The Network Reading Conspiracy

The network renewals and cancellations are starting to come out, and it looks like the networks want me to have more time to read and write.

I wasn’t so sad about Emerald City being canceled. I liked the concept, and it had beautiful imagery, but by the end of the first/only season, I pretty much loathed most of the characters, had no clue what was going on (in spite of having watched it all), and kind of wanted everyone but the dog to die. The dog could come live with me. Everyone else, I was ready to see go. But I have to admit, that if it had been picked up for another season, I was curious as to where they’d go with it.

But they also killed Timeless, which was my favorite new series last year. It was fun and a bit silly, and I loved all the characters. Even the villain had his sympathetic moments because he wasn’t entirely wrong. He was just going about the entirely wrong way of dealing with things. There were time travel twists and turns and great costumes. So, of course, it had to go because we aren’t allowed to have nice things and probably the world needs more reality shows.

I have very mixed feelings about Once Upon a Time getting renewed. This show seldom lives up to its potential, and the writing in the past two seasons has been utterly terrible. Like, it comes across like an ugly first draft when you’re just throwing out ideas without giving them any thought or looking back at what you’ve already written for continuity purposes. The characters aren’t allowed to act like any actual people, plot threads are set up but not really resolved or resolved with a handwave, and resolutions come out of nowhere. Right now, they’re setting up for what’s supposed to be the Final Battle between good and evil, but the “evil” side is a character we only just met, and there’s absolutely no motivation for this battle to take place, other than Because Evil. ARRGGGGGHHHH.

The musical episode was cute, with good music and mostly excellent performances, but the writing for it made absolutely no sense. I liked the framework of why these characters were suddenly singing, but most of the musical scenes didn’t actually fit the framework, and I wanted to bang my head against the wall because it was yet another wasted opportunity, given the talent they were working with.

And then the actress playing the main character announced she was leaving after this season. She got her happy ending with a big wedding (with an inexplicable musical number — fortunately, she married a tenor who could pick up a song and go along with it when she started singing during the ceremony for NO REASON WHATSOEVER!), although there’s still the finale with the Final Battle to go, which seemed like a natural ending point, and I was okay with the series being canceled. But now it’s renewed with a drastically reduced cast, but that cast includes a character  who just got married whose wife won’t be on the show anymore. I’m worried we’ve got an Aliens thing going on here, where we spent all this time leading up to an outcome that’s now going to be undone between seasons.

Really, my issue with this show isn’t just the terrible writing. It’s that they keep talking about it being about hope, while it’s actually a non-ending black cloud of doom and gloom. In the past few seasons, our heroine spent a story arc knowing that the villain was trying to turn her dark, then got turned into the Dark One when she took on the free-floating Darkness to save everyone else, then spent half a season being psychologically tortured by having this darkness within her, then her boyfriend got mortally wounded and she used her power to try to save him, turning him into a Dark One, and when he was able to fight that off, she still had to kill him to try to end the Darkness for good, only it didn’t because it got hijacked, so she then spent half a season in the Underworld trying to save her boyfriend, only to fail, and then when he managed to get a second chance at life and they were going to get to be together, she got a prophecy that she was doomed to die. But the writers talk non-stop about how this is a show about hope. I can see why the actress wanted out. She must want to slit her wrists after spending the last few years that way.

So, whether or not I come back with the show will depend on what the concept for the reboot will be. I like one of the confirmed returning characters, loathe the other two. I don’t know who else will be involved.

Otherwise, I’m mostly down to PBS and limited-run series (the half-season series, like The Magicians, Game of Thrones, etc.). I have to say, it’s kind of liberating. I am reading a lot more, which is good for me.

The Geek Double Standard

I spent the morning buying new glasses. I've had more or less the same prescription -- not changing enough to make enough difference to bother with new glasses -- for about fifteen years, and have had the current glasses for almost 11 years. At my eye exam yesterday, my prescription changed the tiniest amount that it could change, and I figured that was a good excuse to update my glasses. That also gives me the chance to get bifocals, but with the reading part blank. I only wear glasses to drive or watch TV, or when I'm out of the house. I don't need them for anything else, but I've reached a point where I can't wear them to read. I've been taking them off to read, or else I've been looking under them, but that's kind of a pain, and my doctor suggested the bifocals as a way to get a similar benefit without having to take the glasses off (that's what she has). Now I have to wait about 10 days for them to come in.

But shopping for glasses, and realizing that the geek chic frames don't work on my face, made me think of another movie/TV trope involving women, in light of my earlier discussion about the creepy behavior. It's what I call the Geek Double Standard.

In movies/TV shows with a geeky male hero or major character, he's probably fallen madly in love with some beautiful supermodel type woman, often without her having anything in common with him, or with him not even knowing enough about her to know whether she has anything in common with him. This is portrayed as romantic, and we're supposed to cheer for him, even when he engages in creepy behavior in pursuit of her -- sabotaging or interrupting her dates with other men, stalking her, hacking into her online accounts to learn more about her, spying on her, etc. Often, she ends up finding this charming and falls in love with him. If she doesn't, she's portrayed as shallow and bitchy for rejecting him. The only reason given why she might possibly be rejecting him is his geeky appearance. Apparently, not being into stalkers or wanting a man to have something in common with her aren't even considered as possibilities. Even if she is rejecting him because of his geeky appearance, it's okay for him to be into her because she's beautiful, but it's terrible and shallow of her to not be into him because he's not conventionally attractive.

On the other hand, if a geeky female has any romantic interest in any man, it's played for laughs. She's depicted as a pathetic loser. It's especially bad if her interest is in an attractive, heroic type, but even if she's after a fellow geek who has a lot of things in common with her, she's shown to be an annoyance to him. She might get in the way of his pursuit of the supermodel, I guess. He's not depicted as being shallow for not being receptive to her advances because of her appearance. The only way she can get any man is to take off her glasses, let her hair down, wear makeup, and dress up in sexy clothes.

I will give the original Ghostbusters some credit in not falling into this trap. Sigourney Weaver's character was never portrayed as being an awful person for not being into her geeky neighbor or for initially resisting Bill Murray (they just forgot to show the transition between her not being impressed with him and her falling in love with him). Though they did sort of portray Janine's interest in Egon as pathetic, even though he was nerdier than she was.

Geeky TV Woes

I can't believe it's already Friday and that it's the Friday before Thanksgiving. I think mentally I'm still back in July. I still have my summer clothes in the downstairs closet and need to do a closet switch because it's supposed to get cold this weekend and my warm clothes are all still upstairs. We're also getting close to the winter finales of a lot of TV shows, and I'm still wrapping my head around the fact that the fall season has started.

Unfortunately, most of my geeky TV pleasures seem to be failing me this year. I complained at the end of the last season that it was like all the TV writers had some kind of suicide pact going to try to destroy their own shows, and it still feels that way to me. Spoilers ahead, but I'll try to keep things as vague as possible, since if you watch, you'll know what I mean and if you don't, you won't care.

Strangely enough, although I'm not that excited about Doctor Who this season, I also don't have a lot of complaints about it. The semi-serialized nature, with two-parters, gets like the old-school series (though I've never watched it in serialized form, as it seems like in the US it was always put together in a "movie" for each story). I don't have anything I actually dislike about it. I'm just afraid that Peter Capaldi will not be one of "my" Doctors. I've had more fun with the Classic era reruns from PBS and BBCAmerica than with the new episodes. But at least they don't seem to be actively attempting to destroy all that's good about the series. Unlike other shows.

I'm a bit behind on Sleepy Hollow because I'm generally out on Thursday nights and then I forget to catch up with it later, and while this season has been better than last season, the previous season just about killed it, and it's all starting to feel like a stretch with the way Ichabod seems to have had a connection to every single element of the American Revolution. I'm hoping that the two episodes I need to watch will make the arc make some kind of sense or give it some kind of purpose. Maybe they'd be better off with a Monster of the Week instead of trying to do a grand arc about the latest impending apocalypse. I'm just not sure I can forgive them going to the trope of literally demonizing the existing significant other of the male lead last season.

Speaking of which, there's Grimm. I can understand the desire to shake things up in a long-running series, but there's shaking things up and then there's removing the stuff that made it fun. For me, a big part of the enjoyment of the series came from how very ordinary the hero seemed. He's the boy next door, the nice guy with his nice girlfriend living in a cozy house -- and yet the monsters take one look at him and flee in terror. This very ordinary-seeming guy who is in no way large or menacing, who would best be described as "cute," is the monster the monsters tell horror stories about. Now they've removed all the "ordinary" from him, though I guess he's still cute and not particularly physically imposing. They demonized (again, literally) the existing girlfriend and then killed her off, and now he's moved out of the cozy house -- and in with his enemy, in one of the biggest "seriously?" moves in TV history. This woman did a shape-shifting spell to get him to think she was his girlfriend and sleep with her in order to take his powers away, which nearly got him killed, and then the spell they had to do to get his powers back was what turned his girlfriend into a monster, which was what got her killed, and then it turns out that the enemy got pregnant (their way of dealing with the actress's real-life pregnancy) and had his baby, so now he feels responsible for looking after her and the kid. So, yeah, he's having to live with his rapist who's largely responsible for the death of his girlfriend, and they seem to be setting it up for a relationship to develop, and no, just no. That happens, and I have to quit. I know the girlfriend wasn't wildly popular (that character never is) and there were some complaints about lack of "chemistry" between them (ironic, given that the actors are involved in real life), but it wasn't like they needed to get the existing significant other out of the way to make room for the relationship fans were clamoring for. This is where you want to say to the writers, "Have you actually looked at what you're writing here?" I just hope someone has noticed the ratings nosedive and maybe figured it out.

And speaking of not noticing what they're writing … I'm withholding a lot of judgment on Once Upon a Time until I see how they finish the current arc, but I'm very, very worried based on their track record and extremely screwy morality. I'm already iffy with their idea to turn the heroine into a kind of villain, not because of her actually doing anything villainous but because she sacrificed herself to take on the disembodied darkness that was going to consume everything. Strange how that sacrifice is being treated somewhat like yet another bit of "proof" that heroes aren't all that great, after all, even though she hasn't actually done anything bad under influence of the darkness that wasn't for some kind of greater good or at least out of love. Some of the supposedly reformed villains have done far worse while still being considered heroes. And then there's the fact that each thing she did that supposedly brought her closer to darkness has been to save a life. Only on this should would saving lives count as a step closer to darkness. We won't even get into how they've shown us twice in this arc that apparently the real path to villainy is being angry at a person who slaughtered your entire village. But now they've pulled off a plot development that makes very little sense in terms of a magical system or worldbuilding, even by this show's "Calvinball" standards of rules for magic. It actually has all the potential pieces to be a wonderful character arc, but the writers of this show are idiot savants who have a great talent for coming up with brilliant situations without recognizing or actually doing anything with what they've created, so I'm worried. If they screw this up, I may have to be done.

The Muppets seems to be getting better and is apparently going to be retooled during the winter hiatus. The main thing they need to remember there is that the point of Fozzie Bear is that he isn't funny. The humor comes in the way other people react to the fact that he's entirely unfunny, so giving him his own story lines doesn't work. But they did find a way to get Kermit to unironically sing "The Rainbow Connection" and still put a funny new twist on it, so there's hope.

Haven has been okay, but has lost some of its spark. Some of that comes from some offscreen issues, like having to change shooting locations mid-stream, which means the town is no longer such a character in the show. They're giving answers and wrapping things up, but it's going to be hard to evaluate this season until we see how it wraps up. Some of the episodes have been blah, while others have been deliciously tense and weird.

And I think that's all the geeky stuff I'm following right now.

A Catch-up Round-up

I have a title! Book 3 in the Fairy Tale series, now known as A Kind of Magic, will be arriving November 24 (tentatively -- depends on Audible). The cover art is done, so I should soon have a cover to share. The fun thing is that it takes place around the time of the release date. It's not quite full-on Christmassy -- it happens before Thanksgiving, but the production of The Nutcracker starts during the book, and there's already Christmas stuff out.

This may mean that the next book will be a full-on Christmas book, so maybe I'll plan for that release date next year. Assuming I get the book written by then. I need to write another Rebel Mechanics book in the meantime.

I guess that since I had to go straight from getting home from the convention to working on the book, I'm now having my post-convention recovery period. I've been mostly useless the last couple of days, though I did do some FenCon PR work. I got sidetracked into hypothetical vacation planning. That involved going to various travel and tourism sites, searching for what I wanted, then checking the review sites. It seems that what I really wanted doesn't exist. I wanted to do a road trip to the minor mountains in eastern Oklahoma/western Arkansas, and I wanted a hotel like the one I had near Hot Springs last year, where I had a balcony overlooking the lake. My favorite part of the trip was getting up in the morning and drinking tea on the balcony. But it seems that no hotel like that exists in the places where I was looking. I came up with a few alternate possible plans, but then I got a tip from a friend about a place to go that looks like it might fit the bill for a quiet getaway. Now I'll do more research.

In choir news, I did put myself forward for that Requiem solo, and the director came up with an interesting way to deal with it, since there were multiple people wanting it. It's divided into multiple pieces, separated by choir parts, and he's giving the different pieces to different people. I got the middle part that's my favorite part of it, anyway, and I don't have to worry about the really high notes. My writer brain has kicked in, and I already have a narrative for it in my head that suddenly makes the piece make more sense this way. If it's one person doing the solo, it's just the one person offering the prayer at what essentially sounds like a mass funeral (one of the repeated lines translates to "grant them rest eternal"), though since we're doing it for All Souls Day, I suppose it's about all the people who've gone on before us. But with multiple people, I'm picturing a number of people in a cathedral, all praying, and then the spotlight falls on one person offering her prayer, goes back to the crowd, then falls on another person. The different pieces of the solo all have a different tone, so you can imagine them being sung by different characters.

I may get a story out of this.

And in other news, I found this list of inspiring real-life geeks
, and would you believe who's on it? Yeah, I'm listed among people like JK Rowling. Kind of cool.

While I have stuff to do in the next couple of days, I think I'm going to treat the time up to (and including) Labor Day as a quasi-holiday, with the weekend itself being real holiday. Then I'm going to hit the ground running afterward and really try to be diligent and productive. I need to make a conscious effort to do more promotion, and I need to do a better job of staying on top of the writing. I have too many stories in my head that need to be let out. My pastor's sermon series lately has been based on the "first things first" concept -- that illustration where if you fill a jar with water, sand, and pebbles, you can't fit any rocks in, but if you put the big rocks in first, then add pebbles, sand, and water, you can actually fit more in the same jar -- and I've realized I need to do a better job of focusing on my priorities.

The End of the TV Season

I was very good yesterday, getting more than 3,000 words written and taking an extra dance class (I have some to make up from when I was sick earlier in the year). Now my thighs are a little angry with me, but they'll live. I just have one more week of dance, and then a short break before the summer term. I'm a little nervous about summer because it's a teacher I haven't had before, since my teacher will be on maternity leave. My teacher gets that we're adults, not all of us have danced all our lives, and we're doing this for fun/exercise, not to make a career out of it. When we've had subs, sometimes they're a little too intense for our group, and then it's not fun anymore. But I don't want to take the summer off because then I'll turn into a slug. I actually need to find more ways to trick myself into exercising.

The main TV season is pretty much winding down, though these days there are summer shows, so it's not quite the vast wasteland of reruns it used to be. Most of my favorite shows were renewed or are coming to a natural end. One loss was Almost Human on Fox, which I thought was just starting to get into its potential. The other is one I got into late, The Crazy Ones on CBS, but I think my main interest there was seeing when Josh Grobin would show up. I love how as a singer he's so serious and dramatic, but as an actor, he's a raging goofball who specializes in playing characters who are clueless or jerks or clueless jerks, and it was interesting to see him holding his own against Robin Williams in a comedy, even if he was just in a minor recurring role (as the somewhat psycho jingle writer). Warehouse 13 is ending Monday, and while I've loved that show, I think it's time for it to end. While there have been some high points and brilliantly clever moments along the way, I still think it peaked in the first season. It just seemed tighter and the characters seemed more real then. It became a little cartoony along the way.

The Grimm season finale is tonight, so I can't judge how it compares to everything else, but it would be hard to top the Once Upon a Time finale for sheer fun. I liked that NCIS didn't feel obligated to have a cliffhanger. When every show ends every season with a big cliffhanger, the concept of the cliffhanger loses its impact. You expect it, and a good cliffhanger should leave you with a surprised, "Wait, that's it?" moment. When a show like Grimm can follow their "to be continued" screen with "oh, come on, you knew it was coming," you know cliffhangers have become run-of-the-mill. Though I did find their "Oh #&%*$!" instead of "to be continued" kind of amusing.

Now to go make a grocery list, run some errands and get my house in reasonable order before I get a little work done and then do some late-afternoon/early evening hiking. Tomorrow is going to be a good work/reading day.

In Deepest Mourning

I got a bit of bad news yesterday that shouldn't be life-altering, but it is. They're closing Television Without Pity, my biggest Internet addiction. This is a site that offers sometimes snarky and usually highly entertaining recaps and reviews of television episodes, but the main thing for me is the forums for discussing television.

Discussing TV is the main reason I wanted on the Internet in the first place. I'd started watching The X-Files, and while I had a long-distance friend who watched it, I didn't know anyone locally who did. It was such a twisty show where all the details mattered, and I wanted to hash out theories about what was really going on. Then I read a magazine article about an online community focused on the show, and I figured out how to use the Internet access at the university where I worked at the time to get on the newsgroup. I soon bought a modem (yes, they came separately then) and signed up for AOL so I could discuss from home. When the show was airing on Friday nights, I didn't want to wait until Mondays to go online and see what people were saying. From there, I got on other newsgroups for other shows, including Angel, where someone posted a link to a recap at a site that was called Mighty Big TV at that time.

I started reading recaps there, and then later found that they had forums. The Television Without Pity forums were heavily moderated -- a huge shift from the Wild West of Usenet -- and that meant there weren't any flame wars, the 'shipping wars were toned down, things stayed on topic, and people were required to write in full sentences with at least an attempt at real spelling (no text speak). That meant that the people who were willing to abide by those rules tended to be intelligent and literate. I felt a little intimidated, so I didn't get an account and start posting until Firefly was on and I had things I just had to say. Soon, I'd migrated most of my TV discussion over there, and I've posted enough over the past decade that I've reached "Stalker" level. Communities have formed there. I've made friends there who've become real life friends and whom I've traveled to meet up with. I've discovered that I was having online conversations with people I knew in real life.

Even though I currently have geeky friends who watch the same things I watch, there's something different about this kind of discussion than I've ever had in real life. My friends and I chat about the cool events that happen in shows. On TWOP, we delve into characterization, character arcs, symbolism, themes, plot developments, etc. I've learned a lot from doing this that I've applied to my writing, so I think it's made me a better writer to look at stories this way.

We have until the end of May with the forums, and people are already making plans about migrating elsewhere. I'm twitching a bit about the loss, but it may end up being good for me because if I use the moves elsewhere to change some of my habits, I should free up a lot of time that I could be devoting to my own work. But I know I'm going to start twitching when I think of something to post at TWOP and it isn't there anymore. I may do something with my Stealth Geek blog that I totally neglect and do some of my own snarky TV commentary there. But none of it will be the same. I'm already twitching.

A Depressing Epiphany and a Charming Rogue

I think I figured out the reason behind some of the story nag. My subconscious must have needed the conscious part of my mind to get out of the way so it could work, and it did it by creating busy work for it. I decided I needed to take another look at my plot outlines for the current book, since I've changed a lot about the plot, and I had a really depressing epiphany: The "crossing the threshold" part of the story that's the end of act I doesn't come until nearly halfway through the book. I tried a few ways of charting it to try to call that the "approach to the inmost cave," but it wouldn't fit. Even when I gave each character his/her own journey, it didn't work. The moment I aligned that scene with crossing the threshold, everything else snapped into place.

That means I need to cut a lot, probably at least 60 pages. The really sad thing is that I don't have to strain my brain to come up with which parts to cut. I think I was always sort of aware that I had a lot of wheel-spinning going on. That's probably where that "but there's no peril or urgency!" issue came from a few weeks ago. Adding danger to the scenes didn't help the real problem, which was that the scenes weren't necessary. There's some information in those scenes that will have to be added in a different way, but otherwise, I can cut them. The really depressing thing is that one of them is a "kill your darlings" scene -- a scene I've been visualizing since I was midway through writing the previous book. It's a lovely scene that tells us a lot about the characters, but I think I could cut it without changing anything other than removing later references to it. However, it might be a better fit for a sequel to this book, so I'm not trashing it entirely.

Other than going instantly from being halfway through with the book to being a quarter through with it, I feel pretty good about this. Usually, when I get stuck, there's a reason, and once I figure it out, everything moves a lot more quickly. Today will be plot machete time, then I want to do a good writing marathon tomorrow to get back on track.

In the meantime, that story nag is still there, but much less insistent. I have this vague idea of a modern woman from our world captured and taken to a fantasy-type land, where she in desperation tries to prolong her life, Scheherazade-style, by telling stories -- the fairy tales she remembers from childhood. But it turns out to be the history of the world she's in. But I don't know where to go with it from there or how to use the stories if they're history.

I will confess that part of my current interest in Once Upon a Time has nothing to do with fairy tales and everything to do with Captain Hook, which really surprises me, as I've never been the type to go for the bad boys. This version isn't really a villain. He started as a rogue with a personal agenda that aligned him with one of the villains, but since then has become more of a Han Solo type who works with the good guys. Still, I've never been into the Han Solo types, so I was surprised by how appealing I found this character. Then we got his backstory and learned that he started as a very earnest Horatio Hornblower-type young naval officer who turned pirate in rebellion against a king who betrayed his people. That explains a lot. He's not so much a Han Solo as a Luke turned cynical by having his ideals betrayed. And then I saw an interview of the actor, and it seems it's very easy to make him blush furiously (and his co-stars know exactly how to do it). I hadn't thought that blushing really showed up on camera, but he managed it. If he didn't have the current job, I guess he'd be a good fit to play Owen because he can pull off the visible blushing (the coloring is right, too, though I don't know if he could play American, as he's rather Irish). So now I don't feel quite like I've turned against my usual patterns. If you haven't seen the show, this should give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Be warned that it loads very slowly since some of the pictures are animated.

In other geeky news, SyFy has announced an actual show with a spaceship in it. Wow! They describe it as being like Battlestar Galactica meets Downton Abby. I'm not quite sure how that would work, but it sounds like it would be right up my alley. However, about 90 percent of the appeal of Downton Abbey for me is the costumes, and that would be lost with the typical spaceship jumpsuit attire.

Avoiding the Debate

The Monday after a convention is always a bit of a challenge because while there's a part of my brain that's revved up and inspired, it tends to get shouted out by my body and the rest of my brain, which just want to rest. But this is going to have to be a busy week as I try to come up with ways to start revving up the marketing machine for next week's big push. And then there's that pesky book I need to be writing.

Nothing really earthshattering came out of the convention. It was a pretty small, quiet con, which meant it was mostly good for hanging out with my friends. We're so busy running things at our own con that it's nice to hang out at one without having real responsibilities. We dubbed it "sofa con" as we spent most of the time sitting around on sofas in the hotel lobby and chatting as people passed by or joined us.

The Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate turned out to be not so much a debate as a discussion of the two franchises, their influences and their influence. The panel wasn't really set up to be a debate, with "moderators" for each team instead of a moderator throwing out questions to the two teams, and many of us on the panel could argue either way. I've never been big on the "vs." mentality that's so common in fandom, where you have to pick a side, and anything said in favor of the "enemy" is taken as a personal insult. I'm just generally keen on things with "star" in the title and spaceships, and I get different enjoyment from each of those franchises. I wouldn't want to give up either one, and both of them were big influences on me or inspirations at different times in my life. Kevin J. Anderson was the Star Wars team moderator, and I was the Star Trek team moderator, and we decided between us to just make it a discussion.

I will say that one possible factor in me agreeing to this was the fact that there were a couple of fully armored Stormtroopers in the audience. That wasn't exactly an incentive to argue against Star Wars.

Since FenCon has some prominent guests from the worlds of both Star Wars and Star Trek this year, I think I'm going to propose that we do have a proper debate with a moderator posing questions, and maybe even a time limit on responses and a formal rebuttal opportunity, like in a high school or political debate.

Stealthier Geeks

I'm now on Day Two of Doorknob Watch. After I sat around all afternoon, waiting for the guy to arrive sometime "after lunch," I got the abject apology phone call at around 7:30 in the evening. He got busy and didn't realize until then that he'd never let me know he wouldn't make it. I never really know how to handle calls like that because the instinct is to do a reassuring "it's okay," but it's really not okay. On the other hand, being mean about it does no good because it wasn't like I wanted him to drop everything at that moment and come over here, and I know that the other thing he was working on was for the father of a neighbor who had his bedroom ceiling collapse when his air conditioner leaked. That's more urgent than my doorknob. Still, time management is one of my hot buttons. I'm a big fan of under promise, over deliver. I pad all time estimates and then if I'm early, I look like a superhero. I've found, though, that there are a lot of people who are afraid to give realistic (or padded) time estimates up front. It's like they think they're making people happy by saying something will be done soon, without realizing that people will then be really irritated if they don't come through. If he'd told me he couldn't finish with the doorknob until later in the week, I'd have been okay with it and I wouldn't have spent an afternoon held hostage in my house while waiting for him to show up. Although this particular contractor does good work, I don't think I'd hire him for anything on my own because the time thing would drive me insane.

I coined the term "stealth geek" a long time ago, and it's something I've felt describes me pretty well, since I am rather geeky ("fantasy novelist" is probably about the geekiest non-technical profession around) but I don't fit the stereotypical image of a geek. This week, though, I found that I'm merely at amateur level in those, both in stealthiness and in geekiness. We have a couple of new pastors at my church, and in order for them to get to know people, they put together a number of small-group dessert gatherings at the homes of various church members. I signed up for one hosted by a friend from the choir since I figured if I at least knew the host it might minimize the potential social awkwardness. This person reads my books, but I figured she was being polite and supportive, not that she was necessarily normally into that sort of thing. She doesn't have any of the usual geek signs. Then I got to her house, and the first thing visible is the shelf in the entryway full of various Enterprise models and a life-size phaser model. Her DVD collection looked a lot like mine, but with stuff even I don't have. Later in the evening, she invited me to join her Sunday school class for a game night. I was thinking something like Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit, but it turned out to be some kind of adventure card game. When I said that I'm not really wired for games in general and mentioned that I'm probably the only fantasy novelist who never even tried D&D, she said her D&D group already had ten people in it. Apparently this Sunday school class is essentially a science fiction convention with bonus Bible study. I might give them a try, although they're all married, mostly with kids (and most of the kids have been in or will soon be in my choir) and mostly significantly younger than I am. So it turns out that she's both stealthier and geekier than I am.

But that wasn't the biggest surprise. Two of the other people at this gathering were a slightly older couple (they have a ten-year-old grandchild) who are involved in a lot of music things. She plays the harp and he plays the hammered dulcimer, and they demonstrate the instruments for my choir kids. He sings in the choir, and they're both really sweet about coming up to compliment me whenever I sing in a duet or quartet. Absolutely nothing about them pings my geekdar. But then they were admiring the host's DVD collection and started talking about all the Stargate conventions they've gone to. That's some Ninja Level stealth geeking. In retrospect, the harp and the hammered dulcimer might have been a clue, as they're instruments found at Renaissance festivals, but I don't get a Rennie vibe from these people.

Then there was the person I didn't know who approached me to ask if there will be more books in my series, and there was the Firefly discussion on the way out (one of the other guests complimented the hosts on "a mighty fine shindig"), and I was left rather confused. Had I been to a church event or a convention? I had no idea my church was this geeky.

On another note, if you want to make a good first impression on the new pastors, it might not be such a great idea to be holding a baby while introducing yourself as one of the few never-married single adults in the church. I'd taken her off her parents' hands so they could eat, and she was happily burrowing into my hair when it came my turn to introduce myself. I quickly clarified that I was doing early recruiting for children's choir and would be returning her to her parents as soon as we managed to extricate her from my hair (it took three people).

Caution: Flying Sharks

First, a little crowdsourcing/survey: Does anyone have any experience with the Megabus line? They've started operating in Texas and have direct service from Dallas to San Antonio. It's much cheaper than either driving or flying and probably a little faster than the way I'd drive (if they stick to the posted schedule). Their baggage policy would allow for about the same amount I'd pack, though there is a limit so I wouldn't be able to just throw in whatever I want. However, there's no restriction on stuff like liquids, so I could bring a full-size bottle of hair gel. There's the same downside of flying in having to adhere to someone else's schedule, but then there's also the upside of having someone else do the driving while I sit and read or knit. I'm curious what the experience is like, what the clientele is like (would it be safe for a woman traveling alone?), etc.

Then again, the very name "Megabus" makes me twitchy. When we lived in Germany, we took a spring break trip to Spain that was a package tour for American military personnel. The bus was a double-decker with accordion extension, and it held something like 160 people. The guy sitting across the aisle from us dubbed it "Megabus" and didn't shut up through the entire trip from Frankfurt to south of Barcelona, narrating the adventure of Megabus driving through the night. His kids had that handheld Battlestar Galactica electronic game (this was the late 70s), and to this day, when I think "Megabus" I hear the particular pattern of beeps that went with that game.

In other news, I finally watched the infamous SyFy movie Sharknado. It fell into the category of stupid fun, but you really had to turn your brain off. If you've even watched a little of the Weather Channel, let alone actually been anywhere near a tornado or hurricane, it just doesn't work. For instance, there's a hurricane heading toward California that's driving all the sharks in the ocean toward LA. When the storm surge hits, the sharks are washed ashore to swim in the floodwaters. But the beach is full of beachgoers enjoying a sunny day when it hits. Generally, the rain bands of a hurricane hit first, so there are torrential rains even before the storm surge and the worst of the winds. There might be a few idiot surfers out enjoying the waves, but you wouldn't have crowds of people on the beach in their bikinis. Then once the tornadoes start attacking (that part reminded me of the episode of WKRP when there's a tornado and the station's only disaster communication plan is for communist invasion, so they read that, switching the word "tornado" for the word "communist."), they managed to CGI in the tornadoes but not the tornado damage. A major tornado goes through downtown LA, with the only damage caused when it flings a shark into something. Not to mention the people out swimming in a pool during a hurricane that's spawning tornadoes. Or maybe people in LA are that dumb.

But still, I actually kind of liked the main characters, and once you got beyond the stupidity of the situation, their story worked. They bothered to develop characters, and the acting among the leads wasn't that bad. The actress playing the barmaid needs to get cast in a series because she took a bimbo role and made it work. It helped that she wasn't written as a bimbo in spite of her wearing a bikini through the whole movie, but she also came across as believable, credible and sympathetic. Normally I cringe at the acting in these things, but she impressed me. It was the "name" actress who was painfully bad.

And, you know, it wasn't quite as stupid as the episode of Under the Dome I watched afterward.

SF TV in Book Form

It looks like I'll finally get something done on the Saga of the Water Heater Enclosure. Last night, a board member, his contractor friend and another board member who is also a contractor came over to look at it and agree that yes, it does need to be fixed. The non-contractor board member was talking about how the undamaged side was okay, but the contractors said no, it all had to go because it was probably breeding vast quantities of mold. They also agreed that the water heater was probably shot, based on the symptoms. I said I wanted to put in a new water heater when they put the water heater back in after the work, but the one I found that I liked was too big for the enclosure.

That was when the contractor board member, an older gentleman, made a potentially fatal error. He expressed shock that I was shopping for a water heater. I said (not necessarily in these words), "Well, duh, it's a vital piece of equipment and it costs a lot of money. Why wouldn't I research the purchase?" He then said something about getting the right color. He received what my friends would likely recognize as the Scary Smile as I patiently explained that the one I wanted had multiple program modes, so it could learn my water use patterns and save energy, and it had a vacation mode so that it didn't have to heat the water full-on while I was out of town. I think that was when he realized that I was a force to be reckoned with and asked for the specs on the water heater. I gave them off the top of my head, which the other contractor who was standing by the cabinet verified. He then said that he could go through his plumbing supplier so I wouldn't have to pay retail.

Maybe I should have let them know that I might have needed someone to take out and then install the water heater, but I could probably have done the carpentry work on my own, other than rebuilding the door frame. I know how to deal with drywall. Habitat for Humanity is great for life skills like that.

I got word this morning that they'd start work today. I don't know how long it'll take. It's a very small space. Getting the water heater out will probably take as much time as ripping out the old sheetrock and maybe even hammering in the new. Taping and mudding out will take a little longer. So I might have hot water by tomorrow night. In the meantime, I worked out a way to get a semi-shower using a large basin, a small pitcher and the electric teakettle. Is it weird that I'm kind of enjoying the creative problem solving aspect of this?

But enough about the "my house hates me" woes (maybe my ghost is acting up). I have books to talk about! This week, I have two fun science fiction novels/novels relating to science fiction TV. One, I was really surprised to see in my library, Shada, the Douglas Adams Doctor Who story that was never finished, as novelized by Gareth Roberts (a current Doctor Who writer). This is from back in the day when a "story" was told in six half-hour episodes. They'd apparently started filming this, doing the location shooting for the first part that takes place in Cambridge, but then there was a strike that shut down production, so the episode was never finished. From the author's note at the back, I get the impression that the script wasn't entirely finished, either, that Adams, who was never known for being good with deadlines, hadn't quite reached the end, or else had done a "and then stuff happens, the good guys win, the end" type of rushed ending, with the hope of fixing it as they got closer to shooting that part. Since they never shot that part, he never finished it. The fun here is not so much that it's a Doctor Who story, but rather that it really feels like a new Douglas Adams book, more so than the Hitchhiker's book written by a different author. It's very much in his voice, and there are very Adams-like touches, like the ship with an annoying personality. There are also a few inside jokes for Who fans, like the description of a monster tearing through a wall like it was made of polystyrene. I'd imagine that a Douglas Adams fan might enjoy this even without being a Who fan, though obviously a Who fan would enjoy it more.

Still on a science fiction TV theme, I then read Redshirts by John Scalzi. An ensign newly assigned to the fleet's flagship notices something strange, like the way they seem to burn through junior crew members, with at least one dying a horrible and pointless death on every away mission. Then there's the "Box" into which material is fed, and it then pops out an analysis or solution with only minutes to spare, no matter what the deadline is. The science of that just doesn't make sense. The more veteran crewmembers avoid having anything to do with the senior officers and hide when it comes time to assign crew members to away missions. Then there's the one senior officer who seems to get injured or exposed to a deadly disease on almost every mission, only to miraculously survive and then be totally cured a week later. Our hero gets suspicious and starts looking into this, only to find that the truth is even weirder than he imagined. The story goes off onto a highly entertaining metafictional slant, something sort of like Mercedes Lackey's 500 Kingdoms series meets Galaxy Quest meets Stranger than Fiction. It's laugh out loud funny in a lot of places, though one of the codas may have brought a tear to my eye. Recommended reading for Star Trek fans.

Although I enjoyed this approach to the concept, it did make me kind of want to see a realistic treatment of the Star Trek tropes -- what would really happen in a ship like the Enterprise, where the senior officers seem to have a strange case of Stockholm Syndrome that keeps them from accepting promotions that require transfers, where people are regularly coming down with strange diseases that make them behave oddly, and where the junior officers have a horribly low life expectancy? You'd think there would be investigations or mutinies, or is Captain Kirk some kind of charismatic supervillain who has the crew under his thrall so they don't notice these problems and live only to serve him? How does a captain maintain so much loyalty from his crew that they won't leave his command even to further their careers in spite of the fact that so many of his crew are treated as expendable and so many awful things happen to them?

Geeky Summer TV

I launched into the new book yesterday, getting the first scene/the first 2,000 or so words done. Even better, the book seems to have taken over my brain already. I stayed in bed really late this morning in spite of waking up really early because entire scenes were flooding into my head, and when The Voices start talking like that, it's a good idea to listen. I think there will be a writing marathon today to try to capture everything that came to me last night. I'm remembering how much I love these characters. This may come across as blasphemy to some, but I may even like them more than Katie and Owen. They're a lot more complex and a little more messed-up while still being essentially good people who are trying to do the right thing.

In other news, I'm almost done with my latest knitting project, which I hope to reveal on Monday. It's really complicated and required learning a few new techniques, but the part I messed up on was the simple ribbing at the end. After doing a bunch of lace from a chart and then doing a pattern involving all sorts of bobbles and crossovers, I lost count on a simple knit three, purl one rib and had to undo almost an entire row -- and a row is 311 stitches. But now that the rib's properly established, it's a lot more brainless.

I've been getting all this knitting done because there's been a fair amount of geeky TV on lately, so let's catch up.

There's Primeval: New World on SyFy, a Canadian version of the British series, now finally showing in the US but, sadly, already cancelled in Canada after one season. I had to wait for SyFy to rerun the first couple of episodes because I assumed wrongly that it would be available OnDemand, like everything else on SyFy. When I caught up, I really liked it. One thing I like is that it's more on the CSI model, where it follows the events in a different location in the same universe, rather than being a remake of the original series where they try to map the characters onto the original cast. That means there's no Nerdboy. I know he was popular among the younger fangirls because he's allegedly cute (I much preferred the big-game-hunter research assistant from the first couple of seasons, though I ended up liking the actor even better when he got to be the comic relief in CHAOS), but as a character it seemed like they couldn't decide if he was Gilligan or The Professor. Half the time he was getting himself and sometimes others into trouble because he was a total idiot, but then they also tried to make him the brilliant inventor who came up with all the devices that saved the day, and by the end he was also some kind of romantic hero, and just ugh, really. But in this series, they all seem to be reasonably competent adult professionals who I can imagine actually doing this stuff. I like the team interactions. We haven't seen a lot of him, but I rather love the idea of the air force officer stuck in the X-Files/Project Blue Book kind of job who gets the surprise of his life when someone actually reports something relevant to him, and he has to use those protocols he's been sitting on while twiddling his thumbs in boredom.

Fortunately, Sinbad is OnDemand, so I can watch it on Sunday afternoons when I eat lunch and read the newspaper after church. I certainly wouldn't schedule my life around it or even bother recording it. It's supremely cheesy British fantasy fluff with just enough meat in it to be mildly intriguing. They've got a good set-up for a voyage kind of series, with the rag-tag group on the ship whose professional crew mostly died in a storm, and Our Hero is under a curse so that he'll die if he stays on land for more than a day. So they sail from port to port, having adventures before hightailing it back to the boat before sunrise. Unfortunately, this suffers the same ills as most of the recent British fantasy fare aimed mostly at teen-ish viewers, in that it comes across as way too contemporary. The characters in this vaguely medieval Middle East talk like modern Londoners, complete with slang and idioms. Sinbad wouldn't turn heads walking down any modern city street, since he wears cargo shorts and a t-shirt. The sense of modern was what kept me from being able to deal with Merlin, and it irked me with Robin Hood. With Robin Hood, one of the behind-the-scenes features even talked about how their costumes were designed so that kids could find clothes like that in the local High Street shops, so Robin Hood wore Ye Olde Hoodye. I guess they think that modern kids won't relate to anything that's not just like their own lives. Don't they realize that the allure of costume dramas is the costumes? What's the point of something set in a different time and place if I can buy the same things in the mall? Anyway, Sinbad must have caught my imagination on some level because I found myself dreaming an episode the other night. Or, at least, I was dreaming a fantasy story set on a boat.

I caught the first episode of Under the Dome, and while the plot intrigues me, I don't particularly care about any of the characters yet. I mostly spent the hour making snowglobe jokes, since Haven's Christmas episode a couple of years ago was inspired by the same source material, and it turned out to be a girl with powers who was turning the town into a snowglobe. Every time someone ran into the dome in this series, I'd hum a little "Silent Night." I think my main interest in this series will be mapping the King tropes.

It's not new, but my schedule has finally adjusted to allow me to watch Person of Interest, and I think I'm hooked. It would be nice if it were available OnDemand, though, since that's why I didn't watch it in the first place (it was on when I had a class, then wasn't OnDemand, so I didn't get hooked enough to want to record it, so I just didn't watch). I really like the characters (I'm kind of a sucker for the soft-spoken, unassuming badass), though I'm a bit lost on the big-picture story. I love the dog. But now that my dance classes have moved back to Tuesday nights and I no longer have major programming conflicts, guess where they're moving the show? Now I might be hooked enough to record it, though.

As for my question about blog content, I'm rather surprised that people are still intrigued by my daily life. I'm not intrigued by my own daily life. Maybe I'll make up one and start writing about it.

The House of Swendson

I finally dealt with the most nagging bit of procrastination yesterday. The next round of to-do lists comes up next week, but for today, I will be focusing on finishing my Nebula ballot reading, tidying the house in case I have company for Easter and baking goodies for a Doctor Who watching party. Then I have Good Friday service tonight and three services Sunday morning. Fortunately, there's also some fun stuff, with new Doctor Who and Game of Thrones.

Speaking of Game of Thrones, they have a web thing where you can make your own house sigil. Here's the sigil for House Swendson:


"I only have eight more pages!" translates to "I'm not putting this book down until I've finished it." It's a family joke, so I figured it makes a good motto for us. As for who will end up sitting on the Iron Throne when all is said and done, well, duh:


I promise to be a benevolent ruler and only behead the people who really have it coming. Funny, George R.R. Martin cast me as Mary Ann when we were deciding which Gilligan's Island character was which author at the Random House party at last year's WorldCon. He obviously doesn't know me very well. Then again, we were also discussing Gilligan's Island conspiracy theories, and he may not think Mary Ann is all that naive and innocent.

To give Doctor Who equal time, in case you haven't seen it, there's a short prequel to this Saturday's new episode. My cable company also had this available OnDemand.

Now I must go stretch so I'll be able to walk tonight and tomorrow. I went to ballet class last night, so that's twice this week, and it was a beginning class. For me, that means doing the beginning moves at a more advanced level, which is actually harder than the advanced class because it moves very slowly. When you're lifting your leg above a 90-degree angle, slow can be torture. Still, it was fun momentarily being one of the best students in the class, which is a reverse from my usual class, where I'm one of the worst. At any rate, my thighs are not happy with me at the moment.

Sympathy for the Devil

The book is done and off to Mom. Now to have the Day of Getting Stuff Done, though I may be tempted to procrastinate that until Monday because this is perfect reading weather. I've obtained the Blu Ray of Les Miserables, so now I can watch the whole show whenever I want, without having to wait for a touring production or a trip to New York, but I don't know if I'll watch it today. Maybe just some bits and pieces. Otherwise, I have Nebula ballot reading to do. This may be our last blast of cold, damp weather until next November, so I need to enjoy it.

I mentioned maybe last week that I had a rant building up, and here it goes: It seems like the good guys just can't win in modern entertainment. Sometimes it's just the fans who gravitate toward the bad guys, but sometimes it's the writers fueling that.

To start with, being good is apparently considered boring. It doesn't help that a lot of writers don't seem to know how to add shading and depth to a good guy without using shades of gray or darkness. If a good guy is considered the least bit proud of being good, actually cares about being good or if he dares to judge the bad guys for being bad and doing stuff like killing, then he's called smug and self-righteous. Meanwhile, the bad guys are allowed to gloat about their success all they want. There's usually some excuse in the bad boy's past for his bad behavior -- he was abused, neglected, a good guy was mean to him or did him wrong. The good guy's past doesn't seem to matter, unless the fact that he had a happy upbringing is used to show that he had advantages the bad guy didn't have, and thus is also used to excuse the evil. A bad guy can be "redeemed" and practically sainted by just one time not doing something evil when he has the opportunity, and the good guys are considered awful if they don't immediately throw a parade for him. But if the good guy sets just one toe over the line, he's forever damned. His "bad" may not be near the level of the ongoing behavior of the bad boy, but it's still unforgivable, while the bad guy's "redemption" act may be nowhere near the level of selflessness usually shown on a regular basis by the good guy. Just about anything the good guy does to defeat the bad guy will somehow besmirch his goodness. Basically, he's having to fight evil with both hands tied behind his back and then he's considered stupid and ineffectual if he loses.

And this doesn't just apply to good vs. evil -- the heroes and the villains. It also applies to anyone with shades of gray, like the anti-hero "bad boy" who's not a villain in the grand good vs. evil fight but who is sometimes an antagonist to the good boy hero. Eventually, the anti-hero will be the real hero and the good guy will be shown as a horrible person (or at least perceived that way by the fans). Of course, the anti-hero gets the girl because the good guy is boring.

I was thinking about this while rewatching A Game of Thrones, where too many of the good guys are too stupid to live (so they don't), but I really don't think that's meant to be the message in the books. The books seem to draw the line between worthwhile honor and stupid honor that's really more personal vanity, wanting to be able to call yourself honorable rather than truly wanting to do what's best for everyone. They also acknowledge the fact that you can't deal honorably with dishonorable people because they won't follow the same rules, and that means you'll lose, sometimes with horrible consequences. Sometimes, you may have to go against rules or vows to serve the greater good, and that's okay. The TV producers may be besotted with the darker characters and manage to make a lot of the good guys even more stupid than they are in the books, but I get a different sense from the books.

Where it's really become egregious is with Once Upon a Time, where the writers seem to want us to feel sorry for the evil queen because she's sad and lonely as a consequence of all her evil actions. Meanwhile, the good guys are considered tainted if they actually do anything to fight back against the evil. Most of the fans at Television Without Pity are seeing it the way I do, where they're getting tired of watching the villain weep because she didn't get her way and can't force people to love her, but apparently the greater Internet is full of outrage that the good guys are being so mean to her -- never mind that she's never so much as apologized for the wrongs she's done to them.

I think this is one reason I loved the Harry Potter series. J.K. Rowling gave Harry and Voldemort very similar backgrounds, then showed that how they responded to those backgrounds and the choices they made along the way was the difference between being good and being evil, and there was nothing wrong with taking action to defeat the evil. Plus, she got outraged when fans tried to get too sympathetic to the bad boy instead of the hero.

A good guy doesn't have to be boring, and there are ways of writing layers that don't require mixing in a little darkness. Even good people can be conflicted or tempted. They can get angry. They can have layers and nuances and pain. If your good guy isn't as interesting as your villain, then you're doing it wrong.

But I'm also a little worried about a culture that's so quick to forgive evil and condemn good, where trying to be good is considered "self-righteous."

Let's hear it for the heroes!

When Darth Met Mickey ...

I had a pretty good Halloween. I got a fair amount of writing done, watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" and had enchiladas. I had other treats planned, but I wasn't hungry for them, so I just ate a couple of pieces of my "just in case" candy that I didn't have to hand out to trick-or-treaters. I wouldn't let my kids trick-or-treat at my house unless I knew the people who lived there because it isn't really directly on the street, and no one who lives around me has kids, so I don't generally get trick-or-treaters.  Besides, in this neighborhood full of big, nice houses, it would be inefficient trick-or-treating to focus on the smaller townhouses tucked away in a corner where all the residents are single and/or retired (I'm the baby of our little corner). You go to the nicer houses that are decorated and where the people likely have kids in order to get the best candy haul.

The big geek news of the week is that George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney. That's resulted in some fun photos that have been going around Facebook, like the Death Star with mouse ears, or the Death Star hanging overhead with the "When you wish upon a star" logo below.

But I think my favorite Star Wars/Disney mash-up is an official one. This is what Disney Parks put together, and though I don't normally embed videos, this one is totally worth it. So, Darth Vader, Disney just bought Lucasfilm. What are you going to do next?



Listen very carefully to the music. On the surface, it sounds like the kind of tinkly music they play in all those Disneyland ads, but it's actually a rather familiar theme in a way you've never heard it before. That alone makes this a work of art, and if this is the kind of thing that comes out of this merger, I'm totally on board with it. I have to admire the kind of minds that would come up with this sort of thing.

They've said they'll be putting out new Star Wars movies, but in my wildest dreams, what I'd love them to do is reboot the prequels. Those stories need to be told, but they did it wrong. Now they need to claim that those movies were badly produced Imperial propaganda and set the Disney-Pixar writing team to work on telling the real story. They know character and story and know to focus on that, no matter how many pretty bells and whistles they're throwing at the screen. I think they'd realize that they have to totally scrap the idea of Anakin being the "hero" of the prequels because that puts them in the uncomfortable position of making the Young Hitler Adventures. The hero should be Obi Wan, who's struggling with this kid he loves like a brother but who's going down the wrong path. I'm sure they could get Ewan McGregor back (try to keep him away), and he hasn't aged that much, plus he was actually way too young before to have turned into Alec Guinness in only 20 years after the end of Episode 3. They could scrap everything that wasn't already directly referenced in the original trilogy, which would get rid of Jar Jar, make Luke and Leia's mother less useless, allow Anakin to be a darker, less whiny figure (when out of Lucas's grasp, he'd have to be less of a Mary Sue), scrap that awful immaculate conception pseudo-scientific "midichlorian" nonsense, and just tell the tragic story of a young Jedi who was so full of himself that he was easily seduced by the dark side.

Not that I expect that to happen, but in my geeky mental happy place I'm picturing Pixar writing allowed to go into more complex, adult places, with better acting coming out of a better script and better directing. I am curious about where they might go with the new movies. I've lost track of that expanded universe and haven't even finished the last two Zahn books (his are the only ones I've really liked), but I think I'll always be a Star Wars geek at heart, since that was my gateway drug into science fiction and fantasy.

I'm Not Really Left-Handed

I am very, very close to the end of the first draft of Book 7. However, this is going to be the tricky part because the closer I get to the end, the less I know what will happen. The first part of the proposal synopsis tends to be really detailed, but by the end, there's a bit of handwaving, so it reads along the lines of "and then they defeat the bad guys, save the day and live happily ever after." I figure that by the time I get there, I'll have worked it out or I'll come up with an idea. Yesterday, I got there and still didn't have an idea, so I went with something that popped into my head and that veered things off into a crazy direction that is either stark-raving insane or utterly brilliant. It might possibly involve disco as the ultimate weapon for defeating the forces of darkness. I'm almost afraid to look at what I wrote last night, for fear that it really might be crazy and now I'll have to rethink my plans for having the Bee Gees save the world.

My writing got disrupted yesterday by my attempt to buy a new dishwasher. I say "attempt" because I was thwarted. I went to my neighborhood Home Depot, where I must go pretty often because the greeter guy at the front door recognized me. I usually get pretty good service in that store. All I have to do is stare at a shelf for a moment and I get swarmed with help. But that's in areas where I can help myself and just need to take something off a shelf. I went into the appliance section, where you can't just pick up what you want and take it to the cash register, and found something different entirely. For one thing, they don't have much on display these days. I guess you're just supposed to buy online. For another, the one person working in that department was with a customer. I browsed the few things they had in stock and waited for him to acknowledge me enough to let me know he'd be with me in a minute or to call for someone else to help me, but nothing happened. I wandered off to look at the garbage disposals and decided that I definitely need someone to install it because it was a bit too heavy for me to be able to lift and maneuver, especially since in working with it under the sink I'd have to rely entirely on upper-body strength, which I don't have. I wandered back into the appliance section, and it had been totally abandoned. So, I went and picked up a few other things I needed while I was there, then returned to appliances. Nobody was there. By that time, I'd spent about half an hour in the store, so I gave up, bought the things I needed, and left. When I got home, I sent an e-mail via the web site feedback form, and to their credit, the manager of my neighborhood store called me within about fifteen minutes of me sending the e-mail. It might have helped that my slightly snarky e-mail was still polite and kind of funny. If you get a customer-feedback e-mail that uses terms like "lone survivor of an apocalypse" and "invisibility cloak," you're probably going to be curious about that customer.

The guy who called me was able to answer all the questions I wanted to ask the appliance person, and it turns out that there's no advantage in buying the garbage disposal and dishwasher together because they're installed by different people, and I suspect their disposal installation is more expensive than if I just called a local plumber, who can get contractor rates on the parts. The dishwasher installation is free. So I figure I'll call a local plumber and get the disposal taken care of, and then I can get the dishwasher some other time. They had a model of the one I was looking at online at Best Buy, but when you factor in delivery and installation, it's cheaper through Home Depot, and I can just order it online and not have to deal with the store.

In entirely unrelated news, the flurry of posts and articles on the subject has reminded me that this year is the 25th anniversary of the release of The Princess Bride (the film -- the book is older). That makes me feel very old because I was in college when it came out and I remember going to see it with a group of friends. I always hedge when asked my favorite movie of all time, but I think this one may have to be it. Lines from it have become a regular part of my vocabulary, and among the people I hang out with, you don't even have to explain using a Princess Bride reference in conversation. I can watch and enjoy it no matter what mood I'm in. If I stumble across it on TV, I can't seem to stop myself from watching at least a little of it. It doesn't get old for me, and I think it's aged very well. What I love about it is that it's a spoof of fairy tales, adventure stories and fantasy stories while still within itself being a brilliant fairy tale/adventure story/fantasy story. The one weakness is that the romance part of the plot is pretty lame, but I think that's deliberate. The book even hints that this isn't a relationship likely to last, and that's part of the fairy tale spoof, since in all the fairy tales, there really isn't much foundation to the relationship. Sure, the guy went through all kinds of hell to win the girl, but after that, what do they really have between them? That slight undercurrent of edge keeps all the declarations of love from being too saccharine.

I'm rather surprised that Cary Elwes didn't have the kind of career you'd have expected after that role. He seemed destined to be a romantic/heroic leading man, but instead he's either spoofed that image in things like Men in Tights and Hot Shots or he's played creepy bad guys. I rather liked his turn as the shady boss toward the end of The X-Files (when the show was actually pretty good if you didn't think of it as The X-Files), and he's been fun when popping up in guest roles on cable dramas lately, particularly when he played the WWII codebreaker hallucination on Perception. He's one of my mental candidates to play the Doctor on Doctor Who if they want to veer away from the absurdly young after Matt Smith leaves. He has the range for cold and scary, dashing and romantic and wildly funny, all with some of the most supremely snarky line delivery in the industry. Few can do snide superiority better, whether in American or British accent.

I may have to add a Princess Bride viewing to my weekend plans, in addition to reading, baking and visiting the library. Today, though, is all about the writing, and then my Friday TV double feature.

Greeting Cards for Geeks

Earlier this week, I was shopping for a Mother's Day card, and if I had any artistic talent and if I were capable of being pithy and terse, I think I sense a potential untapped market: Greeting Cards for Geeks.

None of the cards the store had really fit my situation. For starters, the syrupy sweet cards with "meaningful" poetry and drawings of flowers just wouldn't work. As my mom would say, "Urp."

There were some amusing cards about Mom taking a well-deserved break that might have applied while the kids were at home, but my mom is retired and the kids are grown. My dad's the one who needs to tell her she deserves a break because he's the only other person in the house.

The cards about now appreciating how tough it must have been to be a mom don't work for me because they're about the shared bond of motherhood now that you have your own kids. Spending 45 minutes a week with preschoolers hardly applies (even if I do have 17 of them at a time).

A lot of the cards are about how awful you were as a kid and needing to make that up to your mom now. I did have a bad bratty phase when I was about ten and probably should have been stranded in the woods without even any breadcrumbs, but for the most part, I think I was a low-maintenance kid. I did my homework, made straight As, practiced my band instrument, didn't spend that much time on the phone, didn't stay out late, didn't run with a bad crowd, didn't go through a rebellious teenager phase and didn't get into trouble. I don't think I'm responsible for that many gray hairs.

A lot of the cards meant for adult daughters to send their moms are based on the idea of what mom taught and how your relationship has transitioned to a friendship, and I like that concept, except that all of the cards seem to express that through shopping or shoes (or shopping for shoes). Newsflash: women can do other things. I'm not opposed to recreational shopping (though I haven't done it for anything other than books in ages), but that's definitely not anything I learned from my mom, who hates to shop for things other than books.

What I need is a card about a mom who started the geeky indoctrination early by watching the original Star Trek with me when I was an infant, who took me to all the Disney fairy tale movies and gave me books of fairy tales, who introduced me to Broadway musicals and who gave me my first Narnia book. We're more likely to watch Firefly or Doctor Who together than to go shopping. Our conversations are more about this week's episode of Grimm or the last Terry Pratchett book we read than about shoes.

So, what we need is a line of cards that expresses that kind of sentiment. Ditto for Father's Day, though in that case it would be about my dad dragging me to see Star Wars, Star Trek the Motion Picture, the original Battlestar Galactica pilot (it was released as a big-screen movie overseas) and Raiders of the Lost Ark. We also need birthday cards for geeky friends. Instead of stuff about shoe shopping and drinking martinis, we need cards about Firefly marathons and seeing movies on opening weekends. It's really difficult to find birthday cards for female friends that celebrate female friendship in some way other than buying shoes together. Forget about finding a card that's appropriate for a woman to give a platonic male friend. All the cards aimed at men seem to be about beer and sexy women -- unless they're about getting old. It does seem like platonic male/female friendships are more common in the geek world, perhaps because a lot of geeky interests are stereotypically "male" and geek girls grow up hanging out with guys because those are the people they have more in common with. Hallmark doesn't seem to acknowledge that men and women might be friends and might not want to give each other cards laden with innuendo, though.

I bet cards for geeks would sell really well at conventions -- unless geeks are more inclined to just send e-cards and have forgotten how to use postal mail. For special occasions, I do like to send or give a real, physical card, though, and the right card is very hard to find.

Flavors of Geekdom

I had a rather challenging Sunday. For one thing, it was my third week in a row to have to sing for two services. For another, one of the songs we did involved Hebrew text (fortunately it was written phonetically) and the other was Mozart in Latin. And then the preschoolers sang in the late service, and the song they did involved rhythm sticks. Yes, we gave sticks to preschoolers in church. We like to live dangerously. But they were good and didn't hit themselves or anyone else with the sticks, and they mostly just hit the sticks when they were supposed to. And they were so very, very adorable. I just have one more Wednesday session with them, where all the choirs do a program for the parents. And then we eat pizza.

Now I feel very, very drained and tired, but this will be a busy week. Essentially being my own publishing company is a fair amount of work, even with delegating everything to experts. I suppose I'm not doing much more actual work than I was doing while working with a regular publisher, but it weighs more on me. Before, they might run stuff by me, but I didn't have any more say than they wanted me to have. They might or might not take my suggestions. Now, though, the buck stops with me. If I don't like something, it doesn't happen that way, and there's a lot of responsibility to that. It's also a big mental shift to make. So far, I've liked most of what's been done, but when I haven't, I've had to remind myself that it's okay to say so and that they have to listen to me. I'm mostly just trying to stay out of the way and let the experts do their thing, but I do have to make the ultimate decision. The other difference is that the timeline is seriously compressed. We're doing in a few months what would take a regular publisher a year or so to do.

I may have to hand in my geek card because I didn't see The Avengers this weekend, and I have to admit that I'm not overly keen to see it. It's one of those things that I feel like I ought to be into but that I could actually take or leave. I've never been all that into the whole superheroes thing, I guess, aside from that mad crush I had on Robin in the old Batman series when I was in second grade. There are flavors of geekdom, and that isn't one of mine. I also don't do games of any kind. I don't enjoy computer games, video games, card games or tabletop games and I've never played roleplaying games. I might occasionally play solitaire (with cards, not on a computer), and when I was a kid I liked to play Payday against myself, using different money-management strategies for each game piece to see which one did best. Otherwise, I get bored with any game within about two minutes. On the other hand, I read fantasy novels, can discuss Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, Doctor Who, etc., and go to conventions, so I think I'm plenty geeky enough, even if I do have weak spots. I'll just never win the gold medal in the all-around geekiness competition. I'll have to be an event specialist.

Friday Geeky Odds and Ends

Oh, man, ballet was tough last night. I woke up already a bit sore. I don't know that we did anything particularly difficult, but the teacher was really focusing on technique, and when I focus on doing things exactly the right way, I know I'm a little more tense. Plus, if you've been doing things the wrong way, you use a different set of muscles when you do things the right way. Thus, the sore thighs. It probably doesn't help that I got there early and was watching the really advanced class in the adjacent studio. Those are the teens who are probably going to dance professionally. I should know I can't do anything close to what they can do, since they're young enough to be my children and have been dancing far longer than I have, but having seen them made me try harder -- possibly harder than I should have. And now I have a week off because of spring break. I've told myself that I will exercise this week so I won't suffer too badly when I go back, but we'll see how that goes.

I also get a week off from choir, starting Sunday morning. I drew the short straw in being assigned to the quartet singing at the early service on the morning of Daylight Savings Time, but the choir isn't singing at all Sunday, so instead of having to do two services, I get to go home when I'm done with the music for the preschool Sunday school. Then there's no rehearsal or children's choir on Wednesday. If I get groceries on the way home from church, I won't have to leave the house all week! Other than to go walking or to a movie, or something like that. Anyway, my quartet is singing Aaron Copland's arrangement of "At the River," and it's pretty easy for me because sopranos sing the melody, except for this one descant part that's a little tricky.

I finally got around to watching the pilot of Awake, the series in which a cop seems to be living two parallel lives -- one in which his wife died in a car accident and one in which his son died. In each life he's got a different partner and a different psychologist, but clues from one life bleed into the other. I'm kind of iffy. It's on when I'm out, so it will be an OnDemand show, and probably one I'll catch a full week later, since NBC is now putting the as-aired versions OnDemand for the first few days, complete with commercials and network promos for things that have already been on. I like Jason Isaacs from the British mystery series Case Histories, and I like him here, even with American accent, but the series didn't grab me as much as I expected, since I love those "what if?" parallel lives plots (and still want to write one). Strangely, I like the cop part better than the parallel lives part, and the clues bleeding over aren't actual clues but just strange connections, so I suspect they're going for one reality being a dream instead of a science fictiony premise where they're both somehow real in alternate universes. However, this series probably has the highest Harry Potter Score on American television right now, with Lucius Malfoy starring.

Meanwhile, the current highest Doctor Who Score on American television is probably The Office, with Catherine Tate (Donna) as a recurring character (who seems to be set up to become a regular next season). It's rather ironic that it's the American version of an originally British series that has the highest Doctor Who score.

By the way, the Harry Potter/Doctor Who Score is a game I play when watching TV or movies after I noticed that almost all British productions involve at least one cast member who's been in either Doctor Who or one of the Harry Potter movies. It's kind of a geeky "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" thing, only you seldom have to resort to degrees. Now that Mark Sheppard has been in Doctor Who, it makes it a little too easy for American series to have a Doctor Who score, so I do have a clause for him where it has to be a recurring role instead of a one-episode villain to count. Otherwise, every series on American television would have a Doctor Who score, and that's just not right. I may have to institute a similar rule for Alex Kingston, except she's a recurring Doctor Who character, and a rather pivotal one at that, which makes excluding her from the scoring more problematic. And that means CSI has a Doctor Who score, no matter how hard I try to avoid it -- though it's still lower than The Office, since she had a one-episode role on CSI and Catherine Tate is a borderline Office regular.

In the meantime, while reading the book on forensics, I think I came up with the murder plot for the book that will kick off my potential mystery series. Now I just need a good evil scheme for another thing I'm working on. I had a dream of one last night, but it turned out to be The Matrix, and I don't think I want to go there.

How to Watch Star Wars

First, if you checked my blog soon after I posted yesterday and thought it looked familiar, it seems that in my cold-fogged haze I had a wee bit of a copy/paste error and re-posted the previous day's blog. I guess you actually have to hit "copy" after highlighting something. I'm lucky that the last thing I'd copied was the previous day's blog post. That had the potential to be all kinds of embarrassing or awkward. Anyway, the right post is up, so you might want to re-check.

I did find that ballet worked really well for clearing my stuffy head. I almost couldn't talk myself into going, but exertion in a really hot, humid room turned out to be great. I may have to shut the bathroom door, run the shower and jog in place. I still have the last remnants of sniffles and sinus pressure, but I think the end of the nightmare is near. Even with my head all stuffy and aching, I felt like I was really dancing for a while. Normally I'm just getting through the moves, but I was able to turn my brain off and let my body go with what it knows how to do.

And now to indulge in a bit of geekery (that I should probably also post to my very neglected Stealth Geek blog).

This blog post has been making the rounds among my friends, and it resolves one of the burning issues of our time: the proper viewing order of the Star Wars series. Should you view them in release order, starting with the original Star Wars and the first trilogy and then moving on to the prequels, or should you view them in chronological order, starting with Episode 1? (That's putting aside the whole "the prequels don't exist, la, la, la, can't hear you" mindset.)

You can read that very long blog post if you want the whole story, but here's my perspective. I'm a child of the 70s, and I saw the original Star Wars in the theater during its original theatrical run (yes, I'm old). We were actually kind of late to the party, as this movie had been the smash hit of the summer of 1977, while we didn't see it until Labor Day. I think that was mostly because of practical reasons. There was one theater in the entire city showing it, and you had to wait in line for hours to get in. That's not something you want to do with two children, one of them a preschooler. Even on Labor Day, we waited in a very long line and got less than ideal seats in a totally packed theater. I didn't actually want to see it. The other movie playing at that "twin" cinema was The Slipper and the Rose, a live-action Cinderella musical, and that's what I wanted to see, but my dad insisted on Star Wars (bless him -- I did eventually see the Cinderella movie on TV, and he so made the right call). And I was totally blown away. That movie changed my life and had a lot to do with me wanting to be a writer. I'm still not entirely sure how that worked, how my lifelong love of books didn't trigger that, but a movie did, but I think it had something to do with so totally capturing my imagination and making me want to tell stories.

Flash forward a few years. I was late, again, to The Empire Strikes Back because I was living in Germany at the time and the base theater didn't get it until November. I was thoroughly spoiled, since one of my mom's women's magazines had published a condensed version of the novelization during the summer. I didn't believe the big reveal until I read it in the actual novelization, which I obtained through a school friend who had an extra copy from her grandparents in the States. Even so, that big moment when Darth Vader tells Luke that he's his father was a big shocker, and I remember the gasp in the theater.

That's the big problem with watching in episode order. If you've seen the prequels and have watched Anakin Skywalker turn into Darth Vader, you know all along who Vader is and it's no big shock, assuming you're showing these films to someone who's been living under a rock and has never heard of any of the major plot developments. But even if you've heard about it, it's still different from seeing it in context. However, if you watch the movies in release order, you end with the big downer of the Republic falling and Anakin becoming Darth Vader. The author of the original blog post also mentions the problem of not knowing who the ghost dude at the end of Return of the Jedi is, but I guess that's a Blu-Ray problem as I haven't watched the version where they replaced older ghost Anakin with young ghost Anakin (the original DVDs have both original and special edition versions).

The solution he proposes is rather clever -- watch Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, then treat the prequels as a backstory flashback to tell Anakin's story after the big revelation, and then return to Return of the Jedi to finish it off and conclude both Anakin's story and Luke's story as well as the restoration of the Republic. Everything comes full circle. There are a few continuity errors that become more obvious this way, like Leia remembering her mother in Return of the Jedi when you'd have just seen that their mother died in childbirth, so neither of them knew their mother. But still, the idea of using the prequels as an extended flashback works better than most viewing orders.

Then the original blogger goes on to propose that you don't even need Episode 1 here, and that makes a lot of sense. Everything you need to know from that episode is explained in Episode 2, and skipping that one means no whiny boy Anakin, less reminder of the kind of creepy way that Anakin and Padme meet when he's a child and she's a teenager (not to mention that whole thing of a planet being ruled by a teenage girl who is elected to that office -- who the heck came up with that political system?), next to no Jar-Jar and no talk of the pseudoscience "immaculate conception" of Anakin (another "seriously?" item). The few good parts of Episode 1 are mostly just action scenes that don't lend much to the plot. Just watch the lightsaber duel at the end for kicks (and the music for that is truly awesome).

I may have to try this during the March TV hiatus/rerun season, and it's convenient as Episode 1 is the only one I don't have on DVD. Of course, it's hard to purge the knowledge of all the films from the brain to really see how it works, and I don't think I know anyone who hasn't seen these movies. It's sort of mandatory for geeks, and all my friends are geeks. Still, it might be an interesting experiment from a story structure perspective.