www.James-Strocel.com

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

I have to say that my attempt at comment-whoring was a bit of a wash. Oh well. I guess that just means I shouldn’t be asking for money through this thing. When I attempt anything as selfish as essentially saying “shower me with your inter-tubes comments!” it’s probably a good thing that it doesn’t result in many replies. It’s also a good thing that almost all of my readers are my friends and family, meaning that I don’t have to pander to my audience.

Sure, it would be wonderful if I could sell advertising on this website and support myself with pithy witticisms about the 21st century, but that’s not what I have this blog for. After doing much research on the subject, I found that in order to make this blog profitable, I would have to make it about something like digital cameras, fill it up with photos, and clutter it to the gills with ads. I have my own ideas for such a project, but www.james-strocel.com is meant for something else.

I first started it up so I would have web server to play with. It allowed me to have the kind of professional development a “computer guy” needs. But, as some of you know, I like to call myself a writer, and this was a robust and public space with which to publish myself. All I knew about what I wanted to write was what I didn’t want to write. I didn’t want to have a not-so-secret diary of my private life, nor did I want to rant about my work and lose my job in a high-profile fashion (I have the terms of my work contracts that take care of that for me). As I continued to publish entries and attempt to keep a schedule, I noticed that my writing started to get sharper. The prose responded in the way my mind wanted it to. Not only that, I noticed that in history, primary documents are often used to piece together a more complete picture of a period in time. Perhaps long after I’m gone, some historian will have a better idea of what life was like at the turn of the 21st century. Who knows, they even might leave a comment.

This is probably the Nth post about Steve Irwin’s passing, but it’s something I just can’t stop thinking about. Actually, it kind of bothers me that it just leaves me so utterly bummed out. Don’t get me wrong, it is a textbook definition of “The good die young”. Even on the internet, salacious mutterings about Darwin awards and other such jokes are met with sadness and derision. For the country of Australia itself, it’s like Superman died. Never mind the work he did to preserve majestic wildlife the world over, Steve Irwin’s “Crikey!” catchphrase and Kahkis created the identity of a nation. The way he used that identity to support his conservation work is model for engineering positive human behavior.

So why has it still got me down? I never felt this bad when Jim Henson or Carl Sagan passed away. It could be that this is just the straw that broke the camels back. It’s been a terrible year in terms of mortality for my friends and family, not the least of which was my Grandfather passing away this spring. Seeing some of my favorite fictional characters in “Legend of Galactic Heroes” and “Firefly” cack this year probably didn’t help matters. However, I tend to agree with my mother (who has been a Nurse for over 30 years) that death is not necessarily bad. It is a transition to a better place, away from this world of pain and suffering. I don’t really need to feel sorry for people who in one sense are doing better for themselves. And mourning fictional characters is just bloody stupid.

But then I thought back to when I first heard the news that the Crocodile Hunter was dead. My first thought was a FedEx commercial he did a few years ago. In the ad, he had been bitten by a deadly snake, but fortunately the antivenin was coming via FedEx. When an assistant told him that the antidote was sent by another courier, he promptly keeled over, dead. It was funny at the time, but now it made me realize that I was feeling partly responsible for Steve’s death. It was like Salieri in Peter Schaffer’s “Amadeus” pushing Mozart to exhaustion. By enjoying Steve Irwin’s antics, and marveling at every attempt he made to wrestle the world’s deadliest animals, I was encouraging a lifestyle that resulted in a freak accident that claimed the world’s premier conservationist. It’s been forming a bitter little ball of self-disgust that I can’t help but lean on like a sore tooth.

Come to think of it, that probably ranks up there with the fictional character mourning. It’s not logical, but I’ll bet that nagging guilt is on the minds of more than one crocodile hunter fan. In knowing this, I’m little more content to be where I am right now. The Geographic Information System technology I’m working with right now is used in conservation efforts, and some day I may find myself working in that capacity as both atonement and tribute to a true wildlife warrior.

If you ever want to expose the inner recesses of adulation and fervor for fictional characters or settings, you need to look no futher than Fan Fiction. This would be referring to the practice of fans of a particular book, movie, or television series to start writing stories about their favorite characters and sharing them out among other fans. It started out in its current incarnation in the 1960′s with the Star Trek series, and thanks to the internet, such stories are now legion, covering properties from Seinfeld to Hellraiser, sometimes even in the same story.

In this modern age along with the internet we have copyright law, and since these stories are written without the express permission of their creators, this makes them quite illegal. Personally, I find fan fiction to be quite benign. The writer’s don’t make any money from it, and most of the pieces are so terrible that they are practically unrecognizable from the original product. In a legal sense, though, they are diluting the copyright of the writers who actually pay for groceries with the money they make writing these characters. After hearing the fan perspective on this issue for so long, I find it interesting when writers take a harsh view of this practice.

Lee Goldberg is one case in point. He is a working, Hollywood writer of such shows as “Diagnosis Murder” and “Monk” who has taken on the unenviable task of denouncing fan fiction in his blog, The Writer’s Life. Taken from his perspective, it’s easy to see why most fan fiction is such contemptible crap. So-called fans can take your work and turn it inside out and backwards, in essence creating the literary equivalent of something that slurped out of a David Cronenberg film. Techniques Slash, Mpreg, and Mary Sue Characters are used to create abattoirs of egotistical wish fulfillment so terrifying that you would flee from the keyboard before I could tell you what the hell those words mean.

Worst of all, it’s a time sink that detracts from the real writing you could be doing. At the end of her very caustic rant against fan fiction, Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm describes, step by step, how to get your story out of the ghetto of fanzines and copyright infringement and get you back to practicing your craft. I believe that this makes fan fiction different from drawing fan art, or participating in a garage band. With a few paragraphs you can make a written story fundamentally different from the creator you so desperately want to emulate.

That being said, I should tell you all about the time I wrote someone else’s characters.

If you google my name, chances are you’ll come across the comic I wrote for a few years back called “Shifters”. It was kind of a Teen Wolf meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer series about a girl named Farrah who suddenly discovers that she’s a werewolf. It was drawn by Marie Tary, a friend who ran table top role-playing games with my friends in college. She had this comic online and was at a loss for what to write in it. So, being a bit of a scribe myself, I took up the task for a few issues, adding some new characters and helping the comic build a bit of a following. As I started getting into my upper level CIS courses, I found I no longer had the time to keep up with the comic, and so I left in 2002.

The question is, while Marie is carrying on her comics, what have I been doing? Aside from a short monologue and a blog or two, things have been rather quiet on the publishing front for me, internet or otherwise. I’ve even started drawing in the past couple of years. Looking at those essays and rants on fan fiction revealed to me something. I’m afraid I’ll write fan fiction.

I just want to go on the record saying that I don’t have a problem with fan fiction. Heck, even I tried it a couple of times. However, I never published my stories on the net because of the ugly realization that I was writing someone else’s story. The idea that I could put so much effort into crafting a story only to find out later that it’s already been done is a great fear of mine. The idea that my pet obsessions could get in the way of my story is also frightening.

Looking at these stories, I realize that their purloined trappings are but a shackle for real story inside. When I started them, I wanted to take the properties to places they had never been to, or never could go for fear of violating their series bibles. Why not just make my own? As I mentioned in other posts, much of my writer’s block stems from a lack of courage. True, I can’t go off writing 500 pages of exposition like some people, but that shouldn’t stop me from writing 250 pages of story. It might be crap, it might be something. But until it get’s on the page, who’s going to know?

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably wondering why the last post date was May 3rd. This time there is a good reason for that. I’ve been working on a new blog that’s a little more market oriented. It’s called The First Thirty Minutes. It’s a gaming review blog with a little twist. I realized that most of the higher traffic sites out there had somehting to do with video games. So I thought to myself, why not create game review site with a little more adult slant? But then I thought, how am I going to have to time to play through all of these games? The solution was critique these games only the first thirty minutes of play.

If you’re young professional these days, chances are you’ve played some form of video game, but since you don’t have the time surplus of your average college student, the most play-time you’ll get with a game in any given day will 30 minutes. Apply that standard to console game rentals, and 30 minutes will be all that you ever experience with a game. How are you supposed to spend your money wisely under these circumstances?

And that’s where www.first-30.com comes in. There are only two reviews up on the site right now, but due to the workflow I’ve established they’ll come out at least once a week. So head on over, enjoy the reviews, and e-mail me with any comments.

Cheers!

Okay, it’s been weeks since my last update, again. Usually when I write in this space, I try to make a point, or give a focused point of view on something juxtaposed against the events of my life. If you’re into that kinda crap, take to the archives. Let’s this be one of the first “I’m alive and I got nothing” filler posts on this blog. It will not be the last.

I set this blog up so be my home on the web, the first place you go to when connecting to me or my work. But if I were to google “James Strocel”, the first page that comes up is from a comic I haven’t worked on in 3 years! Well, I’ve got no one to blame but myself for this. First off, I don’t update often. Secondly, I haven’t bothered to do any of the
keeno neat things that attract the kind of traffic that would make this blog, well, profitable.

Yeah, I promised myself this would not be a blog about me brushing my teeth or the yelling guy in West Kitsilano, but this is ridiculous. This isn’t even about the page views. I want to be producing something that other people can read on a regular basis.
I have obsessions I want to talk about. Geeky obsessions. Want an example? Legend of Galactic Heroes. It’s slow, ponderous, difficult to understand or even get a hold of the episodes. But I love it. LOVE IT I tell you!

Here, have Mr. T tell you where to go.

Star wars and Transformers, two great tastes, but do they go together?

And so what if I get comments that my posts suck? I should be so lucky! Whether you’re in writing, sports, or the restaurant business, it’s not what you can produce when the wind is right or the planets are in alignment, it’s what you can do when you are out of breath and overwhelmed on hour 25 of the day that defines the measure of man.

Oh well, at least Yahoo still loves me.

Last weekend I hit the Surrey international Writer’s Conference (www.swic.ca) to find out a) if I’m really good at this writing thing and b) where should I take it. I had the opportunity to have my work reviewed by one author and one agent. Since i had paid $400 for the priviledge of attending the conference, knuckled down and carved out a chapter of one of the science fiction concepts I had called “The Paranormal Advocate”. The excerpt dealt with the travails of a young lawyer as he took on a telepath as his client.

Don McQuinn was the author scheduled to review my work. To his credit he had 9 novels, including a bestseller series called Warrior, Wanderer and Witch. It was hard to sit there and listen to some of his remarks, but quite necessary. Don narrowed down some of the ways which my writing could be improved, but he also made it very to clear to me where I was going right with my work. He also cautioned me against taking his recommendations too seriously. I believe this was so I would retain the individuality of my work without sacrificing the craft.

My agent appointment was not as successful, since it was hobbled by the fact that I had no finished book onhand. Compounding that, I had no idea how to pitch a book. So I hocked my wares to Miriam Kersh, whose eye for speculative fiction bought her husband a Plasma TV, as she had related at a prior workshop. I got nervous, I stuttered, I fumbled, I wasn’t able to answer her questions properly. In other words, no book sale for me. I reminded myself that my chances were slim going in but what really kept that experience from being a kick in the teeth were the wonderful people I met at the conference. More than the workshops and the celebrity key-note speakers, the real highlight of the conference was meeting people from all walks of life trying to make a buck off their craft. I met people who practised law, worked for the environment, even someone who managed a Chuck E. Cheese. It was a treat see everyone so serious about opening a vein on the page. I grabbed e-mail addresses like crazy, hoping to stay in touch with these people who shared the dream of affecting others with the printed word.

If anybody reading this is from the conference, Welcome. I hope all of your projects are going well, and I hope to hear from you soon!

The first time I knew of Harlan Ellison was this neat show on the Knowledge Network called “Prisoners of Gravity” that ran from 1989 to 1994. The show, starring Rick Green (better known as Bill off the Red Green show) had the most amazing interviews of over 600 science fiction and fantasy authors. The particular episode, I believe, was about being a better writer. Harlan was on a tirade about writers who weren’t willing to do the ditch-digging work when it came to writing. My primary thoughts on Harlan’s interview was, “It sounds like he’s yelling at me personally, but he’s absolutely fascinating.”

I decided to actively seek out his work when I found out he was creative consultant on Babylon 5, my favorite non-Japanese-animated show. It was in that stuffy dorm room at SFU that I cracked open the copy of “Harlan Ellison is Watching” that I had borrowed from the campus library. What lay within was the kind of emotional validation that Republicans get from the Fox News Network. Here was a guy who was not only unafraid of using word like circumlocution and verisimilitude, he used them like his typewriter was a sexual organ. You must understand that in highschool I had to constantly tone down my vocabulary to function among the student population. But for him, there was no reference too obscure, no trope too multi-syllabic. Even when he was ripping into Star Wars, the most beloved film of my childhood, he never failed to make me think.

So, when I found that the guy was going to be in Seattle for a small literary SF convention, I said, what am I doing not down there? Furthermore, when I heard there was going to be a writer’s workshop with him in it, I asked again, what am I doing not joining up?

The workshop took place right after Harlan had been involved in an international incident with the Penny Arcade creators at his guest of honor speech. Harlan had been quite cordial with me yesterday when I bought and had him sign a copy of “Shatterday”. Still, words like “chain-saw enema” and “torched manuscript” from accounts of his previous workshops still rang through my head as I rushed out to my car to retrieve my trusty notebook, forgetting that it was already hanging from my hip in my laptop case.

So there we were, the 12 of us crowded around a long dining table in green leather chairs with Harlan seated at the head. The rules of the game were simple enough, about 14 or 15 pieces of science fiction and fantasy art were handed out. We each picked one and in 20 minutes we would have to finish writing a story inspired by our chosen pictures. It was exactly the kind of fear I was looking for. Finishing stories had always been difficult for me, and to produce something with a beginning, middle and end in 20 minutes downright terrified me. Harlan himself had been supplied with a typewriter and was already pecking away at his piece. I harnessed the nervous energy that had before allowed me to drag five rugby players across the try line and set to work.

The art that I chose can be found here. http://www.donatoart.com/gallery/inheritors.html

And here is what I wrote, mostly unrevised.

“You know, if they gave us the proper funding, we could get some traffic cones around here,” Saroyan pulled down his welding goggles and got back to work on the dilapidated track.
“Do you want to put me out of work or something?”
Harry scouted the maglev for trouble. It was a minor maintenance job, nothing they could secure a whole crew for or even get the proper warning equipment. It was Harry’s job to watch Saroyan’s back as he worked. Nothing worse that a vat-grown mush-dealer trying to take a shortcut on the track during rush hour. Illogical and as dangerous as that kind of thing was, it still happened. The perils of dealing with the public.
“So how’s the single life treating you, Sar?”
Saroyan lifted his goggles to check his handiwork. “I just thank god she didn’t take the kids.”
Saroyan’s torch kept buzzing around the dulling cacophony of the arcology. Harry clenched his teeth, and released.
“So how much did she pay them to be one of them?”
Saroyan put the welder back in his kit. “About 30 million yuan’en. Hell knows where she got it.”
Saroyan’s wife, Milia had joined one of the “new races” out in the Lagrange Colonies. More of humanity trying to figure itself out. Every type of genetic derision imaginable. Colonies of the blind, the deaf, the winged, the gilled. It took all kinds out there.
“Tell me Harry, what do you think?
“Hm?”
“What the hell wasn’t I giving her? I always shared flex time with her. I mean goddammit! Jerry’s not out of middle school yet. And you know where she went, Harry? She went to one of those freefall colonies beyond Luna. Completely minimalist! No family attachment, no possessions, no nothing! And what are they going to do with 30 million? They’re going to let her float around there ‘till all the bone mass is gone and she’s a tub of goo, that’s what!”
Harry switched off the stop warning. “Yeah, just think about what you could do with that kind of money.”
“Harry, stop being full of shit, it’s not about the money!” Saroyan sighed.
There was a long uncomfortable silence as they walked back to Harry’s dock. “Look Harry, maybe you’ll understand when you have a family.”
The maintenance bracket took Harry in its grip. “Maybe I can take a few simulations. I hear they can be pretty realistic.”
“I wonder what is real for you Harry,” Saroyan patted the dock twice, and the maintenance bracket removed Harry’s arms, legs, and head and whisked them off to another body and another job.

There were some great stories in our group. One was about a family of farmers that grew TV shows instead of barley. Another had a man starving himself to eat at a burger joint with a dark secret. Yet another explored the world of fine art in the future. I was third down the line to read my story. Harlan asked what I did and I started with tech support, but gave the short answer that I put truckers on the internet. He asked if I was nervous and I stammered yes. He reassured me that no one was going to hurt me, so I started reading

When I had finished reading, Harlan gave a big smile and said “You like the hard science fiction don’t you?” I replied yes, thinking back to my Gundam models and the fact that Planetes is the greatest anime series in history. His comments and those that came from the rest of the group were quite gracious. Harlan told me about how Robert Heinlein would “limn” or describe the culture and setting of a scene with phrases like “the door irised open.” The others had commented that they liked the blue collar feel to the piece, but felt it was lacking in physical descriptions of the characters, as well as an overall arc, citing that it sounded more like the first chapter of a novel than a self contained short story. I thought to myself, “not bad for 20 minutes”.

However, it bothered me that the comments were on my story were so even handed. Later in the workshop, Harlan commented that if we spoke up when reading our work aloud, myself included, we would gain confidence with our writing. He lost half my story because I mumbled when I talk. This was the greatest lesson of the workshop. Afraid of making any kind of reaction with my writing, I had become timid. The question now was not whether or not I had talent, but whether I had the guts to prove it. That two hour workshop was only a stepping stone. Next month I will be going to the Surrey International Writer’s Conference where I will be exposing more of my work. If I am to improve, I must risk getting pilloried and ostracized just as Harlan did before me. I dishonor the work of my predecessors by slinking in the shadows, cringing at the thought of the slightest reproach by friend and foe alike. If I am to make a vocation of my craft, if I am going to make term “writer” refer to part of my being and not a petty diversion, I must get stronger. My writing must change from the outstretched hand that endures the fearsome onslaught into a fist of rage that strikes against an unfinished world.

Between the rape of H.G. Wells’ works in “War of the Worlds” and the rape of my childhood by the “Dukes of Hazzard” seems like the only foolproof strategy hollywood has against piracy is to make films that no one would ever pirate. Sara and I showed up late to “The 40 Year Old Virgin” while the theatre was still vomiting giant sized adverts that no one wanted to see on television. The previews weren’t much better. It’s probably a bad idea to advertise two police buddy comedies back to back, even if one of them does involve Joe Flaherty.

Even after all these efforts taken to keep me from enjoying the film, I was pleased to find “The 40 Year Old Virgin”. Sure, it was a gross out comedy, but it really contemplated the concept of sex in our society. It’s the same premise of American Pie and its scores of predecessors, but this time our undersexed hero has the wisdom to ask why? Why is sex seen as something dirty, but when you abstain you’re seen as a serial killer? More importantly, how can you be “bad” at something that’s a bodily function? The movie doesn’t quite answer these questions, but the fact they’re asked is a turn for the better.
I got to thinking about this after seeing Hamlet at Bard on the Beach last week. (It’s in the last 4 weeks of the run, by the way. Cut work, cut school, cut everything. See this play!) How many plays of ritualistic regicide did Shakespeare have to sit through before coming up with his magnum opus? There are probably at least handful of bastardized versions of the Hamlet story lost to antiquity. I mean, what peasant wouldn’t want to see his local landed gentry get cakked? In the other versions, the Prince probably killed the evil king, married the princess, and everybody’s happy. Then along came Shakespeare who said, “Hey! The Prince can’t just kill somebody because his undead father tells him to! ” or “Hey! the Prince ain’t going to cuddle Ophelia when his Mom married his Dad’s killer!” You could consider Hamlet to be Shakespeare’s “What is up wit Dat?!” to the world

The crux of drama is the Question. You can create a story that’s full of emotional validation and dick jokes, but when you ask a few choice questions you give the audience something that they didn’t come in with. The Question creates and destroys ideas. It is the gift that keeps on giving. If you want the secret to movies worth pirating, the answer lies in the Question.