2017: I Am Not Pleased So Far

Well, that didn't take long, did it?

You have to say this for ol' Drumpfie, he's motivated af. Obamacare? No thanks. EPA? Let's just shut their communications down. National parks? Don't want them talking about stuff. Muslims coming to America? Nope. And, oh, people on the national security council who know stuff about security? Nah, let's put some racist twatwad on instead.

It's a brutal time, folks. The mind, parsing all of this, asks two questions: how much worse can it get? And how does someone even as monstrously narcissistic and unhinged as "Shut the Fuck Up, You're Out of Your Element" Donnie maintain this level of intensity for the next four years? Yet, having asked those two questions, the mind realizes that it maybe doesn't want to know the answer - it would rather retreat to those halcyon days of, let's say 2006, when the world was full of possibility and the previous worst president ever (who also only got into office because the electoral college is fucked) found himself having to change his mind from time to time as things got bad in Iraq.

Admittedly, the other stuff swirling around is kind of getting annoying too. Senate Democrats, in particular, seem to think that wagging their fingers is a dangerously provocative move, and so, for all their outrage, haven't considered blocking any of Donno's cabinet picks. They have reservations, of course. These picks aren't remotely qualified, even Elizabeth Warren admits that. But blocking them? Gosh, you guys, I don't know - I mean, there's this lovely high road here, and it leads to... I think that sign reads "Irrelevancy", but I can't be sure. Why don't we go up there and check?

In the meantime, all the cool kids are deleting Uber from their iPhones, which I feel slightly vindicates my principled stance in not taking it (seriously folks, I've only ever ridden in an Uber twice in my life, and one of those was paid by my boss). Although it's unclear whether Travis Kalanick ordered an end to surge pricing as a way to profit off the taxi strike in NYC, or as a measure of solidarity. Or... could it be both?

Meanwhile, every right-wing dickbrain out there seems to think that calling protesters "snowflakes" is the height of cleverness. Well, I don't want to be rude, but which side just spent the last eight years getting butt-hurt over how people would throw facts and logic at them? I think all the "special little snowflakes" are on the Republican side here.

Sigh. I spoke once about wanting a hard reset for the political class. I didn't mean tearing the system down or anything, I just meant that it might be time to redesign certain parts of the system. Now I'm not so sure - Plato's Republic is looking better and better, tbh.

Things don't seem to have moved on so far this weekend, but I wait with bated breath to see what horrors will be unleashed tomorrow. In the meantime, here's the website for the ACLU's donations page: https://action.aclu.org/secure/donate-to-aclu

And remember, this isn't a left-versus-right thing - it's about respect for the rule of law and for the Constitution. If you think this is just a bunch of whining lefties protesting - you're on the wrong side of history, snowflake.

What Makes Space Opera Tick?

I've been thinking lately about space opera.

Specifically, I'm wondering if there's a formula to it, the way there is for epic fantasy. Both are forms or genres that seem to prefer large, sweeping stories spread out over multiple books. Epic fantasy is perhaps more known for multi-book storylines, but I can equally point to epic space opera stories, like Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos or Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy. There's also the notable case of Stephen R Donaldson, who's known for both the Thomas Covenant books (epic fantasy) and the Gap novels (space opera).

Admittedly, I've read very few of those books above - I loved the Hyperion books, but was less taken with Night's Dawn, and have never gotten around to the Gap books, though I keep meaning to. My experience of space opera revolves more around other media, specifically TV (Star Trek), movies (Star Wars) and video games (Mass Effect), which tend to skew more toward the mystical elements that epic fantasy also shares. Heck, Star Wars even has magic in it, and features a farm-boy toppling an empire.

But there are enough similarities to begin to move toward a unified definition of space opera, and chiefest of these seems to be multiculturalism (or at least politics, since alien races aren't present in much of Hyperion or Battlestar Galactica). Even the Ender/Shadow/whatever else novels by Orson Scott Card mix characters of different (Earth) cultures and find narrative momentum by examining how they interact.

Another common theme is hyper-specialized Earth analogues. Hyperion's setting is full of planets that are based on one specific aspect of Earth culture, and so is Night's Dawn - in fact, that's one of the things that put me off about it in the first place, as one of the planets in question has recreated Victorian-era British culture, an idea I found stretched credulity far more than the idea of the dead rising and invading human space. Go figure.

Star Trek leans less in this direction, though there are some notable episodes that glance at this kind of idea (like that early episode of TNG with the African-derived culture). Likewise, Star Wars doesn't have much in the way of Earth-cultures, but its equivalent is the array of landscapes it uses to show alien planets, from Tatooine to Dagobah to Endor.

The intersection of politics and business is another big theme, though not in Star Trek, where business doesn't really exist (a fascinating idea on its own, and one that seems to have been explored only there and in Iain Banks's Culture novels). Or if not politics and business, then the politics behind certain galactic corporations' misbehavior seems to be another favorite theme. It feels like a more recent addition to space opera, but timely, as the role of corporations in our own politics grows ever-larger.

Fantasy, meanwhile, seems to have started to embrace talking about business only in the last few years, the main example being the books of Daniel Abraham (whose favorite theme seems to be economics in general). It's probably less relevant to that genre as a whole, but does provide some thematic tension in the form of modernity versus tradition, similar to how it must have played out in actual history.

Daniel Abraham, in fact, is one reason why I'm setting my thoughts down like this. He famously held a discussion on how epic fantasy works with a number of other New Mexico-based SFF authors a few years ago, and the result is his series, the Dagger and the Coin, the last book of which I'm currently reading now. I'm fascinated by looking at the themes in common of space opera, not just because I like it but because it's a form I'd like to try my hand at, and I think an understanding of the tropes and themes is a good starting point.

So let me throw the question out to anybody reading: what space opera stories should I read? And what themes or ideas have I missed?

2016 Recap: Gosh, what an awful year

The theme of how bad 2016 has been has made its way all across my social network/filter bubble, particularly in the past couple of months, so I'm not going to recap all of the ways in which it was bad (I've touched on it in my blogs about various celebrity deaths, and in talking about Brexit). But it's interesting to me how for once I feel in lockstep with the prevailing view of how bad the year's been.

Other "bad years", I haven't necessarily felt the same way, possibly because things were going better for me personally, or because I wasn't in the US and so I couldn't relate to the feeling on the ground (at least in places like the Bay Area or New York; presumably in Arkansas or the Rust Belt people are happy about how this year's gone, who knows?). Even 2001 doesn't stand out for me as a year that was shit from start to finish - without sounding callous, the attacks on the World Trade Center were awful but I didn't have that visceral reaction to them that a lot of people seem to have had, even those who weren't in New York at the time and didn't know anyone directly affected.

But this year was just a bad'un, from start to finish - the fact that David Bowie essentially dropped dead, and that a load of other celebrities followed (some had been ill, some were old, some were apparently finished off by the macro-currents of politics), seems to have really set the tone. The one thing that seemed universally positive this year was Leicester City winning the Premier League, but I can't shake the feeling that such a long shot coming through led to Brexit...

(FYI, no, I don't actually believe that, I have a general understanding of what happened behind both of those events. But allow me the artistic license, okay?)

Apart from one or two things, it wasn't that awesome a year for me at a personal level either, which I think is why the stuff happening worldwide (including what's going on in Syria right now) seems to be affecting me so much. It's hard to say it was a particularly bad year, personally, but there's a sense of not moving forward the way I was in 2013, just as I prepared to move back to the US from London.

At a writing level, I did move forward with a couple of things, which I'm pleased about. I finished (and revised) a full movie script, for instance, a thing I've never managed before. And I finished revising a novel, and started sending it to agents, which is more than I've done for most of the novels I've written thus far.

Most notably, one of my short stories, which I've actually been shopping around for quite a long time, got accepted to an anthology (which is on sale now!), so that feels like a positive development, and one that hopefully I can build on. If nothing else, that shows the importance of actually sending stuff out - I managed a few more story submissions than last year, which clearly helped for getting this one placed. The hopeful thing is that I'm starting to get ideas for new short stories, which means more stuff to send out - and considering that I haven't written a short story since 2013, having more in the pipeline is actually a great development.

On the fitness front, there's been a severe lack of progress, though. I wonder how much is down to the fact that I didn't manage to sign up for a race this year, even though I've logged as many miles as in 2015. I'll be the first to admit that my diet hasn't always been as great as it could have been, but it's hard to draw any conclusions based on my food diaries from last year. Still, in the last couple of months I've done a better job of policing certain things (like my sugar intake), so hopefully there's a foundation to build on there.

Dating was an area that seemed to show some promise, but then fizzled out again. I did meet someone cute (through an app), and went out with her a number of times (previously I hadn't gone on more than two dates with anyone since moving back to the US), but then on the eve of our fifth date she cancelled, saying she was going to see someone else exclusively. So I end 2016 pretty much as I started it - at square one. My idea is to try and meet more people organically, but I'm not sure how successful it'll be, as my friend circle is pretty comprehensively married off and short on single females. And most frustratingly, here as in other areas where I'm not satisfied, it's hard to find silver linings or lessons to be drawn going forward - which is what really makes 2016 a bad year, in my opinion. But I have to be positive, because what's the alternative...?

Money-wise, I've actually managed to accomplish all of my goals, for once, and am hoping to achieve something a little more ambitious. But I've been plagued by two realizations: first, that I simply don't make enough money to live in the Bay Area, unless I'm being subsidized by one or more parents; and second, in September I learned the scale of how badly I'm being paid, in comparison to a new starter who's very junior to me and has fewer qualifications. The answer to both problems is to find a new job, but that's easier said than done, and I'm concerned about how much I'd be giving up by leaving my current job - five weeks of vacation, for example, and the free time to work on my own interests outside of work. But we'll see, I guess.

For other types of goals, it's also been a pretty good year - I got out to New York, and to Argentina, as well as my yearly trip to the UK and Italy. I'm hoping for another visit to Asia or Australia this year, and would love to get out to other parts of the US, or even just other parts of California. And I've taken advantage of a lot of the cultural stuff on offer here in the Bay Area (which reminds me, I need to sign up for Sketchfest). So the plan is to make more aggressive goals for 2017.

The question, of course, is how any of this will be affected by what's happened in the rest of the world. I'm not planning any trips to the Middle East, but frankly I expect the rest of the world to become a lot more dangerous during a Trump presidency, especially for Americans. At the very least a lot of right-thinking people in the rest of the world are going to have that automatic suspicion of me because of my passport and accent, which is a shame. And I'm not hopeful about my own country turning safer or saner over the next four years - in fact, I expect it'll become a libertarian/objectivist nightmare. It remains to be seen how that'll affect individual people, but expect that it will.

But I think John Oliver summed it up best in the final episode for this year of Last Week Tonight. Here's hoping 2017 is better (because it really can get worse, you know):

Why Third Parties Aren't an Awesome Idea

The 2016 election cycle is mercifully arriving at its climax, which is good, because for the first time ever I'm pretty much sick of it all - politics, horse-trading, handicapping, etc. It occurred to me a few days ago that obsessively checking Nate Silver's 538 and worrying about what those numbers mean is bad for my sanity - I've voted, and my ability to affect the result ends there.

So what have I been thinking about? Well, for one thing, that it would have been nice to have a Democratic candidate untainted by the cozy relationship the party's had with big business since her husband was president. And that, even though I'm not particularly a follower of Bernie Sanders, it would have been nice to have a president who pays lip service to my brand of left-wingery.

(Also, please no comments on how far left Hillary Clinton's voting record is - that's as may be, but she did still vote for the Iraq War, so...)

I've thought long and hard about the Green Party, too, but I've just been really unimpressed with them. I'm satisfied that Jill Stein isn't an anti-vaxxer, but I'm not satisfied that she hasn't addressed that more forcefully - y'know, being a fucking medical doctor and all - and I'm furious that her first reaction to Brexit was to say what a good thing it was that it happened that way.

Add to that the fact that the Greens resolutely haven't made any inroads into state or local politics (apart from the odd mayor or council member here or there), and I can legitimately ask why I should waste my vote on them.

But there's another problem with the Greens, that I don't know if anybody's really thought of: if they were to become a major national party, perhaps winning a state here or there, that would essentially hand the field to the Republicans. All of the left-wing Democrats would move there, leaving the centrists to either shift right to the Republican party, or become a regional irrelevancy.

This is essentially my problem with the oft-quoted idea among some Americans that we need more than two parties. I look at the situation in Europe, where multiple parties are quite common, and am not convinced it's the right answer for America.

Take Britain, for example. Labour and the Conservatives are the two main parties, and the Liberal Democrats are generally on the outside, looking in. In the years since the Liberal Party and the Social Democrats merged, the Lib Dems have been close to power only once, when they joined David Cameron's Tories in a coalition, after the results between Labour and the Tories were too close for either to form a government. The Lib Dems effectively made themselves irrelevant, failing to honor any of their promises or enact any of their key policies, and were punished for it at the last general election, leaving only two credible parties to contest power in Westminster.

(Now, that said, they seem to be the only voice of reason in the midst of Brexit, so there may be hope for a resurgence, but for the time being they've done themselves in)

Italy is another example of the multi-party system not working - there are so many parties, that each general election requires them to form coalitions, which become more and more precarious as the number of parties involved increases. You end up either with a group of unruly junior partners who can leave at a moment's notice and cause your government to fall, or you find yourself having to join a coalition with unsavory or ideologically incompatible parties (such as the xenophobic Lega Nord).

There have been two results for Italian politics: one is that this constant jostling means that the government is relatively unstable, and since World War II there's been an average of a new government each year. The other is that the parties effectively coalesce into unions of left and right - leaving us back where we started. And this trend is present all over Europe, not just Italy and the UK.

So to liberals or progressives (I prefer to term myself a liberal, because I find "progressive" to be wishy-washy) who are thinking of joining the Green Party after this election, my suggestion is to stay within the Democratic Party, and actually work to turn it into a sensible, non-ideological but clearly left-wing party. When I say non-ideological, I mean tuned to the concerns of its base without imposing ideas on them that they clearly don't want - in practice, this means reducing the power of corporations and simply leveling the playing field for everybody, regardless of color, social class or other factors.

I'm not saying working within the Democratic Party is the only way to build a credible left-wing party in the US - but I think that strengthening the Green Party (or other left-wing parties) will mean years of being in the wilderness for the left-wing, liberal agenda. And America can't afford that right now.

Some quick thoughts on Brexit

I just got back last night from my yearly trip to Europe, to see friends in London and family in Turin. I'd been looking forward to it for quite a while - not as long as last year, when I booked the September/October trip in about May or so, but long enough - though the referendum result and the subsequent uncertainty over what kind of place Britain will be after it leaves the EU had made me a little apprehensive.

Free movement of EU citizens allowed me to move to Britain not once but twice, after college and after journalism school, so I'm naturally biased in favor of the UK staying in the EU. I also felt that the options for the country after leaving were both dishonest and disappointing - taking on a model like those of Norway or Switzerland would have meant even less sovereignty, but the hard Brexit that appears to be on the cards seems like a license for the Tory government to completely roll back any progressive initiatives. In other words, if the working classes were furious at Europe for not giving them any opportunities, wait until they see what Theresa May and her government have in store for them.

But London's the epicenter of open, cosmopolitan and multicultural Britain, so what could I expect there? On the street, though I felt a little self-conscious (especially on the night that I went out to dinner in the West End with my cousin and his wife, speaking Italian the whole time), I didn't actually experience any hassle. In fact, I used to get hassled more often for being an American when I lived there...

That said, a lot of people I talked to who aren't EU citizens were concerned about the direction that things are taking. A Mexican friend whose wife is Spanish seems safe for the time being, thanks to his job, but an American colleague said he and his wife didn't want their new baby growing up in that atmosphere. And I don't blame them - movements eat themselves, and when you start by compelling firms to list why they've hired foreign workers, eventually things are going to get unpleasant for all migrants, not just the poor ones that are the undeserving focus of all this rage by certain parts of the population.

All of which confirms for me that I made the right decision leaving Britain three years ago. I like being in London, and traveling in the rest of the UK, but even the supposed Remain voters were pretty xenophobic and jingoistic back then, to the point that if I insisted back in 2002 that my paying taxes made me British, the following decade or so disabused me of any notion that it was a welcoming society.

I am a little sad that the option of moving to Britain whenever I feel like it is going to disappear. One friend insists that I'm the type of migrant that post-Brexit Britain will want, but I think he's being naive - even if Britain rolls out the red carpet for middle-class professionals coming from rich countries come 2019, I'll still be benefiting from the xenophobia that blocks anyone with a Polish or Romanian name from doing the jobs that no Briton wants, and that doesn't sit well with me.

Like I've been telling everyone since last year, I miss being in Britain, but I don't miss living there. The events of the last couple of months have shown me I'm well shot of the place - from the divisive, ugly and ultimately violent (RIP Jo Cox) Leave campaign to the increase in xenophobic hate crime and the complete lack of understanding (or interest) on the part of Leave campaigners of how such a divorce would work in practicality or how it would affect the people whose voices they claim to be upholding. I just feel bad for my friends who voted to stay in the EU, but now have to stay in Britain - it's going to be a rough few years ahead.

Watch What You Write

Because one of the projects I've been working on this year, and indeed, for the past few weeks, is a superhero screenplay, I've been watching a lot of those, either on Netflix or rented from Amazon (er, when I'm not renting the Fast & Furious saga, that is).

This is, as I mentioned in a previous post, why I rented The Amazing Spiderman, the version with Andrew Garfield - I was following the suggestions of Blake Snyder's Save the Cat, or Syd Field's Screenplay, to watch movies similar to what you're writing.

It's pretty childishly obvious, as far as advice goes. For instance, my interest in fantasy novels stems from my early attempts to write a fantasy novel of my own. I'd read Tolkien before then, but apart from the more YA-oriented fare, like CS Lewis or Lloyd Alexander, I was unfamiliar with how the genre worked.

Now, you would think that having grown up on comics, I'd know how the superhero genre works, but it happens not to be so. Comics are one way of telling stories - a language, if you like - and movies turn out to be a similar but not entirely equivalent language, and this is one of the things I've been discovering as I watched more of them.

The main takeaway, in fact, has been that Act One of a superhero film needs to be almost exclusively about the hero. Those first 30 or 40 pages are meant to establish where the hero starts, what they need to learn, and how they get their powers - the first act ends when they've put on the mask and gone looking for bad guys to beat up.

Interestingly, though, the thing that established this iron law for me was one step nerdier than just watching the films - I discovered it through reading the shooting scripts (or what purported to be shooting scripts) of Batman Begins and the 2002 version of Spiderman, the one with Tobey Maguire.

This is a suggestion from Robert Ben Garant and Tom Lennon's Writing Movies for Fun and Profit, incidentally - they note that shooting scripts are as close to what's on-screen as it gets, which means you aren't reading an initial draft that was used to gin up interest in a film. Although those can be pretty interesting to read too - look for the script for Die Hard, the opening of which is subtly different from how the movie was shot.

In any case, I remember the "eureka" moment pretty clearly - I'd just gone through Act One of Spiderman, and made the connection, so I'd then gone looking for Batman Begins, to see if it held true. It felt like I was on to something, so I checked the notes I'd made for Amazing Spiderman (yes, I took copious notes while I was watching Amazing Spiderman - two and a half pages on a yellow legal pad, in fact). And eureka indeed - my first page of notes corresponded roughly to the first act, and to the point in the 2002 Spiderman movie where Tobey Maguire dons his own mask.

So the suggestion, then, is to both watch movies in your genre (taking notes), and then look for the shooting scripts online. Reading the script is helpful because you get less distracted by the fun on-screen, which is also important. And the best is if you can watch or read films/scripts from different movies that tell effectively the same story - remakes or reboots or reimaginings seem to be close to justifying their existence purely for budding filmmakers.

Now, that said, Act One and the transition to Act Two is about as far as I got in my research so far. I haven't entirely figured out how Acts Two and Three work yet, but when I do I'll be sure to post what I've found. But in the meantime, I'll be working my through the Fast and the Furious again - with notes...

Wanting to Write, vs Wanting to Be a Writer

I always have a hard time when people ask me what I want to do with my life.

That's not because I don't know, of course. The difficulty comes in expressing it - long ago I decided to stop saying I wanted to be a writer, because it implied wanting the lifestyle of being a writer without the work of actually writing books. So instead I started saying I wanted to write, which is accurate, but also implies that I'm not doing it. I had, in fact, a conversation once that went pretty much along those exact lines. When I said I wanted to write books, the person I was talking to said, "So write."

How to explain that at the time I had already written two novels, and was working on a third? Or that I'd written a bunch of short stories, and sent them out to publishers and magazines, dating back to high school? It was a long, convoluted conversation, in which I eventually got my point across, I hope, but it showed me the futility of answering the question the way I do. Although I'm sure she'd have said the same thing if I'd answered that I wanted to be a writer.

That said, I do think it's a useful distinction to make, even though most people don't understand writing (or other forms of creativity) to begin with. To me, saying you want to "be a writer", like wanting to "be" anything else, implies that you're interested mainly in the optics of it. Being a writer sounds fun - you get to go to book parties, see your films optioned (and sometimes turned into good movies), and all that. Paradoxically, it doesn't seem to include the actual sitting at your desk night after night, trying to finish a thing.

On the other hand, saying you want to write suggests that you do understand the actual mechanics of what makes one a writer, though it also implies that you aren't doing any writing at the moment. And, as illustrated above, leaves you open to well-meaning but not-always-helpful suggestions like that from my friend.

"So write" sticks with me after all this time, as well, because it's one of those pieces of advice that are logically correct (if you want to write, do so), but don't take in the full import of writing as a hobby or vocation or whatever. It implies some lack of seriousness, at least to my ears, as the advice isn't to "just write, research markets or agents, and submit to them".

But saying that I want to be a writer also isn't very satisfying because it implies I'm not there yet. I'm not saying that having taken second place in Spinetinglers.co.uk's January 2013 contest, and earning £50 as a result, makes me a writer, on par with George RR Martin, but if I have put in the work for as long as I have, even without more than that to show for it, doesn't that mean I can say I'm a writer?

I appreciate this is all a bunch of weird, semantic tail-chasing. Weird semantic tail-chasing is one of the things I live on. And it might be coming because at some level I wonder if the effort is worth it - it's not like I'm so good that publishers or whoever can't ignore me. On the other hand, as I tell myself every time I consider quitting, it's not like I have another vocation lined up. Sitting at home and watching TV every night until I die doesn't sound very appealing.

While I'm generally a positive person, I also understand that hard work is only one part of being successful. The most important part, certainly, but there are a lot of people who work hard at whatever they love without ever striking it big. There's also luck, which is predicated in part on how hard or how smart you work. I can't escape the (almost romantic) image of being the unrecognized genius, which is slightly satisfying on a sub-conscious level, but not as much as the idea of seeing a bookshelf filled with my own novels, or of seeing my name in the credits of a movie.

To bring it all back around, whether I tell people I want to be a writer or that I want to write, most won't get it. But what's important is probably that I understand what I'm setting myself up for - and that I understand what I mean when I tell people what I want to do with my life.

So do I realize the full import of wanting to write, and to be a writer? Sure - I just spent Saturday night finishing up an outline for a horror movie, after all, rather than going to a bar to meet girls. But while I hope for the payoff, I should probably remember to give myself a break about not having hit it yet. And think about new ways to do it.