Why You Should See X-Men: Days of Future Past AGAIN

Lately I've been studying cinematic storytelling techniques and conventions. I just mention this because it is the only reason I noticed what I'm about to tell you.

SPOILER SORT-OF WARNING: I won't give away any plot details that aren't explicitly narrated in the opening shots of the movie, but if you read on you might find yourself distracted next time you see the movie.

I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past the first time because I like genre films and this one got good reviews.

I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past the second time because I loved it the first time and I'm a wee bit obsessed with Michael Fassbender.

I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past the third time because I wanted to get some character inspiration from James McAvoy's too-good-for-genre portrayal of Sad Charles. (Also, I didn't want to go home after a beautiful night out and there is nothing else to do at 10:30pm on a Sunday in my sleepy-ass town.)

WELL. This third time I knew the story well enough to sit back and enjoy the cinematic details. And what did I discover?

X-Men: Days of Future Past is an homage to War Games.

Do you want to play a game?

First, there is the basic premise. A war waged with machines devolves into a no-win nightmare, and the heroes must prevent this before it starts. I know, this also describes the plot of Terminator and probably countless other things.

I say it's an homage to War Games specifically because XM:DoFP is also a visual tic-tac-toe game. Next time you see it, look for the X's and O's.

The X obviously represents Professor X and the X-Men and all things good. At the start of the movie, when things are not going well at all, we primarily see the Xavier X inside an O. But this is just the tip of the iceberg; circles are used throughout the film to represent everything Professor X is up against.

It's subtle at first. Notice the spiral staircase in Trask's office (which incidentally calls back to the 1974 movie The Conversation). Then notice the circles in his lamps and artwork. Trask is depicted with a halo handing an artificial limb to a girl in a wheelchair.

As the tension builds, we'll see more circles everywhere from the Professor's own wheelchair to the Presidential Seal to hatches and hats and earrings. Every weapon, literal and figurative, features a circle. By the movie's climax, Professor X is literally buried under and circumscribed by O's.

Once you see it, you won't be able to un-see it.

So what's my point? It's not to ruin the movie for you. It's just this: As novelists it is our job to layer meaning into our stories without bogging them down. We carefully choose verbs that imply adverbs, convey character through voice, tone through description, and in every other way make every word do as many jobs as possible. Great filmmakers do the same, packing as much meaning into every frame as they can afford to. I suppose it is what all artists do, from poets to sculptors to musicians. Maybe this is what defines great art. I just know that as a writer, every time I study any other kind of art, I learn something that helps me be a better writer.

Thoughts Provoked by The Rejectionist

Author and blogger Sarah McCarry and I have pretty much nothing in common, but last night we both went to see Skyfall.

In Sarah's post about her viewing, she shares a personal issue she has watching violence, even fictional violence, particularly against women.  She describes her intense and visceral reactions as being "not normal", and it's true that I for one did not have the same reaction at an emotional level to the Skyfall shot in question even if it did disappoint me from a critical standpoint for the same reasons.

I do, however, have a similar issue with children. Any time I hear a story about a child coming to harm through malice or neglect, I am undone.  I hear the story and the scene starts playing in my head in IMAX 3D.  I am there, watching, helpless, feeling the pain and the fear and the need.  And then the hopelessness and the anger and the sadness and the bitterness  And then the scene repeats and it keeps repeating.  Eventually my own life mixes with the images and I sort of come back, though I never unsee these little movies.

So I think I can relate to Sarah a little, but I am lucky.  I've learned how to mostly avoid such stories from real life (with some help from my husband), and I am also forced to observe that popular entertainment does not, as a rule, feature harm coming to children except in sanitized stories actually written for children. 

But why do you suppose this is?  Are we spared the glorification of violence against children as a matter of traditional values, or because a significant proportion of viewers are like me, so genuinely repulsed by it that the shit just wouldn't sell?  And do we tend to be more repulsed by children coming to harm than adult women - or men - out of biological instinct or simply because we are more inured to the latter? 

My guess is that a lot of parents, possibly mothers in particular, are biologically hardwired to protect children, and the more the children seem like our own children the more intense the instinct.  I think if we could be inured to it, if it could sell, there would be such movies being made left and right already.  I sincerely hope we never see that day.

Congrats to D.J. Kirkby

Thing #1:  I'm still not dead.  Just running the biz and working on that other project that has everything to do with writing except actually writing.  (Why you ask?  Because I like my life meta.)

Thing #2: Congratulations Congratulations Congratulations to blog buddy and client D.J. Kirkby on the release of her second novel, My Dream of You.  Go check it out and celebrate with her on her blog (pssst... she's giving away prizes!)  I can't wait to read it!

What Should Your Focus Be?

Thursday was a busy night.  First I had dinner with a seasoned entrepreneur.  She told me founders don't think enough about exit strategy.

Right from there I went to an event where another seasoned entrepreneur was giving a talk.  He advises not thinking too much about exit strategy. 

After he spoke, I met another guy, who went through a startup accelerator program, wherein one meets with dozens of such mentors.  So often does one get conflicting advice in this world, he said they have a name for it: mentor whiplash.

So at the end of the day, you just have to use your own judgment.  In this case, I've decided not to think too much about exit strategy.  Basically, when people talk about startup exit strategy, they're talking about selling their company - figuring out which bigger companies might want to buy it, at what point it would be most attractive to those companies, what it will cost the founder to get to that point, and how to position the startup to the founders' best advantage.

In my opinion and experience, thinking this way early on can be a trap.  The problem is you start designing the product for the potential acquirer instead of for the user.  It's a huge risk in any case, but if you stop focusing on the user, you're going to have an unusable product.  What's worse is that a hundred other entrepreneurs are probably looking at that same opportunity, so you're going to have an unusable product in a particularly competitive space.  You won't be able to sell the product or the company.

All Thursday night, I was remembering agent and editor blog posts along these very same lines.  Don't write YA paranormal romance because that's what your favorite agent likes, or steampunk because some editor said they're looking for it...  if it's not your passion, you either won't finish or by the time you do finish, it will end up looking like the same formulaic coattail-chaser as a million other entries, and the moment will have passed anyway.  Instead of writing a specific kind of book, write whatever kind of book you can make great.

It Happened AGAIN!

OK, so last night this guy emailed me.  We used to work together - sort of.  He was a VP at this consulting firm I worked at right out of college.  I remember him not at all, and only remember a few things about this firm:

1. The consultants were, on the whole, conspicuously attractive people.
2. The consultants were, on the whole, lazy.  The few people who worked really hard kept the whole thing afloat, but they got less good-looking the harder they worked.  True fact.
3. At the time, I wanted to write a novel about a data analyst at a such a firm who discovers a big international plot and is recruited by the CIA... or turns out to be a spy all along...  or some such bullshit.  I couldn't figure out how else to make data analysis seem interesting.

Well, I just talked to this guy.  (He claims to remember me, which is either very flattering or an obvious lie.  I have an inflated ego, so I choose the former.)  And guess what?

HE WROTE THE NOVEL.  He wrote a novel about an international consulting firm that has something to do with spies.

It's sort of adorable that I ever imagine my ideas to be unique, or ever worry they aren't.  What they are, mostly, is just ideas.  Ideas are a dime a dozen; everyone has them.  Original idea is practically an oxymoron.  It's execution that matters.  This guy spent three years figuring out how to make consulting seem interesting, and another three years getting it published. 

Kudos man, kudos.

Better Sooner Than Later

I guess it was inevitable.  I have four novels in various states of completion.  Tonight I saw the movie trailer for one of them.  The exact same story.  The same opening scene! 

&^%$*! @#$%*!


Oh well, of the four novels, it was the least complete and least interesting.  Hopefully it was the least original too, right?

How Starting a Business is Like Writing a Novel

1. The Blank Page.

You start out with a general idea of where you're going, but there are no constraints - you can go anywhere.  The choices can be overwhelming.  You spend a lot of time meandering and no small portion completely lost.  Your final destination is practically invisible until you're practically on top of it.

2.  The Work.

It is so much more work than it looks like.  Every day you realize it requires another skill, another domain of knowledge, another chunk of time that you have to find a way to acquire.

3. The Qualification Paradox.

You know perfectly well you are woefully underqualified, and also that the only way to become qualified is to just do it.  So you fake it 'til you make it: spend every day pretending to yourself that you can do it until you discover you've actually done it.

4. The Business.

You have to figure out who you're selling to, what they want, how you can give them something they didn't even know they needed that can only come from you.  You have to figure out who you want on your team and how to attract them and how to deal with them.  You have to figure out where the time is going to come from.

5.  The Investors.

You have to decide if you want outside investment, who would be the best fit, and then polish your pitch.  And polish it some more.  And realize in the process that your product needs work and go back and polish that, and then come back and polish your pitch all over again.  Repeat.

BONUS.  The Courage and the Faith.

There is every reason to believe you will fail, and that it will hurt.  This is why most people will never try.  But those who do, who take the leap of faith, will tell you that creating something is a journey, not a test.  The concepts of success and failure over time are far murkier than you'd imagined.  At the end of the day, it is your journey and your courage that will make you proud and bring you happiness.

What Will You Leave in 2011?

At the beginning of my adult life, I was all about accumulation. I was going through my journey grabbing up experiences and things like a squirrel hording nuts against winter.  Then came the day I realized some of the things I was dragging along were holding me back, and an important person in my life pointed out the obvious yet profound truth that it's both OK and possible to leave some baggage behind.

So now this is part of my New Year's process: choosing a burden to abandon.  Of course, deciding to lighten the load is only the first step - implementation can take the whole year, maybe a lot longer.  Nonetheless, it has worked well so far.  Two years ago I left behind fear of not having a traditional job.  Last year I dropped some internally-imposed boundaries of who and what I could be. 

I think it's not coincidental that I also shed a great volume of physical objects from my possession in each of these years.

As for this year, well, I'm still deciding.  What about you?  Is there something you can go into 2012 without?

3 Interesting Facts from Techland

Here are a few things of interest to writing professionals:

Thing 1:  Businesses, especially online businesses, are constantly trying to claw their way up Google rankings.  The single most direct and effective way to do this is to constantly add fresh content to their website. 

Thing 2: Lots of businesses do not have the vision or the budget to generate new content or edit existing content, especially if they don't see themselves as being in the content business.

Thing 3: There are now companies writing software that automatically generates content.  For example, input sport scores and output game recap stories.  Input stock tickers and output market stories.  Input #whatevertopic twitter feed and output article on whatevertopic.  No human writer involved.

Does anyone else find this a little creepy and uncool?

Getting a Little Closer

Helloooooooo!  I'm hooooooooome! 

Boy, the dust is pretty thick around here, but at least there are no critter droppings.

So.  I've been away awhile.  Things got a leetle bit crazy this past year.  Where to begin?  Well, as documented in prior posts, I left my job at Major Well-Known Internet Company a bit less than two years ago and started a little consulting firm.  This has gone extremely well, better than I could have hoped, and yet has turned out to not be quite the fresh start I was looking for.  I am still me, after all, and before I knew it, my path veered sharply away from anything to do with writing and all the way back into my old stomping grounds of data management.  Suddenly I find myself in essentially the same job at a tech startup that I had left at Major Well-Known Internet Company - with all the same frustrations and far less time to write.

Oops.

Time to refocus.  Let's start with Lessons Learned:

1. I really enjoy this tech stuff, especially the part about being good at it.
2. I'm not too chicken to give up a good income to run my own business, but I am too chicken to give up a good income to write.
3. I enjoy all the stuff that goes with writing - talking with authors, learning about the craft, and following the industry - at least as much as I enjoy writing itself.

So, I'm course-correcting.  I'm not ready to dedicate time to writing, but I am leaving the new/old job to focus on a new project that has everything to do with writing minus actually writing.  Baby steps, right?

Brief Note, and Why I Have to Stop Bagging on Twilight

Hi Folks!  Just wanted to stop in and mention that I'm not dead.  I've just been unhealthfully absorbed in my job, sparing time only for family.

However, I just had to share something here, because I can't really share it anyplace else.  I just got an email from a high school friend.  As previously mentioned, I've been in my own little world lately, and had completely forgotten that she was supposed to be sending me something.  Well, in her email she apologized for the delay, and explained that she got sidetracked on another project: filming Breaking Dawn.

Can I just say holy shit?  HOLY SHIT.

Now, whatever I may feel about the Twilight series (and to be honest I've only read the first book), I have a policy of being 100% supportive of my friends.  Furthermore, I have to admit that I would give not one but two vestigial organs to play a badass vampire queen in a major motion picture.  So, it would be pretty craven of me to continue bagging on the franchise.  I just hope my friend has been too busy to read my Facebook updates...

Been Traveling

So, I got nothin' for ya right now.  My non-writing career is going gangbusters and I've been traveling a lot.  I just wanted to let you know that even though I haven't had to time to write much on this blog or anyone else's, I am lurking.

Love the Query Goblin!!

If you haven't already heard, blog buddy J.J. DeBenedictis has a new thing going: The Query Goblin.  You can submit you query and she will re-write it for you!  Or you can do what I do, which is pretend to be the Query Shark and provide your own analysis and suggestions in the comments.

I don't know what it is about these query workshops, but I just can't get enough of them!

That's It! I'm Writing a Vampire Story!

What is it with these things?  I mean, I hated Twilight.  I'm sick to death of seeing YA Vampire novels oozing out of bookstore walls - wasn't this trend supposed to be over by now?  And yet...  I love True Blood.  I loved Forever Knight.  I loved Interview with a Vampire.  I even loved Underworld.  And right now I'm reading the second in The Strain trilogy (conceived and co-written by Guillermo Del Toro, who also directed the surprisingly good Blade II).   And seriously, I could go on and on - my Nook library is disgustingly fang-infested.

Much has in fact been written on what makes Vampires stories are so appealing.  The difficulty there is that they aren't actually a genre.  Vampires are more like a motif that appears across genres, and the variety is pretty astonishing.  Compare the hyper-sexualized non-sentient vampires in Larry Niven's Sci Fi classic Ringworld to the biological evil in the thriller The Strain to the politics and romance in the Sookie Stackhouse novels.  Paranormal romance may be the most popular nesting ground on the modern Vampire, but he is hardly confined there.  The appeal is likewise different depending on what kind of vampires we're talking about, and what that genre's target market is.

If I were to write a vampire story, I would write one aimed directly at people like me: educated middle-aged women.  The protagonists would be adults and would not waste time whining about the unfairness of it all.  They would have awesome shame-free sex.  They would be concerned about maintaining careers and incomes and so forth in the face of obvious logistical problems.  They would be concerned about the realities of extreme age differences.  They would be concerned about the long-term future, since they could reasonably expect to be alive to see it.  They would consider the questions of immortality and morality with the wisdom of experience.

I know I know, there are already fifty such titles out there, right?  Well good!

Dusting Off Old WIPs

This week I decided to go back and re-read the three variously-incomplete novels I started over the last couple of years.  It feels sort of like archeology, finding the foundations but not the buildings.  Likewise, it's so clear in retrospect which parts were strong and which were weak.  I like them at least as much now as I did when I started them, and I'm tempted to start work on them again, but they also feel like history - the characters like ghosts.  It's very strange.  I wonder if people ever do dust off old WIPS and finish them, let alone publish them.

Admit That You've Done This

Practiced writing queries for books you haven't finished.  C'mon, you've done it, right?  Or something like it?

Well, OK, maybe it's just me.  But I think it's actually practical exercise.

Some time ago I realized one of my ongoing challenges is keeping my novel attempts focused; I often can't easily describe my WIPs because, frankly, the deeper I get into them, the less I understand what they're really about.  (That's bad, but at least I'm honest with myself and not pretending that my stories are just too complex and important to be trivialized into an elevator pitch.)  This also means I've had a lot of trouble finishing novels; how does one satisfactorily end a story with no coherent object?

Meanwhile, I've noticed that the kind of novels I like best are devoted to solving a single central problem, introduced on the first page and tied up on the last.

I've also read a lot of what agents have to say about queries: that good queries present the protagonist, the problem, and the stakes; that they demonstrate a compelling voice and style; that they do this in about 250 words.

So I've been trying to think about my WIPS in these terms.  If I can identify a single problem, I can identify which parts of the story are extraneous.  If I can describe the stakes in a single sentence, I can tell if they are high enough.  If I can refine the style for 250 words, I can test the rest against that standard.

Maybe there's another word for this: extract?  treatment?  I dunno, and it doesn't matter what it's called.  It's helped me more than outlines or synopses.  What do you do to keep your WIPs on track?

Why Do You Want to be Published?

It's a valid question.  A good one to start the year off with.

Trying to write a novel is a little like trying to lose a hundred pounds.  It's really hard work with no guarantee of success and certainly no guarantee you'll be happy with the outcome, but most of us take it for granted that it's obviously worth it.

But wanting to get your novel published is a little like wanting to be a fashion model.  It seems glamorous, but it's hard work, the competition is outrageous, it requires constant self-promotion, constant rejection, and only a tiny percentage can make a living at it.  Yet again, most of us take it for granted that it's obviously worth it.

So I ask again, why do you want to be published?  My personal philosophy of life is that happiness is the only goal. Be happy, make happy, spread happy. So for me, this question is a strategic one.  Will being published make me happy?  Or will it only make me happy if I can make money, or only if I get the validation of traditional hard-cover print publishing?  Do I need to read a hundred positive reviews from strangers, or just make my kids proud?  Is their pride in my publishing a book more valuable to me than their happiness in spending time with me?

You can see how the question matters.  How self-publishing might be the best answer for some, and how spending thousands on workshops, free-lance editors, and travel to pitch fests is reasonable for others.  Why after they get deals, some authors spend their entire advances and all their time promoting their book while others just keep writing.

This blogosphere is full of people telling each other what they should and shouldn't do, but it's all bullshit when ultimately, we all want different things in the end.  We need to understand our own motivations as well as we understand our characters'.

As for me, right now, I don't care that much about being published.  Sure, I've fantasized about telling people I'm a novelist at my high school reunion next year, but that's about as far as it goes.  Right now, I just want to create a novel I'm proud of for it's own attributes.  It's an odd realization, given how interested I am in the publishing industry, but there you have it.

2010, 2011

I think it's useful to keep prior successes in mind as one starts new endeavors.  I think it's as important to analyze what we we've done right as what we've done wrong, and to step back and recognize trajectories.  To wit:

2010 was a truly pivotal year.  People all over realized that times were not going to just get better on their own.  Shells of complacency broke and their denizens emerged to re-discover their voice, their free will, their power.

I want to congratulate every person out there who made a positive change last year.  To everyone who started a new career, a new business, or went back to school.  To everyone who moved to a new place, bought a house, or expanded their family.  To everyone who promoted their books, their work, their beliefs, or themselves.  To everyone who kept their nerve and worked their asses off to improve their own lives and the lives of others.  To everyone who didn't give in to fear, who didn't decide to wait out the uncertainty...

Happy New Year!  May 2011 reward you for your courage.

Don't Ask Don't Tell

This post isn't going to be about writing or about books.  I'm going to indulge myself today and talk about Don't Ask Don't Tell.  I was with my family on my way to an early Christmas dinner with the in-laws when I heard that Congress had voted to repeal it, leaving only President Obama's signature left to make DADT a relic of history.

I don't talk politics around the in-laws, and they've only just left, and I feel like I've been holding my breath all afternoon and evening to say this:

HALLELUJAH!

Although you know by know that I'm a woman married to a man and have two children, my online moniker Kate in the Closet is not a clueless accident (like Teabagger).  It's an intentional signal that I support the LGBT community and advocate gay rights; I have for my entire adult life.  I vividly remember piling into a bus with dozens of my UPenn classmates to attend a massive LGBT march on Washington D.C. in the spring of 1993.  At that time, gays and lesbians weren't allowed to serve in the military at all, but that seemed like the least of our problems.  Rampant violence against homosexuals was trivialized under the law as a form of domestic violence (itself trivialized under the law), the community was only just starting to understand how to control the spread of HIV (which was still considered a death sentence), and my gay friends were literally terrified that their bright Ivy League futures would end if they came out (or were outed) to one wrong person.

Nine months later DADT was signed into law.  The community wasn't thrilled about the compromise, but it was a step in the right direction, a temporary layover to full inclusion.

A 16-year, 11-month, and 27-day layover.  A time when the military, the supposed embodiment of American honor, forced its own to lie and hide.  A time when the law of the land told young gays and lesbians that no matter what service they performed for their fellow citizens, no matter what sacrifices they made, that we were ashamed of them.  A time when soldiers were required to fight for their country, but prohibited from fighting for themselves.  A time when thousands of servicemen and women and their families lost everything because of whisper campaigns, witch hunts, and cavalier carelessness by unaffected third parties.  It should have been called Don't Ask Don't Tell And Pray Nobody Else Does Either.

It's a little hard to grasp how far the rest of the LGBT community has come during this time, and there have certainly been setbacks, but relative to prevailing attitudes, this repeal was long overdue.  As chief opponent to it, John McCain has forever tarnished his legacy with his last-minute desperate and nonsensical arguments, and I can't express how relieved I am that his ultimately naked homophobia couldn't carry the day.

So now here we are.  Each of the gay men and women in the military, along with their families, will have to decide for themselves how to proceed, and the rest of us will have to decide how to react.  I hope that you will join me in openly supporting everyone in the military as this momentous transition begins, and offering congratulations to everyone who takes a step forward in their lives, their relationships, and their own attitudes.

Scale and Perspective

When I was in elementary school, I read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.  I loved that book.  But the sequel, A Wind in the Door, ruled as my favorite for years and years.  My ten-year-old mind was blown by, among other things, the notions of scale and perspective in that book.  I've adored science fiction ever since.

This little bit of awesome would have gone along nicely.