So much praise, so you will probably not be too heartbroken if I offer some criticism?
I read “In the company of ogres”, and sort of liked it. But it was something about it…
Then I stopped reading, as the next books (or former) did not seem to appeal to me. I don’t know why.
Then I picked up “Monster”. And read it. Some of it was funny. Some of it was really funny.
But I did make the mistake of visiting your blog before I had finished the book. And I read what you said about “TOO MANY CURSES”, about you being proud of writing a novel without any real “shift” in characters, and no romance, and that being the point. Then it struck me. What I had problems with in “In the company…”  I read the rest of “Monster”, with this thought in the back of my mind. Stuck, couldn’t get it out. I was expecting the same feeling I had when I finished “In the company…” And I got it. It might have been because I was expecting it. But I don’t think so.
The “problem” was that the stories seemed too much like “this happened, and then we went back to nothing (i.e. our ordinary lives)”. No closure, just “back to normal”.
So, you may be very satisfied you managed to write “too many curses” without any “shift” in the characters and no romance, but me personally, I am a bit dissatisfied that I feel you managed the same in “In the company…” and “Monster”.
I still might pick up your next book, though. Two books may not be enough to make a viable conclusion

Well, first of all, thanks for taking the time to post a comment.  Good or bad, it’s always flattering when someone takes the time to offer their opinion.  And you have some interesting ideas here.  I don’t necessarily agree with them, but hey, that’s what makes life so damned intriguing, isn’t it?

I’m not interested in defending my work, of course.  Neither of us are likely to change our minds, but since you went to the trouble of posting a comment, I thought I’d at least offer a reply.  So here goes.

I think you’re misunderstanding my idea of no major shifts in character.  I don’t mean that the characters don’t undergo some subtle changes in their personality through the events of the story.  They just tend not to be radical shifts.  Still they are profound and important elements to every story I write (with the possible exception of MONSTER, which I will get into in a bit).

Your assessment of IN THE COMPANY OF OGRES is intriguing, but I have to disagree quite a bit about character growth in that story.  In particular, Never Dead Ned grows immensely.  Ironically, he grows by accepting himself for who he is.  Going “Back to normal”, as you put it, isn’t Ned refusing to grow.  It’s Ned becoming exactly what he must.  I know the books been out a few years now, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t get any deeper than that.

Meanwhile, Regina has learned that there’s more to life than just kicking everyone’s ass.  Frank has taken steps toward a relationship.  And the soldiers of Ogre Company, while still a group of hard-luck misfits, are on their way toward becoming the military outfit they could always be.

True, none of this is a radical shift.  But by the end of the novel, all the major characters better understand themselves and each other.  It isn’t a huge alteration in their characters, but they are not the same people they were in the beginning of the story in many important ways.

As for TOO MANY CURSES, again, it’s difficult to quantify because, on the face of it, the protagonist starts out as a sensible, level-headed character and remains so throughout the book.  But her transition from lowly servant to mistress of the castle is the crux of the story.  It’s true that she doesn’t rise to this position by becoming all-powerful.  In fact, she does so mostly through the realization that she has been the mistress of the castle for a long time and just didn’t know it.  But even this realization means that “back to normal” is not possible.  (Having not read the book, you, of course, will just have to take my word on it.  Or you could take a chance and buy it, but that’s your call.)

Thinking about it now, I think all my books have this quality.  The characters do not transform in any earth-shattering fashion.  They remain consistent throughout their stories.  But they do change.  They do grow.  They just do it in small (yet important) ways that I find more realistic and satisfying.

I hate to use the word subtle because, damn it, it just sounds pretentious.  But, what the hell?  I’m a semi-successful novelologist.  I have the books on the shelves to prove it.  Just this once, I’ll be pretentious.

As for MONSTER, I agree with your assessment.  Monster, our hero, starts out as a down-on-his-luck pessimist, and by the end of the novel, he really hasn’t grown one damn bit.  That was intentional though.  Sometimes, we just don’t learn.  If you don’t find that satisfying from a story perspective, who could blame you?  I knew when I wrote it that many wouldn’t.

But what about our other protagonist, Judy, who is finally free to pursue her own happiness for the first time?  While she might be the same person, more or less, her circumstances have changed in important ways.  Her life is certainly not “back to normal” by the end of the novel.

And let’s not forget the universe of Monster itself, which has already begun to change after the climax.  Trying to avoid spoilers here (again), but if I wrote another book set in this universe, it would have to be quite a bit different because the very rules of magic and reality that govern Monster’s world have been altered.  I could even argue that the universe itself is the central character of the story and that its transformation by the end could constitute real character growth.

I’m not suggesting that your interpretations are wrong.  All art is filtered through the audience, and if the audience doesn’t like it, then the art has failed.  There’s no debate on that.  I wish I could tell you that you would like my other books better, but I’m not sure you would.  Some of the major characters in DIVINE MISFORTUNE change and grow (though again, nothing very extreme).  Others don’t.  I don’t feel like the book goes “back to normal”, but I didn’t feel that way about the other books either, so what do I know?  I’m just the writer, and in the cosmic scheme of things, my opinion matters far less than the audience’s.

Still, I want to thank you again for taking the time to comment.  If you ever feel like giving any of my other books a try (hey, that’s what libraries and used book stores are for) then I hope you’ll find them worth your time.  If not, well, thanks for giving me a shot.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

It’s time for our infrequent and irregular Ask A Smart Guy segment.  Let’s start with this comment someone recently posted on the site.

Still, I am alive, and I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m still drawing oxygen.  And while I’m at it, I might as well throw in a few offhand comments.

I’m sorta famous.  That still blows my mind.  Sure, I’m not Jim Varney famous, but I do have a Wikipedia page (woefully out of date, but still there) and I do have 6 (soon to be 7) published books to my name.  In the right circles, I’m even recognizable.  Crazy, isn’t it?

I gave a short presentation at the Dallas Screenwriters Association last Friday.  It was a good event, and I think people enjoyed it.  Whenever I give these presentations, I find the best advice I can give to any aspiring writer is relax.  Writing ain’t that hard.

I’m not suggesting that it’s easy, but the hardest thing about writing is finding a way of doing it that works for you.  There’s no secret to it.  It’s an individual process, a way of doing things that gets you where you want to go.  I can’t tell you how often I hear an aspiring writer tell me how relieved they are when I admit that I don’t outline in advance, that I often write by the seat of my pants, just making it up as I go along.  If I can make an aspiring writer’s life easier, then it’s well worth my time.

Saw The Lightning Thief this weekend.  Didn’t love it.  Didn’t hate it.  It was enjoyable, but ultimately forgettable.  I did like the monsters, of course.  Any movie with a minotaur and a hydra is going to score a few points on the A. Lee Martinez neato torpedo scale.  But pacing wise, the story seemed to just wander around.  I’m not usually one to comment on plot structure, but when it’s not there, you can definitely notice it.  And in this case, you could shuffle many of the scenes around without damaging the film.  So I wouldn’t say the film was bad.  I’d just suggest that it wasn’t quite great.  Just good enough.  I enjoyed it enough, but wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it again.

Finally saw Zombieland, too.  Thought it was a good movie with a nice story.  It didn’t reinvent the wheel, but at this point, is there anything new left to do with zombies?  So instead, the film just embraces the zombie mythos (oooh, writer word) and uses the setting to tell an interesting story.  Overall, it is an entertaining, fun film.

My only complaint (and it’s a minor one) is Bill Murray’s cameo.  Rather, the resolution of the Bill Murray cameo.  It’s just too jokey and involves characters acting foolishly.  While the film is a comedy, its characters never behave foolishly.  That’s a particular point of the movie with all “The Rules” emphasising how to survive during a zombie apocalypse.  I have to assume that one of those rules is “Don’t play zombie pranks on your fellow survivors.”  The results will be exactly what is depicted.

I still enjoyed the movie and this one bit is easy to ignore in the end.  But it really doesn’t fit with the rest of the film.  Still good though.

Okay, I guess that’s enough for now.  I have real writing to do, so I’ll catch you later, gang.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Hi.  Been a while.  Still working on finishing my current manuscript, but I can’t stay away.  It’s not fair to you, my adoring public.  You guys are my bread and butter, so I’m setting aside the manuscript for a second and posting something because I know how much you look forward to me enriching your lives with my wit, humor, and dinobot references.  Although in this post, I will endeavor to keep dinobot references to a minimum because “Me, Grimlock, love challenge!”

Damn.  So close.

Oh, well, onward and upward.  As a professional novelologist, I have a tendency not to talk about my work directly.  I feel a good book should stand on its own, and if I have to explain it to you, then I’ve failed.  And the first rule of Novelology Club is you do not talk about Novelology Club.  The second rule of Novelology Club is you do not talk about Novelology Club.  Oh, wait.  The second rule of Novelology Club is don’t use semi-colons.  Why?

We don’t talk about that.

Still I spend a lot of time working on these books, and while I realize that not all of them can be as beloved as others, I still want people to like them.  Or at least, pay me some money for them.  So I’ve decided to take a moment and talk about one of my previous novels.  But because Orbit, my current publisher, doesn’t really gain much from that, I’m also going to go ahead and talk about DIVINE MISFORTUNE, due out next month.

But first, let’s take a look at the ancient past.  Waaaay, waaay back to 2008.  (By the way, am I the only one who still gets annoyed that 2008 is “the past” and yet, when I look back on that time, I don’t think about the time the Martians blew up the moon or the armies of the mole people rose from the underrealm?)

Let’s talk about TOO MANY CURSES.

Too Many Curses might be my least successful novel.  Although I think A NAMELESS WITCH might ultimately be the winner (hooray?) on that front.  I’ll go on record saying that I think WITCH is probably my most subtle novel.  I say this because it seems to get the most varied interpretations and some of the strongest responses (both negative and positive).  Although it gets its fair share of Meh, too.  I really like Witch, and while I could discuss it at length, I think it holds up pretty well.  It did win a feminist fiction recognition (of which I am very proud), and since I actually love hearing the many interpretations, I’d rather not get too into that right now.

CURSES, on the other hand, gets shortchanged a lot.  It’s not that people don’t like it.  It’s got a solid rating on Amazon, just not many reviews.  But that’s par for the course when you’re an obscure li’l writer like yours truly.  Still, stylistically, Curses is a departure on many levels from my previous novels, and it breaks a lot of rules of what readers are trained to expect.

There’s no romance in Curses.  None.

There’s no edge.  Our heroine is not a your typical empowered woman warrior or mage in training.  She’s a housekeeper.  And she remains a housekeeper, more or less, throughout the novel.  While she does evolve over the course of the story, she doesn’t radically shift.  And that was kind of the point for me.

It has almost no world-building.  Not a single scene takes place outside of the castle walls.  And even the castle itself is left ill-defined and nebulous.  While Nessy knows how to navigate its many halls, I deliberately didn’t include a map or even bother to create one.  I couldn’t care less about those things.  They are completely unimportant to the story for me.

I wrote Curses because I wanted to write something with a lot of weird monsters in it, and a castle full of weird monsters seemed the perfect place for that.  But like any story, it evolved into something more interesting.  Curses is a story about individuals trapped in a rotten situation and just trying to make the best of it.  Even the villain of the story, The Door at the End of the Hall, is really all about growing and evolving as a person, trying to become better than you are.  But lest you think I take myself too seriously, let’s not forget some other reasons I wrote this story:

THE MONSTER THAT SHOULD NOT BE.  The Monster Under the Bed.  The Very Hungry Carpet.  The Sword in the Cabbage.  The Drowned Woman.  Olivia the Alliterative Owl.  The Toad Prince.  The Ragdoll Princess.  Decapitated Dan.  Mr. Bones.  The Vampire King.  The Hellhound.  Gnick the Gnome.  The Hanged Man.  Echo the Bodiless Poet.  Sir Thedeus the Fearless Bat Hero.  Dodger the thieving weasel.  The Jabberwock.  Fortune the black cat.  Wow.  Just writing it now, I could go on and on, and I have to say I love all these characters.  Some don’t get much more than a few pages of story time, but that’s what I love about the castle.  It feels alive, like a real place brimming with characters and life.  A small world in itself.

Also, there’s a really cool scene where a bunch of enchanted armors for fantastic creatures fight a witch who can kill you with her touch.  And the scene where Tiama the Scarred confronts THE MONSTER THAT SHOULD NOT BE is just awesomeriffic.

So if you haven’t read Curses yet, you really should.  At least I think so, and if you can’t trust my opinion, what is this world coming to?

Onto DIVINE MISFORTUNE…

This is my new novel, out this March.  It is going to be my breakout novel.  I call it here and now.  It’s going to make me rich and powerful and able to control the weather with my mind.

Plus…Laser vision!

But what’s it about?  It’s about gods.  Lazy, dumb, petty, easily confused, down-on-their-luck deities who spend most of their time watching television, playing board games, and trying to do as little as possible while gaining the most glory for themselves.

So, yeah, they’re pretty much like the rest of us.

That’s how gods used to be, y’know, and while I have nothing against the modern conceptions of divinity, they don’t really allow one to tell a great story.  Heck, once you make your protagonist all-knowing and all-powerful, it’s hard to have much conflict.  But Zeus and his ilk were that wonderful combo of all-powerful and dim-witted that allowed pretty much anything.

My gods are immortal.  Period.  They don’t die.  They can hurt each other physically (they are physical beings), but nothing leaves any permanent damage.  My gods aren’t powered by faith, which is far too nebulous a commodity.  They’re paid in tribute:  blood sacrifice, prayers, and ritual.  Or cash.  Yes, these guys take cash, too.  It’s a modern world.  The more tribute they collect, the more powerful they become.  The more powerful they become, the more tribute they collect.  Yes, even for gods, life is all a popularity contest.

The focus on the story isn’t on the celebrities of the divine, but on the working class gods.

First up, is Lucky, raccoon god of good fortune.  He’s a player, a schmoozer.  He’s not quite as charismatic as he thinks he is, but he gets by on equal parts charm, wit, and…well…luck.  That’s kind of his thing.

Then there’s Quick.  You know him better as Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec feathered serpent god.  Quick is definitely down on his luck.  He turns his back for one second and the next thing y’know, a handful of conquistadors have ruined everything.  Ain’t that always the way?

Siph the goddess of heartbreak is a former goddess of love who…well, can’t ruin everything, can I?

And let’s not forget Gorgoz, the chaos god who sulks in an unlit basement, watching Leave It to Beaver reruns and drinking beer.  Even for a god of death and destruction, he’s a real asshole.

Intrigued?  You should be because, as we’ve already covered, if you can’t trust me, who can you trust?

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

LEE

Still, I’m behind, and I really shouldn’t be wasting much time blogging when I have actual work to do.

So I bought Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on DVD and watched it again.  Perhaps I’m sounding like a broken record, but damn if that isn’t a great movie.  The spaghetti tornado alone is worth the price.  Highly recommended.  And I’ll try not to mention it again.

Even before I was a writer, I was a writer.  All that novelology entails is creating a story via imagination and conjecture.  I have this game I play sometimes.  When I see someone on a cell phone, I’ll imagine that through a quirk of fate, they picked up the wrong signal.  The voice on the other end of the line says a meteor is heading for Earth, and, long story short, you’ll be dead by the end of the hour.  Then I ask myself, what would this person do with that time?

Try it sometime.  It’s a great way to flex your novelologist’s talents.  Even if you aren’t a professional story maker-upper like me, you can still have fun with it.

Okay.  This was a short post.  Just checking in.  Now back to work.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Onto the subject at hand…

Recently, I found myself in a short debate on the nature of villainy.  What makes an interesting villain?  What doesn’t?  Is a colorful villain the same as a more subtle villain?  Stuff like that.  Rather than repeat it all, I recommend you check out the comments on my Opinions Vary blog entry.  Some ideas are shared, and it makes some interesting reading.

Near the end of the exchange, I noticed something.  I’m a writer.  A needless observation since, if you’re visiting this website, you probably know me first and foremost as a writer.  Safe to say, if I wasn’t a writer, you wouldn’t give a damn about what random thoughts were crawling through my head at any moment, no matter how well-expressed.  So I am indeed a professional writer, and I have the check stubs to prove it.

But more than being a pro, I’m actually a writer.  I think about stories, about characters and plots and premises and everything that makes a story up.  If it’s a book, you know I’ve thought about the sentences, considered how they all fit together, about what they say and what they don’t say.  If I’m reading the book, I’m analyzing it (even against my will).  And if I’m writing it, I’m trying to make sure it does what I want.  Oddly, even when I’m not sure what I want it to say.

If it’s a movie, I do the same thing.  Except I’m not really concerned with cinematography or subtleties of direction that I’m sure are there but usually go unnoticed except for a feeling of something great when it’s there and something off when it’s not.

I can turn this off to some degree.  I saw Legion this weekend, and while there are many questionable plot choices, I also was willing to overlook it because there’s a fight between archangels that is totally badass, and really, that’s the whole reason I’m there.

I have a pet peeve of using the term “storyteller”.  It just seems pretentious.  I also hate the phrase “craft of writing”.  It just bugs me for some reason.  But I do believe storytelling is an art and that writing is a craft.  Though maybe I’d be more comfortable with “trade of writing” because I’m a tradesperson, really.  But instead of making houses, I make stories.  It takes some of the romanticism out of it, but if you ask me, that’s a good thing.  Because novelology isn’t glamourous.  It’s mostly sitting in front of a computer and typing.

Being a professional teller of stories, I still sometimes get confused about it.  Recently, at the DFWWW’s after-IHOP gathering, a rollicking conversation about Transformers 2 and racism erupted.  The conversation is far too complicated to get into now, but it was fantastic.  It was great because we were all discussing a movie about giant robots and racial perceptions far deeper than one movie about giant robots and about the nature of stories themselves.  One of the most memorable discussions I’ve had in a long time, and one not soon forgotten.

More than an interesting diversion though, this was me discussing storytelling with fellow storytellers.  Really not any different than a bunch of carpenters sitting around discussing hammers and nails.  It’s why I keep the receipts from my IHOP gatherings because it is a business expense.  My writing benefits immensely from these discussions.

People think writing is easy.  Heck, I think it’s easy.  It’s certainly not as hard as breaking your back for minimum wage.  Or manning the counter at McDonald’s.  Or any number of thankless jobs that demand so much and give back so little.  But writing isn’t easy.  You have to think about it.  And if you do a good job, most people aren’t even going to notice.  And if you do a bad job, many people aren’t going to notice either.  People really don’t care that much about stories.  They tend to take them at face value.

I’m often amazed at how often people talk about the story without ever thinking about the writer behind the pages.  That’s how it should be.  I think only bad fiction draws attention to the author, just as bad directing tends to be all about the camera movements and stylistic shots rather than what’s happening on the screen.

But I am a writer.  And I do care.  And I do think about it.  Just do me a favor.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Haven’t been blogging lately because it’s not always easy to come up with interesting topics.  I know some folks are just happy blogging about any ol’ thing, but I am an important person.  This comes with important person responsibilities.  Like being interesting.  And fighting mummies.  Since I fought mummies just last night (FYI: I won), I guess I’ll try to be interesting today.

As my novelology career continues to grow, I ponder the perils and perks of fame and fortune.  On the plus side, I get to meet people who are nice to me just because I’m famous.  I also get a magic sword that makes fighting mummies a hell of a lot easier.  If you’ve ever tried fighting a mummy without a magic sword, you know what I’m talking about.  On the downside, I find increasingly a wall between me and the ordinary people that make up the bulk of our world’s population.

Granted, I am not really that famous and my fortune isn’t going to pay for that solid gold robot polish I need.  (Jeeves-3000 is looking a bit tarnished of late.)  But even in a cosmic scale, where I am but a speck of dust floating beneath the all-recording optical sensor of The Mighty Robot King, I still am more famous than most people who are reading this right now.  Probably.  Maybe.  Or maybe I’m just delusional.  Just play along in any case.

I’m in a delicate stage right now.  I am just successful enough that many people think of me as being something special, but I’m also obscure enough that most people haven’t heard of me.  On the one hand, this keeps me humble.  On the other, it elevates me in a way I don’t always like.  There are newer members of my writer’s group who never got a chance to meet Alex Martinez, the aspiring writer.  They only know A. Lee Martinez, world-renowned novelologist and mummy fighter.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve only been a published writer for a few years now.  I was an aspiring writer much longer.  And when I finally as accepted for publication, there was much rejoicing in my group because everyone knew what a long, hard road it had been.  Now it’s just assumed that I am going to make a living doing this.  When I present something at the DFWWW, it’s assumed that it is going to be published at some point.  This isn’t a bad assumption, but it changes the dynamic of the situation.

Assuming something of mine does eventually become a movie (a big assumption, but more and more possible each passing day) there will come a time when I leap from obscurity (“I’ve never heard of you”) to less obscurity (“You’re the guy who wrote the book that movie was based on?”).  While I do look forward to this possibility, I also realize that this will present a whole new dynamic to my relations with the little people.  It’s not a change I’m particularly looking forward to.

Fame and fortune come at a heavy price, gang.

Do me a favor and just remember that, underneath it all, I’m just a guy who gets paid to make up stories.  The only thing special about me is that I’ve got a talent for it, I didn’t give up, and an ungodly amount of luck.  And of those three things, I rank them (in order of importance) as Luck, Persistence, and Talent.  And I think I’m probably overestimating talent’s importance.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Yes, my friends, it is indeed.  A. LEE MARTINEZ APPRECIATION DAY!! is upon us once again, and while I’m sure all of you are up on the traditional festivities (play a board game, watch a monster movie, push A. Lee Martinez novels on friends / family / loved ones / strangers / enemies), not everyone knows that, by The Supreme Directive of The Mighty Robot King, you are required to read any blog post I write on this day.

Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do.  But trust me, you do not want to get on The Mighty Robot King’s bad side.  Before you know it, you’ll be up to your elbows in avenging dinobots and wrathful planet-devouring androids the size of the moon.  And nobody wants that.  So just sit back.  Relax.  Read this post at your leisure.  And know that in doing so, you’re placating the wrath of our all-powerful mechanical deity.

I’ve said it before, but I find that as I grow older, I have more and more appreciation for the absurd and the fun.  This is probably why I’ve outgrown so many things I used to love.  Although thinking about it, “outgrown” is probably the wrong word.

Take comics.  Modern comics are so dark, mature, and convuluted that they take all the fun out of people with strange powers beating each other up.  The most powerful villain in Marvel Comics at the moment is a beauracrat.  The stories of late resolve around mega crossover, soap opera style events that tie every single comic together into one giant story.  I won’t comment on the qualities of these stories because that’s fairly subjective.  But I will suggest that very few comics are actually fun anymore.  The reasons for this are way too complicated to get into, and I don’t even know if this is a good or a bad thing.  But it’s just the way it is.

The best comics I’ve read in the last year were Atomic Robo, We Kill Monsters, Lockjaw & the Pet Avengers, Beasts of Burden, and Casper & the Spectrals.  Of these comics, Beasts of Burden was probably the most “adult”, and it’s about a group of dogs and a cat who fight supernatural evil.  Both Lockjaw & the Pet Avengers are all ages.

Oh, and there was Dr. Doom and the Masters of Evil.  I think that came out last year.  It was the best thing produced by Marvel Comics in a long, long time.  An epic 4-part limited series focused on Dr. Doom’s quest for ultimate power.  It managed, through a rare kind of magic, to be dark, brooding, fantastic, mature, and fun without resorting to swearing, gore, or anything even remotely edgy.  This was an all-ages comic that manages to explore a genuinely dark protagonist with more subtlety and intelligence than pretty much anything else out there.

Although Lockjaw & The Pet Avengers had a group of super animals fighting a giant red dinosaur.  So maybe it’s a toss up for greatest comic of all time.

Video games are the same thing to me now.  I notice that the games that get commercials on TV and exposure on G4 are all the dark, grown up games.  I got a Wii this Christmas, and right now, I’m enjoying the heck out of Super Mario Galaxy and Little King’s Story.  Neither game features realistic graphics.  Both are absurd adventures.  Whether you’re playing as a plucky Italian plumber facing off against an obnoxious, fire-breathing turtle tyrant or taking on the role of a boy king sending his army of grunts, miners, hunters, carpenters, and chefs into battle against a clockwork knight, there’s something unique and wonderful about these games.

It’s not that I’m a prude.  I don’t care if there’s swearing and blood in my media.  But I’m definitely over blood and profanity for their own sake.  Too often they’re crutches.  They’re used to present the illusion of sophistication, but sophistication isn’t found in making superheroes swear or the number of polygons that make up a video game sprite.  If only it were that easy to quantify.

So I finally saw the preview for the Percy Jackson & the Olympians movie, based on the books.  The strange thing is that I wrote this story already.  Several years ago.  Okay, technically I only wrote half of it.  And I never published it.  But just watching the preview, I saw things I’d put in my own reluctant demi-god story.  In my demi-god story, a character is attacked by an old lady who is actually a harpy in disguise.  In my demi-god story, the hero has to fight a hydra.  In my demi-god story, demi-gods are hunted by dark forces.

Similarities are inevitable when stories draw on similar source material.  I certainly can’t suggest that the Percy Jackson story was stolen from me (unless they were able to burrow into my dreams), and I can’t say that my ideas were stolen from them (unless I have amazing powers of foresight).  It’s just coincidence.  I say this because too often people are accused of stealing popular ideas when it’s just as likely that someone just came up with something similar, drawing on similar ideas.

Finally, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on just how lucky I am to be here.  Sure, I’m talented, intelligent, witty, able to bend spoons with my mind, and capable of levitating a few feet off the ground for several minutes at a time, but I am still basically a guy who is paid to make up stories.  I’m good at it, but being good at something doesn’t always mean you are fortunate to get paid for it.  I’m pretty good at thinking up cool nicknames for people, for example, and I can stick my whole fist into my mouth.  Yet nobody seems ready to pay me for these things.

So thanks, gang.  I’ve said it before.  I’m sure I’ll say it again.  But I’m grateful for all your support.  Now go enjoy your A. LEE MARTINEZ APPRECIATION DAY!! monster movie (might I suggest Godzilla 2000 or It Came From Beneath the Sea?).  Have fun with your board game (Small World anyone?).  And push my books, gangs.

There.  End of the official A. LEE MARTINEZ APPRECIATION DAY!! blog post.  You’re free to go.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

So here’s your first (tiny) little taste of DIVINE MISFORTUNE.  Hope you enjoy it.

            “I’ll let you in on a little secret.”  He leaned closer.  “Nobody has had a destiny in a thousand years.  Not an official destiny anyway.  Things got too big for that a long time ago.  It was a lot easier to preconfigure the paths of fate when there weren’t so damn many of you mortals running around.  Now it’s pretty much impossible.  I think the last guy The Fates tried to guide was Gary Hamelin.  And we all know how that worked out.”

            “Never heard of him,” she said.

            “Exactly.”

            “Well, my mom swears by them.  Said they helped her find some lost keys one time.”

            “Oh, yeah, they’re good for stuff like that, I suppose.  Just don’t expect them to be infallible.  It’s a good way to end up doing life in a Peruvian prison.”

            “Gary Hamelin?” she asked.

            “Trust me.  You don’t want to know.”

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

I recently started a Twitter mini-debate with a friend of mine.*   Watching a preview for the new Kick-Ass movie, I remarked how the movie straddles a clumsy line between superheroes and realism.  This has always been a tricky prospect.  Some elements of fantasy are closer to reality than others, and superheroes are about as far from reality as one can get.

I haven’t read the original mini-series this movie is based on, but the premise is an exploration of what would happen if people in the real world tried superheroics.  This could be interesting.  Although it seems like the story would be really, really short.  Person in funny costume leaps out at bank robbers.  Bank robbers shoot costumed person.  The end.

However, the premise is destroyed for me the moment Hit-Girl, a small child, is able to kill a whole room of thugs and killers all by herself.  This might even be possible under the right circumstances, but Hit-Girl is able to dodge bullets, reload guns by throwing clips in the air and slamming her pistols into these spinning clips, able to kick a grown man across a room, and cut off limbs with a sword.

None of this is realistic.  All of this dwells firmly in the realm of the absurd.  For all practical intent, Hit-Girl isn’t a parody of superheroes.  She’s not a deconstruction of the superheroic fantasy.  She’s not even really a tongue-in-cheek joke about superheroes.  She’s just a superhero.

Kick-Ass seems even less realistic than Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.  At least those films go out of their way to justify Bruce Wayne’s training and equipment.  These aren’t realistic films by any stretch of the imagination, but at least by giving Batman a technological edge and an elaborate backstory, they’ve designed a fantastic justification for why Batman is Batman.

But Hit-Girl is just a little girl who has been trained to kill people.  And while I do believe it wouldn’t be that hard to train a young girl to shoot people, I think teaching anyone to dodge bullets in a firefight would qualify as a superpower in itself.

Realism is absurd in this context.  Once a character, any character in any story, is able to dodge bullets, you are dealing with fantasy.  If you don’t believe me, then try an experiment.  Have five or six friends stand around you with Nerf guns in a small room.  Then have them all shoot at you.  Can you dodge all those slow moving, readily visible projectiles?  Of course you can’t.  And that’s giant foam darts, not speeding, invisible bullets.

Also, swords don’t just slice through flesh-and-bone like Play-Do.  I know that Kill Bill helped to cement this in our pop culture perceptions, but even that film took the time to justify it by giving our heroine a special sword, her own personal Excalibur.

None of this is meant as a criticism of Kick-Ass as an off-beat action adventure film.  But it is a criticism of the realism of Kick-Ass.  And anyone who suggests that Kick-Ass is realistic has no weight with me.

Realism in fantasy films is one thing.  But what about realism in other mediums?  How about video games?

A big game right now is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  It’s a first-person shooter that involves running across the globe, fighting terrorists and other bad guys.  While certainly on the surface, this game is more realistic than Super Mario Galaxy or Pokemon, in the end it isn’t very realistic at all.  Because a realistic FPS would involve the player running around in a panicked state, trying to keep cool in a sea of chaos.  And when you were shot, you’d die.  End of story.  Admittedly, getting shot doesn’t always kill you instantly.  So the game could choose to have your character lay helplessly on the ground for a few minutes until either you expired or someone came along and carried you off to the infirmary.

Or you could be captured and thrown in a cell for years.  Doesn’t that sound like fun?

A life bar or health meter makes a game fun, but it doesn’t smack of realism.  When was the last time you were punched in the face and said, “Thank the Mighty Robot King that my health bar was full!  Now if I can just find a health pack and a power up.”

Now Mario is, in the spectrum of things, more unrealistic.  Realism is probably the last thing the designers of Mario games worry about.  As I play Super Mario Galaxy, I don’t try to make much sense of it.  Why does a big, evil turtle have an obsession with kidnapping princesses?  Why does he emply an army of turtles, mushrooms, skeleton turtles, ghosts, and walking bombs?  Why do I climb a giant toy robot in one level, fight a flower monster in another, and turn into a bee in another?  Who knows?  Who cares?  It’s Mario.  That’s just the way Mario works.

I’m not suggesting that Mario is a better game than Call of Duty.  I like Mario better, but that probably has less to do with the quality of the game and more to do with my old school platformer roots.  And I do enjoy weirdness for weirdness’s sake.  I have no reason to believe that Call of Duty isn’t a solid game in its genre.  But is it realistic?  No, it just ain’t.  It’s only realistic in comparison to something that is less realistic, and it’s hard to find things less realistic than a chubby (yet surprisingly athletic) Italian plumber who explores the universe, collecting stars, fighting the minions of a giant, fire-breathing turtle to rescue a princess.

Kick-Ass will undoubtedly be more realistic than much superheroic fantasy.  The costumes alone demonstrate this, and the fact that many of our characters are clumsy wannabees with illusions of grandeur is more realistic than many comic book universes, where it often appears as if just putting on a costume makes you capable of fighting crime.  But characters like Big Daddy and Hit-Girl are cut from the superhero cloth.  They do swear, but a lot of modern comic book heroes do that.  They do kill people, but a lot of modern comic book heroes do that.   They’re thinly disguised psychopaths, but a lot of modern comic book heroes are that, too.   

(When will we get tired of retelling Moore’s Watchmen?  Or at least when will we stop acting like retelling the story is edgy or original?  Just wondering on that one.)

There’s very little, if anything, to distinguish these characters from your garden variety superhero.  And that’s not a problem for me.  I like superheroes.  I like superheroics.  And Kick-Ass looks like it could be a fun, surreal, dark comedy adventure.  I’ll probably even see it though I’m not a fan of Millar in general.  I could launch into a rant about the ridiculous nonsense that was “Old Man Logan”, but that’s another blog post entirely and one most people wouldn’t give a damn about.

(Long story short: Old Man Logan was a very dumb Wolverine story.)

There’s nothing wrong with surrealism.  There’s nothing wrong with realism.  Both are valid styles.  But don’t try wrapping surrealism in a realism package.  Because that’s just silly.  It makes realism look bad.  It makes surrealism look bad.  And it’s just unnecessary.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

*My friend-in-question is Russell C. Connor.  He’s a good guy, and he has a couple of books available on Amazon.  There’s a plug for you, Russ, because I’m cool like that.