Not-the-Tonys 2020

 My blogging buddy Squid does this every year, and I thought, why not? Why not do a best-of yearly stamp, this of all years? Very slowly I’ve been rethinking the idea of having multiple blogs but only talking about my writing (mostly) on this one, especially as I’ve slowed my blogging in general, and it gets a little depressing talking only about the pandemic here (which is what I’ve done for months here). So here are some highlights of 2020 so far, and what lies ahead the rest of the year:

Favorite Writing Project:

Let’s start with a writing thought on a writers blog! On Monday I submitted a story to the IWSG anthology, and it involved my Space Corps saga, and, regardless of how it fares with the judges, I think I did something really good with it. I’ve been taking a lot of creative risks this year, and I think it’s starting to pay off with my work. (Monday it also rained on me and potentially wrecked my computer and lost me a lot of material...but I think I could actually be okay with it. Mostly. I can rebuild Bionic Man style.)

Favorite Family Memory:

A few months back it was a year ago I stopped actively participating in my niece’s life when she moved on to Texas. I had a meltdown over that but was able to recover. As of earlier this month she’s a big sister! So another adventure is just beginning. I’m happy that she has new experiences to look forward to as she continues to grow up. It was always her life anyway, and I was always privileged to play any part in it, and now I can more clearly see where it’s her journey and I am a privileged observer. (But yeah, I write yearly Christmas poem chapbooks for her. I already wrote this year’s. Or will get to write it again, depending.)

Favorite Work Memory:

Like everyone, work has taken some interesting turns this year for me. (And I never forget how privileged I’ve been to be relatively unaffected.) Early in the year I was given pre-pandemic curveballs that created a lot of stress. I took it as an opportunity to grow and to put money where my mouth was, looking at challenge babies as a challenge worth taking. I saw real progress as a result! Similarly, during the pandemic I was given another curveball, and can honestly say the last day of the particular challenge I ended with a real victory. Every moment isn’t a victory. There are defeats. The reward of victories makes them worth it.

Favorite Book (New):

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, his second book, published a decade after his first (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe). Yu is a brilliant writer capable of viewing his topics in truly unusual ways, which here means exploring the Chinese-American experience in ways we don’t tend to consider. In a year where BLM once again surged in the public consciousness, Yu’s work is a great reminder that all minorities face challenges.

Favorite Book (Old):

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, another great Russian novel, exploring the idea of social change in surprisingly relevant ways.

Favorite Book (Comic):

Folklords by Matt Kindt, a miniseries I randomly sampled and then felt compelled to finish, about a fantasy world where the youth take on an adventure as a rite of passage. The lead character dresses in a suit like our real world and wants to prove it (our real world) exists. Kindt is a more than reliable talent, and so this was a nice new project to discover.

Favorite Movie:

Obviously the release of new movies has been compromised this year so far. Early on I got to indulge in the fact that Colin Farrell is my favorite actor when he appeared in Guy Ritchie’s new movie, The Gentlemen, a gangster ensemble flick with a fun conversational framework. Farrell ended up acclaimed for his supporting role as a surprisingly fierce ordinary neighborhood coach. The same day, the first and only visit to a theater so far this year (though I’ve caught up with a few more 2020 movies via the archaic DVD technology), I was able to catch my previous favorite actor’s cinematic comeback, Jim Carrey in Sonic the Hedgehog. Obviously he’s great in it, absolute classic form.

Favorite TV Show (New):

Star Trek: Picard (I’m a Star Trek guy, okay?), an elegiac, ambitious reprise for a beloved character (or two or three or four or five) last seen nearly twenty years ago.

Favorite TV Show (Old):

Folks, I discovered Letterkenny. And folks, I absolutely adore Letterkenny. Honestly, I was interested in it at all because Pat Dilloway saw it and hated it, and I was naturally curious. Sorry, Pat. It’s brilliant.

Favorite Music:

Honestly, my music consumption has deteriorated over the years. I don’t blame the new music. At the start of the pandemic I saw the Strokes had a new album called The New Abnormal. Still working my way into it. Seemed eminently relevant even though it was a total coincidence. Otherwise I cycle through older stuff. 

So what does the rest of the year have going for it?

Writing Projects:

 I don’t want to jinx them talking about them here. I’m starting to feel like Grant Morrison, who talks about some of his projects maybe too ridiculously early sometimes. There’s one that probably will never happen now I still check in on hoping in vain for updates. At times I’ve written about projects here that I’m really excited about...but don’t exactly get actually working on. So I’m going to be more cautious about that. But I will be working on things!

Books:

This is easy to project. For most of the year I’ve been ignoring my reading shelves by skipping ahead to more recent acquisitions. But I’m finally working on those shelves again! I’m going to be reading a lot of Thomas Pynchon soon. I love Pynchon, so this is quite exciting for me.

And...the rest will play out. Hopefully happily! But I have to be okay when it doesn’t. Always a process.

Books into TV shows

 In classic Hollywood if a book was going to be adapted, it was for the film industry (or radio). There wasn’t really a question about it. When “prestige television” became a thing about twenty years back, it opened up a new avenue. There had been, some forty years ago, the concept of miniseries, such as The Thorn Birds or Roots, but regular TV stuck with regular TV concepts. Then HBO started leaning heavily into original programming, and the stakes were raised. Today it’s as easy to find a book adapted into a movie as a TV show.

The only streaming service I have is because I’m a Star Trek guy, and since I don’t have cable and I finally broke my network viewing habit (I used to very easily have something to be excited about every night), my discovery of new shows has become more limited than I might’ve previously imagined. Recently, though, I’ve been watching a lot of shows adapted from books.

I just finished the first season of Get Shorty. Based on the book by Elmore Leonard (and previously adapted as a John Travolta movie), by the end of the season you can kind of guess that it was inspired in part by Breaking Bad, a show about a guy who becomes a gangster somewhat accidentally. Admittedly, a large part of what broke my TV habit was the spate of shows everyone admired that I found deplorable. I see nothing worth liking about Walter White. The more critics embraced antiheroes who were probably straight-up villains, the less interested I became in the results. But Chris O’Dowd, in the final episode of Get Shorty’s first season, is literally looking at the camera as it dawns on him that his scheme to escape gangster life by becoming a movie producer has...completely backfired.

The whole season has shown how inextricably the process played out. There’s no mystery, no ambiguity, no pretensions that he started out with the best of intentions but somehow ended up in a position he could never have imagined. He suffers no illusions, his best friend has fewer scruples but actually seems more innocent, and his family, for whom he too is attempting to do this, is lost to him in quick order.

Anyway, so it’s an interesting show. The highlight is an apparent dimwit actor who’s unexpectedly brilliant while performing, a revelation that comes late in the season, a subplot that’s mostly in the background, never especially emphasized (except with a random flashback). It epitomizes the rich possibilities of this version of the story, which uses different characters but the same basic premise as the book and the movie. (We get one nod to the original lead character, Chili Palmer, who arrives at the movie studio at one point just ahead of our actual cast, just the back of Palmer’s car and his last name being used.)

I enjoyed HBO’s Watchmen, a sequel to the original comic. I adored Catch-22 with George Clooney. Good Omens was a hoot (all three of these were miniseries, admittedly). BBC’s Dirk Gently was pretty great, a show that lasted two seasons. It’s based on a couple of books (and an incomplete one) by Douglas Adams. 

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is currently being developed by Netflix. Attempts have been made for years to get an adaptation done. This is one of the great comic books, a true literary marvel that incorporates...everything imaginable into its plot (Morpheus, the King of Dreams, has been imprisoned for years, only to discover freeing himself results in confronting everything he did before). If approached even remotely for the scale it deserves, the Netflix version would necessarily be something quite special as well.

Admittedly with my Space Corps stories, with the lead one anyway (Seven Thunders), I was always envisioning movie adaptations. The bulk of them, though, were actually outlined as TV seasons, even though I’ve been working on reverse-engineering them for book format (ha!), which has meant removing overly episodic elements (I’m a Star Trek guy; that what I had to work with, okay?). The funny thing about these recent TV shows is that they basically function as extended movies. The much-discussed Snyder Cut of Justice League is basically going to function as a miniseries in this fashion, four hours cut up into segments. Even Star Trek: Picard was described by producers as a nine hour movie, which has apparently become the way these things are routinely talked up.

TV has come a long way. It becomes easier to create cinematic experiences, at least cosmetically, and the storytelling draws established movie actors. Films then become a medium of compact art. (Almost like a really good TV episode.)

I wonder if any of this affects how books are written. You can’t really say that a TV show is necessary to capture all the beloved details of a book, since shows like Get Shorty can reinvent them anyway, and besides, if you wanted all the details of the book, you already have the book. Different mediums ought to produce different results. Will publishers seeking TV adaptations (this is easy to see with comic books, where a creator will lean heavily into a concept without bothering to develop it, because the movie version will do it for them) look for ways that will streamline the process?

We’ll see!

A Journal of the Pandemic #18

Reopening...! That's the hot topic now, right? Reopening schools, with the new year beginning or about to begin around the country. This involves two segments of the population who have kind of sat out the last few months of dramatic developments. The students, of course, who stayed home for a kind of regular summer vacation, and the teachers. 

These were also two of the most visible segments of the early pandemic, engaged in the strange new world of virtual learning. That’s how the school year ended. Optimistically, the next one might have had slightly less to worry about. We know, of course, now, that this will simply not be the case. 

The slow process of figuring out the (temporary?) new normal has been developing as people have tried to figure out how to open up the shutdowns. Here at my childcare facility we’re recalling staff that haven’t been active in months. Not everyone’s back yet, but it’s already provoking further complications of absorbing the extra staff from my original building; apparently we have a surplus of caregivers. For me, that means a lot of standing around waiting for something to do. The assistant director has remarked several times to me that with my degree I could take advantage of the circumstances and pursue a teaching career.

Which, for any number of reasons, I’m still hesitant to do. One of them, now, is the idea of swooping in and claiming a spot that’s empty mostly because someone else is feeling uncomfortable in this new environment, whether the concept of distance learning or not wanting potential exposure to the coronavirus. It’s not just kids, after all, who will be newly vulnerable to it, but the teachers, many of whom are alarmed about it. 

We’re at a point, though, where I think impatience is setting in, not in the ordinary folk everyone likes to blame for spikes, or the most visible politicians, but the decision-makers running the regular operations. Even those who tried to stick it out are starting to feel the pinch. DC Comics just announced massive changes to its internal structures, for instance, this after already months earlier upending the distribution process of the medium, all as a result of the pandemic. Change is always going to happen, but some change is absolutely attributable to the pandemic. DC has been confronting its future throughout the year anyway; before the pandemic it fired its longtime publisher Dan DiDio, accused of too much editorial meddling and continuity reshuffling. Now, who knows?

Last Friday I had a good phone conversation with my brother in Maine. It was actually about our dad. Like me he’s been struggling with how to perceive our dad, but he’s been having an even harder time of it. On Sunday I talked with my dad, as usual, and...I sort of realized all over again that there are things I don’t often think about in regards to him, how his sense of community is considerable, for instance. He’s involved in his community in ways that objectively put me to shame. His priorities are very different from mine. His life is very different from mine. This is part of why I try so hard to appreciate the differences, work with them, and maintain my relationship with him. Because the funny thing is, no matter how different we are, we can still have conversations, which isn’t always true, not for me, and maybe not for a lot of people. I consider it a very good thing that this whole thing has put such a spotlight, for me, on my dad, for good and otherwise. 

Yesterday I finally got to submit some stories to a comic book publisher I’ve been waiting on since the pandemic began. This publisher prides itself in stuffing its comics with bonus material, which means you can submit to them on this basis. They say they look at more than just microfiction, but that’s all I’ve personally seen them include, and all I’m currently interested in sending. They periodically open, and then close, the submission portal. It was supposed to open in March, but then of course the pandemic hit and threw everything into disarray, and comics were hit like everything else, and the portal remained closed until this month. That’s a long time to wait! I had written two stories for the company early in the year, and that’s exactly what I ended up submitting. I could have written more, and obviously I still can, but that’s two, and now I want to see if either is accepted. I like ‘em both, besides (but hopefully I do, right?), so I guess it was just hard to give them additional competition from my own material.

This week I read Ted Chiang for the first time. Chiang wrote “Story of Your Life,” on which the film Arrival was based. Arrival is one of those movies I loved instantly and somehow began to think even more highly of as time went on. So the story, and Chiang’s storytelling in general, had a tall order to follow. For me he isn’t really up to it. He’s more of an idea guy, who wants desperately to impress but kind of hopes the ideas alone will do it. As fate would have it, I’ve been working on a lot of ideas lately, and Chiang’s ended up feeding into that. That seems good enough.

Finally watched Josh Trank’s Capone, with Tom Hardy, one of the movies that managed to get released during the pandemic (and not as a Netflix release, or some other premium streaming platform). Hardy is Hardy (which perversely is harder and harder to impress with), and he portrays the famous mobster in his inglorious final year, in which his diminished mental abilities drastically affect his affairs. Too often we either glorify our famous figures, or vilify them. This is a rare instance to see something else.

And, today, as I have throughout the pandemic, I ordered Dominos. And as of a week ago yesterday, my niece is a big sister!

IWSG August 2020

I haven’t been a very good member of the Insecure Writers Support Group (which blogs the first Wednesday of every month except the thirteenth one, in which case obviously it does so on the thirteenth day), but as I’m planning on entering the latest anthology contest (with about a month left to write something) at the suggestion of Smilin’ Alex Cavanaugh, I figured I ought to dust off the ol’ “support” part of the IWSG and participate again.

(Here I remind readers that I’ve been unable to leave comments on blogs since the pandemic started. I don’t know why my phone doesn’t want to let me, and even when I checked in with my notebook recently I couldn’t. Don’t know what that’s all about.)

Anyway, the group likes to lead discussion with a question, and this month’s is:

Have you ever written something that became a form (a poem, short story, novel) or genre that you hadn’t intended on? Or do you choose that in advance (and stick to it)?

The second novel I tackled writing turned out very differently than I expected. The first one, written under the auspices of NaNoWriMo, was something I had switched to on the day I started writing it. The idea of NaNoWriMo is that all the work, and all 50,000 words of it, is done in November (that’s the “mo” or “month” at the end the funny title). I think some people plot out in advance but still do the writing itself during the month. In 2004 I tackled NaNo for the first time, and for the next two years continued the story (each with a new timeframe and other considerations, but technically I cheated the second two times by having something preexisting). On November 1 I thought I was going to be writing one thing, but switched to a different idea just as I sat down to write (or earlier in the day; I can remember some thoughts as they were occurring that month, but not all of them!).

When I sat down to tackle the second book, I had a very specific idea of what I wanted to write...but I had done next to none outlining. It was very vague. So as I began writing, my necessary improvisations changed the book substantially. It was no longer anything like what I had imagined. I mean, there were the elements, but the end result...basically helped me learn what it might look like for me to write a wholly original story of my own. To that point the bulk of my fictional output was Star Trek fan fiction (but even that was always fairly recognizably unusual), and then of course what I produced over the course of those three NaNos, but even then I had been borrowing from a familiar playbook.

The results, to my mind, were very interesting. Other people did not necessarily agree. But the experience has continued to inform my literary career. What can I say? It’s important to know what’s important to you as a writer. If you only write what anyone could write, it’s not really critical for you to have written it, unless you’re a writer who’s okay with that, and many are, but I am not. So this was a crucial learning experience for me, and directly informed the novel I wrote next, which was considerably more focused for it.

And then I had a better idea how to do this sort of thing. And am gearing up to do it all over again.

A Journal of the Pandemic #17

So, the pandemic is still happening.

Last week at work was kind of a grind. A few people were on vacation, so I worked more hours. I still don’t get why the first and loudest response to COVID-19 wasn’t to shut down nonessential interstate travel. I’ve had multiple coworkers travel out of state in the past three months, and none of them has had to quarantine upon returning. This is literally how it spreads, folks. It’s pointless to try and contain it from person to person six feet apart when someone from, I don’t know, Boise can take their filthy Idaho potatoes to Maine (we grow them, too!) just because they want to visit someone there, and bring COVID-19 along with them, completely asymptotic. But, and not to keep making the same point over and over again, but the political points some people are determined to make over this (it doesn’t matter which side) keep hammering the same points but ignoring the greater problems. 

This is all kind of ironic because at the beginning of the pandemic I was pretty mad about having to cancel the birthday party reunion. Apparently we can’t have anything nice. If we could have been bothered to put in place reasonable restrictions with reasonable measures and reasonable demonstrations on how to actually pull them off, instead of what we actually got, all of this would have been a lot easier.

On Thursday I had my first Zoom experience. Since it wasn’t a cast reunion thing it did not make the news cycle, although that would have been a lot more fun. (The cast of Competition Piece back together! Although sadly would’ve been incomplete with the death of the lead actor earlier this year.) It was the annual suicide prevention course. But it kind of reminded me all over again how everyone in my life has taken for granted that the one dude living alone is just sort of busting it out. I’m okay on my own, I really am. Most of the time. But last week was another rough patch. I wish being social weren’t seen as inherently reciprocal. 

On the other hand, I had a great phone call with my dad last Sunday. It involved a lot of reminiscing. I don’t know if he had a particular need for it at the time or if that’s just the way the conversation went. As with any family stories I’d heard a lot of it before. Some of it seemed new! I liked that. At one point, though, he talked about one of the dogs in his past without mentioning the name, where in the past he’d always used it. It was a momentary hiccup, and maybe didn’t mean anything. The weird thing is that I’ve always had a hard time remembering the dog’s name, but am pretty sure I have it (Duke, which became easier to remember when I made the connection to John Wayne, who was my dad’s favorite actor) locked in now, so it was, I guess, disappointing, if anything, not to get that affirmation that I’m right about that.

Anyway, my WriteClubCo buddy last night said he was scrapping the anthology I sent him seven stories over the course of the last few months for inclusion. (Sending those stories provoked me into leaving my pandemic comfort zone, which has otherwise shrank back some things I’ve been doing that theoretically have nothing to do with socializing. Far less blogging, recently, for instance.) It’s the most I’d sent him in the three anthologies he worked on putting together. It’s disappointing, because I hate submitting my material. I don’t have a great track record of publication outside doing it myself due to feeling, well, rejected by rejection, so I saw the guy as a reliable outlet. He instead is moving forward with another project. I have to fight the instinct to question why he’s abandoning the project outright, but then small market publishers implode randomly all the time. They have far less incentive to be professional. I was a part of it once myself. Someone decides they want to walk away and the whole thing collapses. 

Part of why last week was hard was exactly because not only did I work more hours, but just when I was getting around to feeling motivated to write again, and even settled on a new project, I suddenly had to readjust all over again. Recently I’ve had a lot of free time that felt almost embarrassing, and it was consistently in the morning, and then I went back to an early shift, and that required adjusting, and...

So I guess this stupid pandemic experience has begun to be sort of consistently frustrating at this point. Not in a medical capacity, or in being caught up in one of the many tangential crises (unless you’re still participating in protests, there really wasn’t something new last month, which was a first; but of course those protesters somehow provoked a federal response, which surprised them, but probably no one who was surprised their protests were somehow still happening despite no one talking about them until the federal response), but in the act of just trying to figure out “the new normal.” 

So perhaps as a result, I ordered a bunch of stuff, again, recently, just like old pandemic times...

(I don’t actually have a grudge against Idaho and their filthy, filthy potatoes. But yeah, Maine has better potatoes.)