Word count: let’s not and say we did
I’ve managed to move all of Jade’s stories from Freeshell. I was going to be especially industrious and move some of mine, but I got mired in fixing just the broken links that are already here.
Word count: zero
Seema wrote Behind every good writer is an absolutely awesome and patient beta reader. Now this is so clearly untrue that it won’t take long to debunk. Behind some writers there are five or ten unexceptional and impatient betas. Other writers have no betas at all.
“Beta reader” is a strange term for an editor. Like all weird fandom terms, it covers a huge range of activities and attitudes. I suspect its origin is “beta tester,” that is, someone who tries out the beta version of new software and (ideally) reports any glaring bugs. That’s what I want out of a beta reader - I’m not looking for awesomeness or patience or heavy participation in the writing (programming) process.
I’m not against editing, but I think being a good writer means, among other things, being a good editor. A second pair of eyes is always handy but shouldn’t be an excuse for the first pair’s laziness, especially among people who for whatever reason are trying to improve their own writing skills.
Since I’ve finished the draft of the story I was working on this week, I don’t feel too guilty for not writing anything these last two days. In fact, I’m considering extending the not writing for another week or so. Dr. Deb has gone to Seattle for reasons which I don’t quite recall, so I will be feeding the feline and enjoying the DVD player. I’m hiking over to Brookline every day, I may as well make the most of the facilities. I’ll have plenty of time to get back on the 1,000 word wagon come August…
Word count: not looking good
I picked up a Dover Books edition of R.U.R. by Karel Capek (there’s supposed to be a Czech hat on the C but I can’t find it in the HTML entity set) and read it on the T. R.U.R. stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots and is the source of the word “robot.” See Maxfield & Montrose Interactive for the full derivation.
The play was written in 1920 and became an international hit. The theme is hubris and the dialogue is quite striking at points. The men who run the world’s first robot factory are flooding the labor market with cheap, soulless labor created using their secret recipe. For reasons which are never specified, this leads to a drop in the human birth rate. Between that and wars fought with robot soldiery who have no qualms about genocide of civilians, mankind seems to be taking the express train to extinction even before the robots turn on their masters. It may be the end of the world.
Speaking of the end of the world, I also saw 28 Days Later tonight. (That’s my excuse for not writing anything.) I include it here only because I’d heard it described as science fiction. There is actually no sci-fi content - it’s just a disaster movie. Think Day of the Triffids (sans triffids) meets Night of the Living Dead. The disease around which the movie revolves is an eclectic mix of ebola, rabies and bleeding ulcers.
[Spoilers ahead] I can’t resist - I have to nitpick. Can anyone name a disease that manifests itself fully in 10 to 20 seconds? I thought not. I understand that for plot purposes (that is, having to hack your friends to death with a machete within 10 seconds of exposure), the unprecedented incubation time keeps the movie moving along, but it’s never justified.
First things first - when we first meet Our Hero, he’s been unconscious in a hospital for twenty-eight days. Later developments would seem to imply that he’s been abandoned for at least six of those days. That’s a long time to go on one IV bag and no bedpan. (By long I mean medically impossible.) Somehow Our Hero misplaced his johnny, so we get that Full Frontal shot American audiences have come to expect from British movies.
So Our Hero gets up, drinks some Pepsi, and explores the empty hospital and empty city. Eventually he runs into some of the Infected and is saved by some of the Uninfected. Although there’s nice Molotov-cocktail action to start with, the disinfection process switches quickly to the manual machete approach. And that’s not even the gross bit.
[Gross spoilers ahead] The grossest thing in the movie is some violence against eyeballs near the end. The second most icky thing is the projectile hematemesis. (And you thought there wasn’t a word for it!) At random but frequent intervals, the Infected manage to vomit huge clots of blood, preferably onto the Uninfected, but any nearby surface will do. They don’t seem to do anything besides grunt, spit, twitch, and barf - such as eating to replenish all that lost blood.
Some of the Uninfected are smart enough to wear biohazard gear to prevent just such projectile eventualities. You’d think more of them would catch on to such a lifesaving fashion trend, but no…
I’ve barely begun to scratch the nits, but there’s one I just can’t overlook. I know that survivalists never end up the main characters of post-apocalyptic stories, and that nobody stuck on a savage, deserted island (in this case, Britain) has ever read Robinson Crusoe, and I accept that. However, some of the survivors were army officers, so there is no excuse for this nit. I’m only going to tell you this once, and you, too, will have no excuse. If you’re ever wondering whether a disease has wiped out all mankind or just Britain, there’s a very simple way to find out. Turn on a shortwave radio.
I’m not saying don’t see the movie; I’m not even saying it was bad. The characterization was pretty good, for horror. I’m just saying that if the hero can’t put a shortwave radio together out of, say, shortwave radios and batteries, and instead has to watch the sky for planes like some sort of cargo cultist, then don’t call it sci-fi. It’s an insult to the genre.
Word count: 711
I read Finity to give John Barnes (of A Million Open Doors fame) a second chance. He hasn’t won me over.
Finity is in the first person past tense, which is always a strike against a story for me. As in most first-person stories, the protagonist never quite gels as a character for me. He has plenty of unpleasant experiences but nothing transformative. At the end of the novel he realizes that he’s just a dull guy who wants to stay home.
But good characterization just gets you insults in this field, so I’ll move on to the science. This is a multiple/parallel universe novel with a twist - some American expatriates are trying to phone home and nobody’s picking up the line. This is where I began to suspect John Barnes of being Australian, since the hero was from New Zealand and, as I told the Mad Chatters, the entire population of the United States was in the cornfield. The ideas here were interesting, but the characters didn’t go particularly deeply into the histories or the science behind them.
The question of where the US went is neither resolved nor left unresolved. Overall, there’s a lot of material here that fits together in that loose, Golden Age way that you’d think people would be over by now.
And speaking of the Golden Age, I read a classic of military sci-fi, Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson, previously mentioned in the context of Wolfling.
I was more interested to see the same eugenic theme to the story than to see what’s now an antique example of the art of military sci-fi.
Nevertheless, the text is clean and light and the resolution neat, though I’m tempted to say it wasn’t foreshadowed enough. The theme, I’ll guess, is the inevitability of both social and individual actions - social for the military side, and individual for the eugenics.
Word count: 1230
RJ inspired me to cheat on this quiz. I got Elrond twice, but third time’s the charm:
An enigmatic recluse with a mysterious past and even stranger loyalties, you are an intensely serious presence.
Word count: 637
Filk: Holodeck Hero Author: Jemima Original: "Paperback Writer" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney Dear Captain Janeway, where've you been all Night? I know it's dark out there; do you feel alright? The crew's getting worried - we all need a break I was bored to death, so I programmed me a holodeck hero Holodeck hero It's a silly program 'bout a silly man And my Klingon babe doesn't understand My best friend's bucking for a second pip It's a long long trip so he helps me be a holodeck hero Holodeck hero Holodeck hero It's got twenty chapters, give or take a few I can whip up more in a shift or two - See the Mines of Merc'ry, visit Planet X, Don a rocketpack - don't you want to be a holodeck hero? Holodeck hero When you're feeling naughty you can play the Queen She's the campiest vixen that you've ever seen If there's any trouble use the pheremones, Save the universe - you were born to be a holodeck hero Holodeck hero Holodeck hero Holodeck hero, holodeck hero Holodeck hero, holodeck hero Holodeck hero, holodeck hero Holodeck hero, holodeck hero [fade out]
Word count: 1315
The following is an email I sent to the C/7 list in regards to the perennial “Did Seven ruin Voyager?” controversy. An abbreviated version of the argument below can be found in the comment I made in Rocky’s Seven of Mine LJ entry last month on the same topic.
People who pin the changes in Voyager on Seven’s appearance are missing the point. The show had problems at least a season before Seven, and I would say two seasons beforehand. As I recall, the actor playing Kes quit and Seven was a replacement. That a replacement for a relatively minor character ended up taking over the show is a sign that there was a huge vacuum in the show waiting to be filled, and Seven filled it.
An ensemble is not enough to carry a sci-fi show, and it wasn’t carrying Voyager. While ensembles are nice in principle, they can lead to an unfocused feeling where all the characters blend into one another, have no disagreements or tensions, and are, to put it bluntly, boring. TNG was terribly dull at the character level because of the shiny happy Starfleet ensemble - the most interesting thing those people did together was play poker. TOS, on the other hand, never had this problem, partly because of Spock and McCoy’s constant bickering and partly because it was never an ensemble show. TOS was about Kirk, Spock and McCoy. By season 3, Voyager wasn’t about anything and didn’t have the novelty value of TNG to keep people interested. There were better sci-fi shows around.
I think people overrate the value of an ensemble cast, or to be more precise, they use the “ensemble” canard because they can’t pin down what really went wrong with the show. If Voyager had suddenly become focused on Janeway, Chakotay and the EMH, the most vocal critics (whether J/C or pure Chakotay fans) would never have complained that, say, Tuvok was getting shafted. Chakotay was a pivotal character, and not only for the J/Cer’s romantic purposes. In a sense, Seven of Nine did not replace either Kes or the mystical ensemble - she replaced Chakotay.
Voyager’s early momentum was shot not when Seven showed up, but when the conflict between Starfleet and Maquis (and Tom) was brushed off. After that there was no internal conflict in the crew to carry between shows, and the nature of the premise kept external conflicts (say, Picard or Kirk vs. the Starfleet brass) from recurring. Chakotay was the most affected by this change because as the leader of the Maquis he was the one who either personified or resolved the resulting conflicts. The canon Paris/Torres relationship was a bad idea (”Blood Fever”, third season) because it defused yet another important area of conflict, as did “Resolutions” for the Janeway/Chakotay non-relationship.
When Seven appeared, she took up Chakotay’s dropped mantle of being the show’s “contrary.” She was outside of Starfleet like the Maquis had been, she had an annoying personality like Spock’s, and she had to learn about humanity like Data, while being tempted to go back to her own people like Odo. She filled a vacuum. If the Maquis issues hadn’t been dropped, then the show could have gone back and forth between other conflicts and Seven-based conflicts, maintaining the ensemble illusion. Instead, it rode on Seven for some time until new conflicts could be created. Demoting Tom was a good idea of which little was ever made, since it had no effect on his duties or his painfully dull relationship with B’Elanna. The EMH’s new, even more annoying personality was a better move for the writers. He became the character you loved to hate, whereas pre-Seven he had been the adorable curmudgeon.
Now it’s possible the Maquis conflict was doomed from the start, since it was political and Trek is a sci-fi show. The writers weren’t up for producing DS9 in the Delta Quadrant, but at least they could have kept up the Starfleet/Maquis banter to the Spock/McCoy level. In fact, as the real conflict subsided, joking about it was likely to increase in such a community. Instead, the writers dropped a major premise of the show, leaving it drifting in search of the Borg.
I sympathize with fans who mourn the old Voyager, but not because of the ideal of an ensemble or some promising pairing (J/C, J/P, C/T, P/Kes, etc.) that never got off the ground. I like J/P and I like ensembles but I like Chakotay in leather and Tom in the brig more, and I’m not the only one. The Maquis that should have been are still popular in fanfic, from Talking Stick/Circle to MJB’s Revolution to various AU J/C fics. One of the big disadvantages of C/7 being canon is that the leather-clad Maquis Chakotay doesn’t show up nearly often enough in C/7 fic.
Consider it a challenge: What if Seven of Nine had met the early Chakotay?
Word count: 621
I took the fourth off and thought about Seema’s advice to quit my job - specifically, how to go about doing it. I’ve never resigned before, so I don’t know how you deliver the letter (mail, email, by hand?), what it says, or how to say “I quit” politely in person. Maybe Seema knows.
Though I’ve considered quitting before, I’ve never taken that writer’s-eye view of it where you imagine waltzing into work singing Take This Job and Shove It with a chorus of fellow oppressed workers backing you up, or at least you fire off a pithy parting line like Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
Maybe the muse will come up with something. Her low word count is due to the holiday and to having finished the first draft of a story, which means the count will no longer be increasing but fluctuating with edits.
Word count: 1025
You may be detecting a pattern to my word counts. It’s not that I’m not enjoying writing, but it’s hard to write more than a thousand words in what little time I have before and after my Donneresque commute. When I notice I’ve hit the mark, I bail for the night. Now that it’s the long weekend I could write more, but I think the extra free time is better spent editing or muse-thwacking. (Muse-thwacking is my new term for annoying the muse with a problem until she finds the solution.)
Besides, how would you word-count editing? You could count the additional words, but what if you ended up cutting instead? A writer’s fragile ego can’t handle negative word counts. You could check the previous version out of rcs and do a wc on the diff, but that would require extreme geekiness. More importantly, it’s too many keystrokes for someone who’s checking her progress towards that magic 1000 every ten minutes.