Supervillains in Retirement

So, as you can probably tell from the hour at which I'm posting this, it was kind of a crappy week; but I wasted the time productively, getting a shareable Sims2 neighborhood to the testing stage and passing it along to a couple of people for playtesting. One must keep the wheels turning somehow, and if nothing else it's an exercise in a new format. Anyway, one of the characters is a Criminal Mastermind (the top of the game's criminal career) who has, theoretically, retired to the country, except that he hasn't quite gotten around to the part where he stops working. As a result, he drives off in a limo to commit dastardly deeds every night and shows up in a supervillain costume to hang out at the swimming pool or the General Store during the day. Sometimes he pokes people and sometimes he comes with his wife and spends all his time canoodling her.

When one of my playtesters sent me notes on play, I was amused to find that she was loving this guy, making plans to get him a Persian cat named Doomsday to love on, when suddenly she looked in the relationship panel on the Heads Up Display and uncovered the affair he'd had with a young lady (now pregnant by his son) and became furiously angry with him. He can be a supervillain offstage all he wants, and it's cute; but she can see his wife, and his wife adores him, and cheating on her is Different.

I get this, but I also find it hilarious.

And then she sends me pictures of him out and about in his supervillain finery, and I start to wonder, How would you do this in a story? And could you do it, and be funny, without sacrificing a strong moral sense?

Mad geniuses and over-the-top supervillains have been a bit of a meme for awhile now. I first became aware of this in 2005, when I started reading Narbonic, a comic about mad genius and romantic love. I see it in YA literature (Catherine Jinks does it quite well), knocking around the web (as in the grand satire "Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog"), and it's even reached the mainstream movie audience in Despicable Me. But as far as I know the Monty Python bunch led the way with a sketch called "Mr. Neutron," in which "the most dangerous man in the world" prompts government officials, spies, and so on to take all kinds of panicked action, while he goes around chatting with the neighbors, sitting in spindly garden chairs, and going shopping. He apparently has the power to destroy the universe, but not the motivation. (What motivation would be sufficient, anyway?)

But could you center a work on a figure who was evil, and likeable, and retired to the country, and never did anything to the people around him; and bring him to justice; and make the reader feel both the powerful necessity of bringing him to justice, and the pity that it should be necessary?

And if you could do all that and still make people laugh (because people hate stories that make them think too hard, but will forgive any work that also makes them laugh) -
Well, you'd have done a good job of work, then.

Do Not Want

One thing that discourages me is reading the "New Deals" mailings from Publishers' Marketplace. So much of what's sold sounds so dreadful to me!

A lot of this is just the required format, which requires that the pitch line for the book, information on author (and previous work), publisher, agent, and terms of the deal all be shoehorned into a single paragraph, preferably containing only once sentence.

The experience has brought to my attention certain phrases that automatically turn me off. This puts additional pressure on me when writing queries, as I am now consciously avoiding them. If I'm sick to death of hearing these phrases, I think, an agent or publisher with taste similar to mine presumably is even more so.

For the record, if you try to sell me something and find yourself saying:
"...only to find..."
"...changes everything..."
"...nothing will ever be the same..."
"...fight to survive..." (or against tyrranny, or to regain, or basically any generic fight, battle, or war turns me right off)
"...not what he/she/it/they seem..."
"...learns that..." (Okay, this one is contextual. If the protagonist learns that his mother is a robot, I'm cool. If he learns some big philosophical point like how to feel truly alive or that risk is necessary or some damn thing like that, don't tell me about it in the pitch!)
"...little realizing..."
"...all while..."

You've already lost me.

Fortunately for you, as a consumer I'm on the wrong part of the bell curve for marketing success. In fact, if I can tell you're trying to sell me something, you can't sell it to me. I immediately don't want it. I want to go in to a store and find what I'm looking for, on my own, thankyouverymuch.

No wonder I have such a hard time selling perfectly good stories!

Idea Garage Sale, Reversed

So, I'm scheduled to be part of a coordinated blogging effort on behalf of the Andre Norton Award, as detailed at Erin Underwood's blog. My contribution will be on the 11th.

I volunteered from a sense of civic duty, but I don't have a clear idea of what I want to say on the topic. I'm sure I have something relevant and at least mildly interesting knocking around my head, but I don't know what it is yet.

So instead of putting up a garage sale idea, I'm browsing. Fiction ideas aren't the only ones out there. Anybody have anything they've always wanted to hear discussed about the Norton award, YA and MG speculative fiction, or anything related to them that I might be better qualified to discuss? Go ahead and run it by me.

Otherwise, there's no telling what I'll come up with.

That Time of Year Again; or Why Am I Never Prepared for What Always Happens??

As Kitchen Sanitation Month draws to a close, I am faced with the reality that I still don't understand how the crisper drawers in my refrigerator are set up.

It looks perfectly simple when I'm taking it apart for cleaning, and then when I go to put it back not one bit of it makes any sense. The only thing I know for certain is that the holes on the sides of the frame fit into those little knobs on the sides of the refrigerator. That's the baseline. But once the frame's back in place - this part moves this way so this end must be the front, but if I try to put it in that way the glass won't lie flat and if I put it in the other way there's nothing to hook the ends into and the slots on the sides of the drawers should lock into something but there's nothing except this bit and in that case how does the drawer move at all? Every year I go through this. Every single year.

It's not just that I'm mechanically hopeless. Damon's much better at this sort of thing than I am, and when I enlist his aid he's soon as bewildered as I am. At the moment we have an arrangement that almost works, but one of the drawers sticks so much that we can tell something's still off. I'm hoping that, having gotten so close and slept on it, I can get to the "oh, of course, I do this to that and then everything fits" moment, which is also a yearly occurrence, as soon as I go down there and look. You'd think it'd get easier every year, but it seems to get harder.

This, of course, is what notes are for. Maybe this is the year we make some. But will we then be able to find them next time Kitchen Sanitation Month rolls around? All we can do is the best we can do, but I'm not convinced we've done our best on this one.

I'm sure nobody who reads this blog ever has problems like this. :)

Get Out of Your Way

I started noticing this with writers, or people who intended to be writers, or artists, or whatever. "I'd like to..." they'd say, and when I said, "Why don't you?" the answer was: "Well, first I'd have to..."

And it's never anything they actually have to do first. I totally agree that if you want to write about the sinking of the Bismark you have to do a big chunk of research before you do much in the way of real writing; though personally I'd count that as part of the writing process. No, it's first I have to get some sort of tool (artists are really bad about this) or take some class or get better at this other thing, or go and do something completely irrelevant. Granted, somebody has to pay the rent; but you're not at the soul-sucking day job 24 hours a day and you'll never get a break from it if you don't give yourself one.

But here lately I've noticed people doing the same thing with their play. Someone wants to run a certain kind of role-playing game, but doesn't have a finished map, or the entire society set up ahead of time, or all his NPCs detailed. Newsflash: the players can only be on one part of the map at a time, you won't have time to refer to your NPC notes in the heat of play anyway, and you can improvise better than you think you can.

Someone else wants to play a Sims game; but they don't have all the custom content they want for it and the thought of tracking it all down, or making their own, is exhausting. So? It's a solo game. You're the only one playing. No one's going to be judging what you do, except you. Yeah, it'd be cool if your Test of Time Challenge sims had complete immersion sets that really looked like Neolithic huts, Egyptian palaces, etc.; but you know what? No matter how much custom content you put in there, the sims are still going to roll inappropriate wants to buy electronic entertainment. And you could easily spend a year making stuff and still find, in play, that you want something you didn't think of, but never actually use the sabertooth tiger teddy bear that you sweated blood over. So why not relax about it, get what you can as you can, and make the custom content you feel a real need for when the need for it makes the process of doing so fun and engaging?

There's active fandoms out there documenting various games and commenting on those of others; but months can go by when bloggers appear only to say that they're so far behind with the documentation that they can't play until they organize their pictures, write up the story, and make a post. Nonsense. Of course they can! No one's obliged to document everything that happens, or anything that happens. Your audience will not cease to love you if you document three months of silence with three lines of summary text and plunge back into current events; and if they do, screw them. You're not playing for them. You owe them nothing.

You don't need to have the new glove in order to play baseball. Someone will loan you a glove. You don't need the perfect shoes to hike in; choose trails that your existing shoes can cope with while you're saving up for the good boots you want.

You don't need a new dress to go to a party - just change up your accessories. Anyone who judges you for wearing a dress twice is someone you don't need to associate with anyway. The people who matter most either won't notice, or will admire you just as much as they did the first time you wore the dress.

You don't need anybody's permission, and no one is setting these requirements except you. Set different requirements and get out of your way.

If you need somebody's permission - here's mine. Enjoy yourself.

If you won't, who will?

Idea Garage Sale: Roadside Bigfoot

I turn again to the Fortean Times; to the same page of the same Fortean Times as last week, in fact, as the quarter-column about the mechanical ape is preceded by Bigfoot coverage: about three-quarters of a column on Bigfoot sightings in, and a dubious YouTube video from, Ohio (not thought of as Bigfoot country by the mainstream media), and half a column on a practical joker in Montana dressed in a ghillie suit and trying to spark a Bigfoot flap being accidentally hit by a teen driver, then run over by the teen driving the car behind her. Which is tragic, particularly for the teens, who now get to live with the fact that they've killed a man; even if it was, arguably, not their fault. Being hit by a car has to be accepted as a natural risk inherent in the activity of dressing in camouflage and deliberately looming up from the side of the highway trying to scare people at night.

Nor are cars the only hazard involved in impersonating Bigfoot, particularly in a state like Montana where gun racks are standard pickup equipment; but that's probably why August was chosen as hoaxing month. People are a lot less primed to shoot large animals in August than in November.

This is all evocative enough, but the trouble is, there's no real implied plot here. None of the characters have any obvious connection beyond that fatal conjunction at the side of the highway and nothing was at stake in the masquerade except for a practical joke. In a sparsely-populated state like Montana, the odds are reasonable that all of the principals knew each other, at least by sight, but Westerners are accustomed to driving long distances for what would seem to be slight cause in more densely-populated areas, and he presumably chose a relatively well-traveled area to maximize the potential that his prank would pay off, so it isn't a given.

So if you're going to use these elements, you have a lot of work ahead of you still. Here's some sample questions to answer before you even sit down to write:

Does the accident have to be fatal, or can you get away with pulling that punch and telling a farce?

Is the accident the end of the story, or the beginning? If it's the end, then the story is a tragedy (unless the hoaxer was using a Bigfoot disguise to cover up a nefarious crime, which is contrived and melodramatic, but contrived melodrama still has its place in literature); if at the beginning, the story will be about the two teens learning to cope with what happened and can, therefore, have a happy ending.

Is there some useful mid-point for the event, the third-act turn, for example, in which the discovery of a Bigfoot hoaxer turns the entire plot to that point on it's head? This would require that the protagonists (presumably the teens) were dealing with some mysterious events, all of which have been assumed to be Bigfoot-related; but now that they know about the man in the ghillie suit, not only have they got accidental manslaughter on their consciences, a big chunk of whatever they were involved in is suddenly not explained by the Bigfoot hypothesis and they're on a downhill run to the climax.

What are the connections between the two teens, the hoaxer, and Bigfoot, either as a concept or as a real phenomenon?

What more interesting motives than tomfoolery or boredom might have prompted a Bigfoot hoax? Perhaps the hoaxer is not a mere silly joker, but someone trying to create a flap in order to hoist the local economy out of the dumps through increased tourism. Perhaps there's a real Bigfoot population and he's trying to protect it by drawing the attention of cryptid hunters to areas where it's not.

Does it have to be Bigfoot?

Does it have to be Montana? Sometimes an incident floating in isolation in the news can be snapped into place in one's own culture and location, and you know that, if that had happened here, it would have happened on such-and-such a road, the hoaxer would have been a member of a particular subculture, his motivation would have been thus-and-so, and the teens would have been on their way to the county line to buy kegs; and the rest of the story would roll out effortlessly from there.

This is why people think it's hard to get ideas. Getting ideas is as easy and pleasant as reading the Fortean Times. Developing ideas, now - that's work!

A Few Thoughts on Baking

First off, I'd like to state for the record (in light of the recent Garage Sale about the guy who runs around taking stuff I like off the market) that I have never liked Twinkies and haven't eaten one for at least 30 years. So Hostess's failure is not my fault. And anyway you know somebody's going to buy up the rights and make an equally tasteless, nutritionless knock-off about the time the people who bought them all up decide it's time to dump them on E-bay.

Second, tomorrow being Thanksgiving, I'm baking today. Damon specifically requested that I make dilly casserole bread, which we haven't had for awhile because it's pretty high sodium, like all bread, and because I have trouble getting yeast breads to rise. When it works it's about as yummy as bread gets, though.

Since I'm not sure whether my trouble with bread rising is down to overbeating or to the ambient temperature in my kitchen - which is, counterintuitively, the coolest room in the house - I made two batches, one of which I underbeat, if anything. That one's taking its time rising, too, but it looks like I might have two decent batches of dilly bread. Which is twice as many as I need but what the family doesn't eat tomorrow the gaming group can eat over the weekend, and what I was afraid of was of having none.

I went very short of sleep last night, my head aches, and making even one batch was more of a chore than it should have been, but -

That's how you know when you're really engaged with a job. When you take pains over it, even excessive ones, even when your body is protesting, because you want to be sure it's done right.

If you're not doing that, you're doing the wrong things. Stop it, and do something else; or make up your mind to it, and do it right.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.