Anyway, I’m still working on my top secret project I’m not allowed to talk about.  So why bring it up?  Because what’s the point of working on a top secret project if you can’t mention it?  This is probably why I’d be a lousy spy.  The details will remain undisclosed, but I’m optimistic at this stage that this could be awesome.  I could be wrong.  It’s happened once or twice before.

But while I have a free moment, I figured I’d drop by, confirm that I am still alive, and maybe share some random thoughts.  People do seem to like that sort of thing.  Maybe because as a sort of famous person, they’re under the illusion I have something interesting to say.  Or maybe we all have something interesting to say, and I just happen to be lucky enough to have an audience.

So I’ve been playing Skylanders on my Wii.  If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a video game with a gimmick.  You get a wireless “portal” device that connects to your system and when you put the Skylander figures onto the portal, they appear in your game as characters for you to control.  Think of it as Pokemon, but without having to capture the damn things and instead just going out and buying them.  It is a gimmick, and psychologically, it should be annoying that you’re basically paying to unlock things that are already in the game.  But it’s a tremendously charming game with a lot going for it.

For one thing, the game is a bit old school and aimed at a younger audience.  It’s not tremendously difficult and most of the levels are straightforward, even if there is a bit of puzzles here and there.  For some reason, Skylanders reminds me a lot of that old classic Gauntlet.  Only instead of running around in a dungeon with four characters to choose from, there are 32 different Skylanders (if you should happen to buy them all).

What elevates this beyond a gimmick for me is that the game is genuinely fun to play.  And each character has their own unique style.  They aren’t just interchangeable with different special effects.  Trigger Happy carries a pair of pistols that shoot gold coins and can spray the screen with a deadly barrage.  Meanwhile, Terrafin is a landshark who can swim through rock and punch the enemy with tremendous force.  The more you play the game, the more you unlock on the characters.  It’s all a very elaborate system of enticement, but so cleverly done that it seems rewarding rather than manipulative.

It’s the difference between a game with a gimmick and a gimmicky game.  Skylanders is certainly designed to sell collectible figures, but they went above and beyond to create a fun experience that continues to reward me.  If I were less secure, I might feel weird admitting how much I’m enjoying a game aimed at kids, but I’m a professional novelologist.  And I fear the day I can’t see the beauty of playing a game where I can be anything from a rock dinosaur to a cyber dragon to a very angry tree who spits out giant spiked acorns that he rolls over the forces of evil.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been enjoying Castle Empire Online, a free online game that’s about managing a small kingdom.  It’s a different animal than Skylanders, but fun.  Worth checking out, if you’re so inclined.  I play under the name EmperorMollusk.  Send me a friend request.  Maybe I’ll trade you some fish for coal.  (I’m always short on coal.)

But what about the real world?  What’s going on there?

How quaint of you to ask.

Got that secret project thing.  Hush hush.  But it’s coming along.

Working on Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest, my next manuscript (prob out in 2013).

Oh, and that Mack Megaton story…it’s still coming.  I promise.

Finally, I’d like to offer my thoughts on the topic of skepticism.  The problem with your average person’s view of skepticism is that it seems to mean “Non-Believer”.  When I say I’m skeptical of ghosts, for instance, it’s often assumed I don’t believe ghosts exist.  In point of fact, I am a genuine skeptic when it comes to the paranormal.  I remain unconvinced but open to it.

And, yes, I understand there there is “evidence” for the paranormal.  It’s just not very good evidence.  And it certainly isn’t very convincing evidence for any particular claim.  This isn’t to say that those claims are wrong.  It’s just that they remain so ill-defined as to honestly admit they are specious at best.  The difficulty I have with “the paranormal” is that no one who believes it genuinely seems to be investigating it in an open way.  Instead, they have their pet theory that they are trying to prove.  That’s just bad research.

For example, perhaps electronic voice phenomenon is a real thing, and we are managing to record the voices of invisible beings around us.  This could mean a hundred things though.  Perhaps there are alien entities from another dimension trying to make contact with us.  Perhaps mischievous imps are playing tricks on us.  Or perhaps they are psychic imprints created by the will of the living investigators.  When it comes to the paranormal, none of these explanations seems unreasonable to me.  Or they could all be wrong.

This is why I am skeptical.  Even if you capture a genuine EVP, it could be something we haven’t even thought of yet.  There are so many possibilities, the only genuinely honest thing to do is to record the result and keep investigating.

Inevitably, someone will tell me I am being too closed minded.  But it’s actually the opposite.  I’m so open minded about what it COULD be that I have a hard time just declaring what it is as if I actually knew.  The believer is often the one who seems closed minded to me, willing to stretch any and all evidence toward their pet theory, ignoring any possibility outside of that.

As an experiment, I suggest watching different ghost hunting shows.  What’s most surprising about the shows isn’t that they find “evidence”, but the type of “evidence” they find.  Each show tends to find the kind of ghosts they’re looking for, regardless of their location.  The less dangerous spirits of Ghost Hunters never seem to cross paths with the more terrifying specters of Ghost Adventures.  And the outright malevolent forces of Paranormal State never seem to show up in any episodes of Fact or Faked.

Skeptically, it could be argued that perhaps that’s the way the supernatural works.  Perhaps different facets of the paranormal respond to different people.  Perhaps my very skepticism is what prevents me from seeing any evidence for myself.  Or perhaps it’s all just our primitive imagination responding to spooky sounds and unfamiliar locations.  Or perhaps we’re all just brains floating in a giant shared simulation and some people have their experience settings dialed to monster.

That’s skepticism.  Far too extreme to be practical, of course.  But just want to put it out there.

My general rule is that if the evidence could just as easily apply to leprechauns, then I remain unconvinced.  Lights in the skies could be alien spaceships.  Or the fey folk playing tricks on us.  Until we actually have a flying saucer or a faerie in our possession, we can’t know for sure.

Although I do still believe that Bigfoot is just Chupacapbra in a suit.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Okay, probably not.  Because that’s not something I do.  It’s not something that interests me.  I’ve got a pretty light touch when it comes to killing characters.  I’ll admit that.  I’ll usually kill or destroy or otherwise get rid of the bad guy, but it’s not my thing to introduce a colorful supporting cast and then pick them off to establish the credibility of the threat they face.  It’s probably yet another thing that keeps me from being taken as seriously as I’d sometimes like.  Nothing like a little blood on the page to remind everyone that you’re not screwing around.

I think this is probably because of my love of comic books.  Comic book superheroes are some of my earliest influences.  But I have a bad habit of liking the strange and obscure characters.  The very same characters that tend to die whenever a writer needs extra drama.  It puts me in a strange position.  If you’re favorite hero is Batman, Superman, or Spider-Man, you can rest assured that they aren’t going anywhere.  They might die for a gimmick, but no one with any sense believes they’ll stay dead.  Same with all the popular villains.  But if you, like me, enjoy Quasar, Diamond Lil, or Arnold Wesker, you are stuck walking a very difficult line.

Quasar, for example, is a character who was never popular but nonetheless had his own comic book series that lasted 60 issues before fading into complete obscurity.  I had the whole series and really loved it.  It also had the unfortunate side effect of making me a fan of several other even more obscure characters in his supporting cast.  Seriously, does anyone else out there like Makkari the Eternal?  If so, love to hear from you.

But then Quasar disappeared into comic book obscurity.  He did eventually reappear.  Only to be killed by an evil alien.

Story of my life, a comic book fan of the little guy, the obscure, the forgotten.

I think Quasar is back because death is rarely permanent in comic books if someone likes you, so clearly someone out there has a soft spot for Quasar.  Good luck, buddy.  I’m rooting for you.

Danger is often an important aspect of adventure fiction, but it shouldn’t be the only aspect.  Or even the most important one.  The conflict from adventure fiction should rarely be about the protagonists’ continued survival, but on their ability to achieve their goals.  Danger is only one of the obstacles that can get in their way, and it is, more often than not, an artificial one.

I call it The Invulnerable Protagonist Rule.  The rule says that if making your hero explicitly invulnerable to physical harm removes all the tension from your story, then you’re doing something wrong.

Almost all adventure protagonists are invulnerable.  Not explicitly.  But they’re invulnerable just the same.  Batman is not going to get shot and die, no matter how many times he leaps from the shadows into a mob of thugs.  Indiana Jones is not going to be killed, execution style, by the Nazis.  And no matter how many times James Bond is facing incredible odds, he won’t die.  This is necessary for most adventure fiction.  Without it, most protagonists would probably perish in very short order.

We might thrill to the adventures of action heroes, but for the most part, we know they are in no real danger because who wants to watch an superhero movie where the heroes spend all their time in traction?  Or watch Conan the barbarian get eaten by a giant spider?

The tension in adventure is found in whether our heroes can triumph.  Can Superman save Earth from an alien invasion?  Will Indiana Jones keep the Nazis from finding that magic superweapon?  Can James Bond keep Goldfinger from nuking Fort Knox?  Being invulnerable helps an action hero, but they usually have to work at it still.  Just because no one is going to shoot Batman in the back, it doesn’t mean he automatically wins.

I’m often surprised that this source of tension is lost among both writers and readers.  It’s one of the arguments most often used for why someone prefers Batman to Superman, for instance.  As if a Batman story is going to end with Bats getting mortally wounded.  The only difference between Batman and Superman is that Batman conveniently jumps out of the way of bullets while Superman doesn’t usually have to.  At the end of the day, they are both functionally invulnerable as their stories demand.

Yet there seems to be no greater joys for most writers than to get to write the story where ANYONE CAN DIE!  And the audience tends to dig it too.  And that’s their choice.

But I always get a little angry with it.  I don’t like stories where a character I’ve invested in is killed.  I don’t like them even as imaginary stories, as alternate universe adventures.  I find it annoying, manipulative.  Sometimes, it even seems a little abusive of the artist / audience relationship to trick the audience into caring for a character only to kill them off to supply drama.

I’m not suggesting that it shouldn’t be done.  I’m all for a diversity of stories, and if some stories make life cheap and the fans like it, well, good for them.   But in my fiction, if I’m going to invest in a character (or ask my readers to invest), I’m not going to yank the rug out from under their feet just because I can.  Frankly, I’ve lost too many important people in my life and in my fiction already.

This one goes out to you, Thunderstrike.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Here’s just a general tip from a semi-famous novelologist.  You don’t hook your audience by telling them they are going to be hooked.  You don’t keep people interested by telling them something interesting is happening (or will happen possibly at some point in the future).  You don’t tell people that, if they just stick with you long enough, they’ll be rewarded at some point with a few measly plot points and maybe some character development.  Because nobody cares.  If you don’t keep them interested with an interesting story told in interesting ways than you’re just a gimmick, and people don’t generally like gimmicks.  Especially uninspired gimmicks.

I was not a fan of Lost.  It’s just not my thing to sit and ponder mysteries that I’ll never get the answer to or that will inevitably lead to endings I probably won’t find worthwhile.  But if you put that aside, Lost was a well-executed show.  While I might have considered it gimmicky, it wasn’t written nor promoted like that.  The show was built on mysteries, on a cult-like devotion to unfolding questions leading to more questions leading to more questions.  But the show knew better than to lean on that to keep the viewer interested.  Instead, Lost was an adventure into the unknown, a thrilling fight for survival with characters that intrigued the audience.

The Event falls spectacularly short on this front.  Even as a mystery, it fails.  Though a mystery, Lost could be summarized easily.  Some people are stranded on an island.  Weird stuff happens.  It’s an intriguing premise or at least an easily explained one.

But I defy someone to tell me what The Event is.  Heck, even the promos don’t want to tell us.  This is not The Event.  That is not The Event.  Have you ever tried to explain a story to someone by telling them what it’s not about?  Good luck on that.  The Event is about . . . something mysterious.  Terribly mysterious, in fact.  But a mystery is not a story.  Not by itself.

And then, even more annoying, the show continues to tell us how it will hook us.  “If you watch this episode, by the end, you’ll be hooked!”

One of the things I’ve learned at my writer’s group is that bad writers expect the audience to sit through a bunch of boring crap.  At the DFWWW, we read our work aloud.  We’re allowed 15 minutes, but I find 10 works well.  If you read something aloud for 10 minutes and your audience is bored, then you’re doing something wrong.  Good writers realize this.  Bad writers always wish they had another 5 minutes to get to the good parts.

Every part should be the good part.  Every scene should help the audience want to move forward.  Telling a story isn’t complicated or tricky.  What I do, on the surface, is easy.  Make some interesting characters.  Have something interesting happen to them.  Give them a problem to solve.  Then have them work on solving that problem.  The end.  That’s it.  And maybe if you’re writing “literature” (i.e. pretentious stuff that is intentionally written awkwardly to make it seem intelligent) then you can get away with breaking that rule.  But if you’re writing “genre” (i.e. good stories with a plot that makes sense and offers a satisfying resolution) then you need to just build on the basics.

Who is going to tune into a show, week after week, with absolutely no idea what it’s about?  Lost might have been confusing, intentionally so, but they were still given problems to solve and for the most part, they solved them.

Yet The Event is a show so vague, so mysterious that I don’t know why I should give a damn.  It’s intentionally confusing, but not in the “How Mysterious” way, but in the “I’m going to make this really hard to follow” way.  That’s not good storytelling.  That’s clumsy at best, cheating at worst.  And it seems to me there’s no better way to annoy and / or anger your audience than to continually taunt them and telling them that they really, really need to watch your show for a long time before they’ll be able to understand any of it.

Maybe that crap flew with Twin Peaks, but even that didn’t last long.  Plus, Twin Peaks was at least unique for its time.  What’s unique about The Event except that it’s just another overlong mystery told in overlong fashion that takes forever to get anywhere and will inevitably implode from all the plot threads its trying to keep dangling.

I could be wrong.  Maybe The Event will be huge.  Maybe people will be willing to give it five or eight or eleven episodes to catch their attention.  But that seems awfully optimistic in a world with increasing choices of entertainment media.

I would like to plug No Ordinary Family.  The first episode showed promise, and unlike The Event a lot actually happened in it.  The family gets superpowers.  Characters are given moments to shine and develop personal relationships.  And they even managed to throw in a brief superfight between a superstrong character and a teleporting villain.  It was creative, fun, and everything Heroes should have been if it hadn’t been so jaw-droppingly full of itself.  It’s nice to see a show where superpowers aren’t automatically assumed to be negative and where a family can have problems without getting absurdly angsty about it.  Thumbs up from this lowly novelologist.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Here’s the thing, gang.  We are human beings, and we see things in 3D already.  Everything in real life is in 3D.  And it’s so much a part of our world and perceptions that we already see movies in 3D, even if they’re 2D.  If you think about it, when has anyone been fooled by scale in a movie without 3D?  Has anyone ever watched a movie and wondered, “Hey, why is that one guy so much smaller than that other guy?  Oh, wait, he’s on the horizon, that’s why.”

I saw Coraline in 3D.  Good movie.  And while the 3D was interesting for a bit, after a while it completely fades into the background.  It becomes completely unnoticeable, almost invisible.  The only way to appreciate 3D is to constantly be aware of it, and for me, that’s counter to the viewing experience.  One should never have to be aware of the medium to appreciate it.  3D demands that the audience pay attention to the style of the presentation, not the presentation itself.

Sure, as a gimmick, it can be neat.  But so what?  Gimmicks are easy.  Gimmicks don’t make good movies.

Recently, I saw HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON.  I deliberately chose not to see it in 3D because, just in case it isn’t clear by now, I find 3D to be ridiculous.  The movie was thrilling, enjoyable, and wonderful.  3D wouldn’t have improved it in any way, any more than smell-o-vision would have.

I don’t really care if 3D is out there.  Just as long as I have the 2D option.  Really, options are great.  If someone enjoys 3D good for them.  But I’ll stick with 2D as long as I can.