As usual, Mark Coker has some definite ideas– this time about the place of libraries in the world of ebooks. I’m not sure about what place libraries will have in our world in 20 years, but he is right that they have been an important part of America up until now. Check out what he has to say.
Well, here we are at last friends. Spring Break has arrived. I was so frazzled when I got home, I seriously thought about passing out for the entire weekend. But I’m not going to. I’m going to get started on my writing and try to get something done today.
I haven’t gotten any writing done during the last four days, but I have been looking through projects that I’ve started and never got back to– some of which I had forgotten. I might just post the pieces that I have written, since I don’t think I’ll ever do anything really with them. There are what I thought (at least at the time I wrote them) some good concepts. Here’s a sample:
The Olympian gods awake suddenly on an alien world, unaware of how the arrived, and are pitted against similarly powered alien gods.
Famous people appear in “purgatory” after their death, where they fight a war. The two main characters are Albert Einstein and gunfighter Clay Allison (no relation).
A young woman is kidnapped and held hostage, but is helped by a mysterious “ghost” who has a very limited ability to interact with the real world, but seems to know all about her.
I don’t know. Any of them sound interesting to anyone out there?
I’ve been talking about TV characters and how you have to have a character relatable to the audience. So how does that work in my own writing and am I practicing what I preach? Well, I try to.
In Senta and the Steel Dragon, I’ve got literally dozens of characters and quite a few from whose eyes we see the world.
Senta, Saba, Terrence, Yuah, Radley Staff, Cissy, Zeah– we see the world and the other characters form their eyes. They all tend to be pretty normal. Terrence is maybe the least normal of the group. Heroic and handsome, but a drug addict. I needed to see the world through his eyes in order to show the world on the other side of the drug, but once I did that, he became much less central to the story.
On the other hand, some of the major characters in the story– notably Bessemer the Steel Dragon and the Sorceress Zurfina are so out there that it would be hard to identify with them as a reader… probably more so with Zurfina. Bessemer is pretty normal, other than being a dragon. But Zurfina is unique.
I was talking about TV characters and how they have to be relatable for the audience. I mentioned Seinfeld. I think a much better 80s show was Friends. All the characters had their own quirks, but they all had redeeming features that we could fall in love with. Ross was a nerd, but his (mostly unrequited) devotion to Rachel made him somebody that we could root for. Chandlers snideness, Monica’s obsessiveness, Joey’s obliviousness, Phoebe’s weirdness, and Rachel’s self-centeredness could all be looked over because we like the characters.
I also said you could take characters to the extreme, if you have at least one character the audience can view the others through. Think back to the 60s, and the Andy Griffith show. Most of those characters were completely wacko, but we could always enjoy them by looking through Andy’s exasperated eyes. That’s why The Andy Griffith Show is timeless and hardly anyone remembers Mayberry RFD (the same show without Andy). A similar methodology is the show Two and a Half Men. Originally the audience could enjoy Charlie by viewing him through Allen’s relatively normal eyes. Unfortunately, Allen has become such a caricature himself, that it is no longer possible. I think the show’s producers were lucky that Charlie Sheen left when they did, so that they could bring the character of Walden in to be the “new normal.”
One of the drains on my time has definitely been my work as advisor of our school yearbook. It’s taken all my spare time at school (which is not much anyway) and has taken a huge amount of my out of school time. But now it’s done! For good or ill, the thing is finished. I can catch up on my grading and planning at school and catch up on my writing (hopefully) at home.
In addition, next week is Spring Break– Free at last, free at last (with respect to Dr. King). I haven’t looked forward to a week so much since– well, ever. As I write this, my little log book tells me that I should have 310 more pages written so far this year than I have. That’s more than a whole book! I’ll let you know where I am at the end of spring break.
The Johnny 7 OMA was my favorite toy. I got it for Christmas when I was nine years old. I can’t imagine it being sold or advertised today. Just one more example of how things have changed.
Some days when I am really in a bad mood, I just watch this and laugh my ass off.
Sorry, for some reason I can’t get the embed to work.
I saw an ad for Seinfeld reruns the other day that referred to the series as “the greatest show of all time.” It got me thinking about the importance of characters. I stopped watching Seinfeld several years before it went off the air. For me, the characters became uninteresting. They became so caricatured that I couldn’t identify with them anymore. No matter how abnormal that a character becomes, the audience should be able to see the world through their eyes.
Now this doesn’t necessarily hold true for all the characters, but there has to be one central character that holds onto some self-awareness. In the beginning of the show, that was Jerry. But eventually he became as goofy as the others. There was nobody to view the other characters through and they stopped being endearing.
Let me give you a current example– my favorite show Big Bang Theory. Sheldon is so out there that he is a constant comedy foil, but if we didn’t have Leonard to view Sheldon through, he would be far less enjoyable. Leonard has his own foibles, but he has self-awareness. He’s a nerd, but he knows he is, and he knows what makes him one. Sometimes he doesn’t want to be one, but he knows he always will be. We can laugh at Sheldon, but we need Leonard to appreciate them both.
I needed a little change from what I have been writing, so I sat down this week and worked on two chapters of The Sorceress and her Lovers. I have never worked like this before– switching back and forth between two chapters of the same book. Like the stories in Senta and the Steel Dragon, this book will have four different main characters and will switch back and forth between them. The two chapters that I have been writing this week are a Senta chapter and a chapter featuring Hsrandtuss. The latter is a lizzie that first appears in The Young Sorceress. I always had fun writing the “Cissy” chapters of Steel Dragon because it gives me a chance to look at human beings from the outside. Here’s another little teaser. The Hsrandtuss chapter takes place at the Dragon Fortress (last seen in The Two Dragons), while the Senta chapter takes place in the country of Freedonia.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Kickstarter projects or not, but they are based on a web site that encourages people to donate toward some artistic or creative endeavor. Recently the creator of the cancelled TV show Veronica Mars proposed a movie and fans ponied up for the money. If you haven’t seen Veronica Mars, you should. It was an awesome show, staring then unknowns Kristen Bell and Amanda Seyfried. I have all three seasons on DVD. With any luck, the movie will be such a success, they will bring back the show.
