to trade you something interesting for your pile of gold bars. And it ain’t a roast beef sandwich with all the trimmings, that’s for certain.
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* Fun fact: Since pissing off so many legit businesses with his cretinous rants, Glenn Beck’s show is heavily sponsored by companies who offer to buy your gold jewelry, for which they will pay you the going market rate. This is part of a growing trend n the Tea Bagger subculture, which has decided to embrace, among many other bad ideas, investing in gold as away to survive the coming socialist/Marxist economic collapse. This has created a small but growing investment bubble in gold. And as we all know, investment bubbles are just keen!
Wonkette has the updated list of sins from the Family Research Council. No real surprise that under the heading of State and National Sins, it’s basiclaly GOP talking points all the way down.
We’ve come to expect groups like the FRC to get all butthurt about the loss of White Male Privilege and the right to hate on gays,* but it’s interesting to see how many of these “sins” are a repackaging of Conservative anti-tax/anti-regulation memes. They seem to have taken Jesus’ beef with the money changers and run with it in all sorts of new and intriguing directions. He not just hung out with tax collectors but apparently beat them up and took their lunch money. “Render unto Ceasar this, Motherfucker!” How that translates into being anti-environment is just weird. They’ve internalized anti-liberal sentiment to the point where it’s a knee jerk reaction. They’ll oppose anything so long as it’s in the same gravitational pull as Obama, George Soros and hippies.
Which all goes to add more evidence to my thesis that American Christianity is not so much a religion as a package of tribal identity memes used to justify a lifestyle that is becoming more and more obviously unsustainable. Used to be, Conservatives just didn’t like paying taxes because some of their pennies would go to to help black people. despicable but at least an obvious outgrowth of their sense of lost privilege and a drift away form the Good Old Days of grandpa’s honest bigotry. But now it’s become part of a larger culture war issue, to the point where environmentalism and progressive taxation and social justice are inverted into anti-christian activities by the very nature of them being part of the liberal agenda. They hate that the world is changing, to the point that any lifestyle change, no matter how banal, is considered a spiritual threat. Once you become opposed to energy-saver light bulbs and hybrid cars on the grounds that they’re Satanic, you may want to take a step back and get a little perspective.
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* There’s probably someone’s thesis in trying to figure out how polytheism got tangled together with multiculturalism for these nimrods. Apaprently, respecting the rights of Mexican people to exist is tantamount to worshiping Baal. though it does explain how Arizona’s new “No Walking Down the Street While Hispanic” law comes from. Well, not explains, so much as poorly rationalizes an ad hoc association of bigotry with religious dogma.
I was alone that morning in the library when the strange woman returned the book that did not belong.
That sentence has been in my head (and on paper) for about six years now. It’s the first line to a story. I think. The thing is, I have no idea what the next sentence is. I’ve tried figuring out who “I” am[1], who “The strange woman is”[2] and why the book doesn’t belong.[3] The number of possible permutations of all three variables is staggering. And I think I’ve decided that they don’t matter. Nothing I could come up with could improve on the story. I think that one sentence is the story. The universal I, a hint at longing, lust or love and the deliverance of knowledge arcane, foreboding and possibly forbidden. Anything else i might have to say on the matter would just be embellishment. This story is a little longer than six words, but it fulfills the same quality as that exercise in concision: economy of language, precision of word choice, reliance on and acceptance of the profound and multiform variability of the English language, it’s nuance speaking volumes in single vowels. More importantly, it’s an exercise in knowing when to stop.
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1. which is more than the usual existential conundrum, as there are quite a few possibilities besides myself, narratively speaking.
2. Is she very strange? Merely peculiar? A little eccentric? Does she walk with a limp, have a glass hand or an eye patch? Or is she just inscrutable? Perhaps she’s a Manic Pixie Dream girl? A femme fatale? A mousy, gangster’s moll with a lisp?
3. I’ve determined it’s at the very least not the usual sort of wrong book, as in it simply comes from another collection. It should be a portentous book, full of omens and riddles, possibly in a cipher, maybe in a made up language. I toyed around with it containing the secret history of the United States, but then i read Crooked little Vein and decided that well was dry.
Don’t mind me, I’m just going to spill a few links here so I can find them later. This is a reference post of cool things that, for the astute, will give you an idea of what the new book is about, since I mentioned nothing concrete in the previous post.
A flickr set of the great French illustrator and writer, Albert Robida. A contemporary of Verne, he wrote farcical futuristic satire about what sort of life we’d be living in the 20th century, as seen form the late edge of the 19th. Brilliant bizarre stuff.
A couple of links to dictonaries of old timey slang and one on how to talk like Frank Sinatra. In case you were wondering and I know you are.
An interesting article on everyone’s favorite topic, sex tourism. Kids love Thai lady boys!
And Steampunk Magazine has released issue 7 into the wild.
What do you do when the story goes off the rails like, as John Rogers put it, a burning train full of pantless clowns?
You bury the dead and walk away, preferably in slow motion while ”Everyone” by Van Morrison plays on the soundtrack.
So, that’s basically what I’ve been doing these last few weeks, ignoring the blog and burying the dead story that was formerly The Man From Planet X. “But what happened?” says nice kind hypothetical you, “I thought everything was going well. You had a plot outline, a structure, your characters were humming along and everything seemed like it was moving towards Miller Time.”
Well, see that’s the thing. Sometimes, you can do everything right and one day, the story just has an aneurysm and falls down on the kitchen floor.
What happened was this: the plot stopped working I was running in circles, trying to figure out how to move the characters from one contrived set of circumstances to another in a way that would be entertaining, both for me and the reader. And it wasn’t working. The circumstances of the story were too contrived. I had a lot of cool stuff and fun characters but everything they said and did was flat, pointless and required an epic level of disbeleif to be suspended on very thin wires. It wasn’t fun or alive. Worse, it wasn’t my story.
At some point, the tale had turned into some wrote bit of sci-fi pablum. Just another Saturday matinee thriller where something weird and lifeless and hollow happened for no real reason other than the thought that hey, it be kinda cool if a time traveling astronaut were to get in a fist fight with Transhumanist fascists dressed like Lady Gaga. You see? That’s not me! That’s not the story I wanted to tell. So, for now at least, Major Tom will remain lost in space. Maybe at some point in the future, I’ll bring him back down to Earth and see if I can’t find something worth his time. Until then, he’ll just have to remain a junkie, strung out on heavens high, reaching an all time low.
Luckily, this is where plan B comes in to play.
“What do you mean, plan B?!” says hypothetical you. “There was no mention of Plan B when we started this trip!”
That’s because there’s always a plan B. Its a given. If you want to write for fun and profit, you’d better have more than one story to tell, otherwise, it’ll be a real short trip.
Plan B in this case is another novel that I had been tinkering with. I already had all the character notes, a skeleton of the world built and enough of a plot to get the ball rolling in short order. Turns out — and I’d completely forgotten this — I’d already written the first five chapters even. reading over them again after nearly a year or so, I found they worked really well, so much so that I can’t for the life of me remember why i set this story aside. In the last week, I’ve already roughed out nearly three more chapters.
And here’s the best part: I already feel a lot like I’m home in this story. Like it’s already worn in and I just have to pull it out of the back of the closet and put it on my feet. There’s something to be learned here: that sometimes, the real way to succeed as a writer is to fail. Fail hard. Fail gloriously. Then pick up and take what you’ve learned and start again.
The iPad came out this weekend and the backlash is in full form. “Why would I want a big iPod?” says the computer geek, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I already have a netbook running Red Hat Linux.”
Saying that you wouldn’t want an iPad because you already have a laptop is missing the point.The iPad isn’t designed for or marketed to the tech savvy or computer literate. It’s not for geeks who want to build websites in their spare time (and neither is it for tinkerers, hackers or makers). It’s for people who don’t see a use for a laptop, because they only use desktop computers at work, to write reports or run spreadsheets, and can’t imagine why anyone would want to spend their spare time doing something that looks like work. It’s for people curious about this whole Youtube/twitter/facebook/ebook thing they keep hearing about. The iPad is cheaper than a laptop, and marketed as a thing that does simple stuff for people who don’t normally play on computers. It’s for consuming media as fast or as slow as you want it, not for playing Net Cowboy in the digital wilderness. It’s a spork, not a Swiss Army knife.
Tech savvy tinkerers can use it too, as a way to separate their social media playtime form their working on a laptop time, so it does have that geeky, gadget fetish factor. But that’s a secondary market. The iPad is the machine that will introduce your grandma to facebook or let your macho buddy who doesn’t do all that nerdy computer stuff read an ebook or play a game. Neither will be frightened by having to sit down at a computer. Because it isn’t a computer. it’s an iPad. It isn’t for the faithful, it’s a missionary machine.
Being of the geek faithful, you may have a hard time wrapping your head aorund the idea that Uncle Steve made a new toy for the dumb kids to play with. That’s OK. Your only sin is being too imaginative. You wanted something that would change the world and what you got was just another cool gadget. I’m sure once you get one of your own though, you’ll get over it.
