Proximity Muse

I won’t lie. I’ve been a lazy bastard since I finished my finals. OK, not altogether lazy. I have been doing research and writing background stuff for an idea I have. Here’s a snippet.

Disclaimer: Very rough draft.

1

The Benz rolled sedately off the highway, stopped at the end of the exit ramp and turned right. It moved slightly faster than the posted speed limit allowed, but most people assume speed limit signs are more in the way of suggestions than commands. Even in the sunlight, it was difficult to see through the tinted windows of the car to see inside. If the shadowy outlines of driver and passenger could be trusted to convey some notion of actual size, the driver was an enormous man, easily twice the breadth of his backseat passenger. Sheer determination on the part of someone following the vehicle might have been able to make out the broad gesticulations of the driver, the motions of a man that talks with his hands as much as his mouth.

“It wasn’t a bad gig, ya know?” Said the driver, continuing to gesticulate with one meaty paw while the other steered. He was wearing a white, collared shirt with a broad black tie. A gray, off-the-rack suit coat was folded on the seat next to him, and he wore matching gray slacks. A pair of black Oakley’s protected his eyes from the sunlight that leaked through the tinted windows. His head was crowned with a mop of black hair that managed to look untidy despite the gel that attempted to rein it in.

“I mean, a constant supply of needy customers, all clutching some kinda coin or another in their hand. We make a transaction, I row for a few minutes to get from one side of the river to the other and we start the whole thing over again. Man can do worse than a steady job, right? I mean, sure, I still had expenses. You don’t think my robes cleaned themselves do you, or that the leaks in the boat got plugged up by magic? It was the cheap-asses in the river that caused those leaks, by the way, always clawing at the bottom of my rig when I passed overhead. You telling me their families couldn’t afford to bury them with a single penny or some kinda jewelry to trade me?”

The man in the backseat made no reply to the constant stream of chatter. Being bound and gagged with duct tape has a way of making conversation difficult. The bound man was also dressed in a suit; a silky black thing that said Armani, rather than clearing house. Small trickles of sweat rolled down his face, even with the AC in the car cranked up to near arctic levels.

It’s the Obama train coming through! OK, you caught me. I have no reason to use the train picture I took other than I wanted too. Still though, the man is at least starting to swing back at the lock-step Republicans (click). And that’s what I’m gonna talk about today, the notion the Republicans have been trying to feed us that they’re somehow saving us from the Democrats.

Let’s start with the obvious. Since Obama took office the Republicans have consistently forced a 60-vote majority in the Senate to get anything done. They’ve threatened to filibuster over anything and everything. Is this because Obama and the Democrats have refused to work with the Republicans? No. Is it because their political agenda has been reduced to simply hoping that Obama fails? *Ding Ding Ding*

The Senate was not intended to require a 60-vote majority on every issue. The Founders would puke if they saw the shenanigans the Republicans are getting up to. If an appeal to your patriotic spirit doesn’t move you, how about some math? When the Senator from Wyoming threatens a filibuster, he’s holding up the business of the United States with the approval of, what, 1% of the population of the country? Does that seem like a legitimate use of power? I submit the answer is no. That’s like a golf cart holding up highway traffic.

What concerns me about these tactics, other than the fact nothing is getting done, is that the Republicans hold them up as somehow being in the interests of the country. How is a refusal to do anything in the interests of the country? Any child can pout, stomp their feet and refuse to get up after they don’t get want they want.

A camera! Yes, now not only can I bore you with my writing when I remember to post, but also with my photos! Yay!

Here’s a link (maybe) to my trial run. Oddly I wasn’t at all cold while I was taking the pictures, only when I stopped and had to move to a different spot again. I get like that when I’m writing sometimes too. I dunno what to call it. Zen?

Photoshopped? I have no idea what you’re talking about. But I’m not here to discuss my meager Photoshop skills. What I’d like to talk about is auteur excess.

The best example I can give you is Heaven’s Gate. No, not the religious loonies, the film by Michael Cimino, the director of The Deer Hunter. Cimino was so out of control on that film that when it crashed and burned (one reviewer likened watching the movie to a three hour guided tour of his own living room) it took a studio down with it. Auteur excess is all about believing you are the only person who really knows how the story/movie/play should be done, and anyone else is just meddling in things they don’t understand. It is about ignoring any and all advice about your project. It is the ultimate form of artistic arrogance. I can almost hear the clicking of keys as folks do a Google for Cimino and I know what you’ll say once you’ve looked him up.

“Aha!” You’ll say, “That bastard never did anything major again. It was his downfall.”

And that’s all true. But what about people who get away with auteur excess? As might be guessed from the picture header, I have some suspects in mind.

The Clown

I like many of Quentin Tarantino’s movies. When he’s good, he’s really good as is the case with Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. But when he’s bad, oh boy. Watch out! His characters just keep talking and talking and talking and talking and…you get the idea. Some people have tried to tell me I just didn’t get it, but I still believe Death Proof was a terrible movie. It was an hour of talking to set up a 20 minute car chase. Death Proof was the movie equivalent of Tarantino whacking off.

I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, however, so I saw Inglorious Basterds last summer. It was really not good. I won’t say it was terrible, but it wasn’t great. The movie suffered from too much Tarantino. I saw a review that said something along the lines that Tarantino the director was too much in love with Tarantino the writer. I agree whole-heartedly with that. It’s no challenge to pick out a number of spots in the movie where an editor that wasn’t so enamored of his own work would have cut early. A number of scenes just go on and on, draining away any tension the scene might have had with sheer fecundity. I say that Inglorious Basterds was one editor and one producer away from being a fantastic movie. As it is, the auteur triumphed and the movie suffered for it.

The King

Stephen King is one of my favorite authors. I even enjoy some of his books that I really have no business liking such as Needful Things and Tommyknockers. Neither of those books was great, but neither of them were as awful as Insomnia either (possibly the worst book Mr. King has ever written). I’ve enjoyed most of his offerings since he finished the Dark Tower series and “retired.” Cell was alright and Duma Key stole ideas directly from my brain, but nothing he’s written in the last 20 years has come close to the brilliance of The Stand. You might guess at my excitement when I saw the press blurbs for Under the Dome. “As big as The Stand!” they said. “Chock full of characters!” they said. I checked when it was going to come out, then put it out of my head until after my semester was over. No way I was going to start on a 1000 page King book around finals time.

Finals over, I got the book. It’s awful. Only Insomnia is worse. You know why? The book is full of characters I’ve already seen and situations I’ve already read. The bad guy comes directly from Needful Things, the good guy from The Stand. The whacko sheriff from Desperation makes an appearance, as does a gang of kids in the tradition of It. The dome itself and the reason it appeared are mainly forgotten for 500 pages. Mr. King says he doesn’t like to plot books, and usually I’m right there with him, cheering. In this case, some notes would have been good. What would have been even better was an editor with the nuts to tell Mr. King that he needed to cut the fuck out of that book. Just as with Tarantino and Inglorious Basterds, Mr. King is too in love with his own work. The auteur wins at the expense of the fans.

The Point

I do have one. Here it is. No one creates anything in a vacuum. Everyone needs useful feedback on their work. Find some people you can trust, some people that know their stuff and let them do their jobs. Listen to them when they say things. You might think 50+ pages of your main character doing household chores in the buff is awesomesauce, but most people won’t. Find people who will tell you when your stuff sucks and why. Find people who can tell you where you need to make cuts. As soon as you start thinking you are the only authority on your work, you need to step back and think again.

This is the last of my character development bits. Next I’ll ship these off to my writing partner to get his take, then I’ll start on a treatment. The wife has insisted she sees the Dealer as Rob Lowe and I’m hard pressed to disagree.

The Dealer is the MC of this back room poker main event. He looks to be in his early 50s, with graying hair, a healthy tan and a fit body. It’s clear from the way he shuffles and deals the cards that he’s no stranger to the tables. The Dealer wears a comfortable looking gray linen suit with plenty of pocket room to hide the .45 he keeps in a shoulder holster. The money for this soirée is his and the two large, no-nonsense looking goons that accompany him and the money are also packing heat, but in a much more obvious fashion. They carry MP5s and back-up 9mm in ankle holsters. The Dealer doesn’t fuck around with security.

What the Dealer wants from the game is to watch the people involved, like it’s a reality show put on just for his benefit. He knows the players involved, maybe better than they know themselves. He intentionally puts people from diverse backgrounds together just to watch them rub each other the wrong way. He doesn’t discriminate against cheaters or ruffians either. As long as no outright violence is committed at the table, he doesn’t get involved. If someone can cheat and get away with it, no one is more delighted by it than the Dealer.

But he doesn’t put up with any shit. Each player is allowed to bring two spectators along with them. The visitors are told not to interfere with the game, but unless they try something violent, the Dealer is just as amused by the visitor’s antics as he is by the players. He realizes that a great many people bring along spectators to help them cheat, and, while he technically discourages this, it’s really just another piece of the game. If violence does take place, either from the players or the spectators, the Dealer responds in kind. Fisticuffs are met with brutal beat downs (courtesy of the goons) and the very sight of a gun brings a lethal response from the Dealer himself.

Every writer has a head full of useless facts and zany trivia. We pound so much garbage into our skulls that some of it is bound to stick. When I know something random and someone asks me how I know, I’m frequently forced to admit I have no idea. Every once in awhile, though, I’m at least able to say that I know because it was part of the research I did for Project X. So research, yeah. That’s what this post is about. It just took me awhile to get there. Specifically, we are gonna talk about using the Interwebs. Start by memorizing this phrase. Just Fucking Google It.

How Much?

How much research needs to be done depends entirely on what you are writing and what your audience is. If I’m writing short pulp stories in the vein of Two-Fisted Tales, the amount of research I’m gonna need to do will be light. I may need to know how to spell the name of some exotic locale properly (hey, that is research), what sort of folks live there and what the nastiest animal around is. That should take like 20 minutes, tops. I’m not gonna be taking a ton of notes (though I make some bookmarks for later reference), because the genre doesn’t really require a great deal of verisimilitude. Now, if I’m doing a freelance bit for the WWF (environmentalists, not wrestlers) and they want me to write about the same area, I’m gonna need to dig a little deeper. I’m gonna need to spend more time reading, more time documenting sources and more time making sure of the quality of my sources. This seems like common sense, yeah? Do the amount of research your work requires – don’t be lazy – but don’t do more than you need too.

Where?

Wikipedia. There I said it. It has a lot of good information that can help you get started with your research. If nothing else, Wikipedia should give you an overview of whatever you’re researching. Obviously, you don’t want to take everything posted on Wikipedia as the absolute truth, but a reasonable amount of the content is sourced. Go look at the sources. Them things is gold mines, son. I use Wikipedia to find sources that are more reliable. Those sources generally lead to other sources, and so on. I’d also suggest working on your Google-fu. I’ve found full academic .pdf files online that my professors said they couldn’t get hold of. No, I’m not advocating piracy here (arrr!) I’m just saying know how to work the system.

Here’s an example of how to work the system and find obscure shit. Let’s say I want to find a picture of Chuck Wendig naked. Stop making that face at me, it’s hypothetical. Fine. A poem about Chuckles naked form then. The worst thing you could ever do is type “Chuck Wendig naked poem” into the browser. I don’t know what you’d find and I don’t want too. My guess would be pictures of woodchucks banging to bluegrass music. I digress. The important part of a poem about naked Wendigs isn’t the naked part. The internet loves the word naked so much that you’ll get 3 million hits on crap that has nothing to do with a nude Chuck (I’m guessing here). You need to learn what sort of words Google likes but doesn’t love. A better search would be “poem chuck wendig artistic” or “poems about chuck wendig.” Either of those should let you find what you want, assuming such content actually exists.

Plagiarism

Just because I can’t spell the word doesn’t mean you don’t need to watch out for it. I know how tempting it is to just copy/paste stuff directly from a site into your work. Resist. Even if that wasn’t completely unethical, the internet is filled with millions of howler monkeys looking out for exactly what you just did. God forbid you ever become famous and someone finds that shit. We’ll never hear the end of it. Make the information work for you, don’t just work the information.

NOTE: No poems or pictures of naked Wendigs were produced during the making of this post.

I’m still plenty sick. Don’t expect much from me quite yet.

Unsurprisingly to anyone with even the vaguest idea of world geography, Mr. Kobe hails from the magical land of Japan. Mr. Kobe is the youngest of our poker players at a mere 25 years of age. He wears those thick-rimmed glasses popular with the hipster crowd and dresses in suits that probably cost than might be apparent.

One of the themes of our tale is how the mobile phone has changed things over the last decade or so. Each of our players has one, The Dealer has one, and even some of the cronies have ‘em. In Mr. Kobe’s case, his is a super slim Japanese model that makes the iPhone look like the primitive software it actually is. The phone has all the usual bells and whistles, but the one thing about it that stands out is its audio and video capture abilities. His phone is basically skinnier version of the Flip, and Mr. Kobe uses this aspect of his phone more often than any other, much like the iconic buck toothed Japanese tourist from the 80s. He takes pictures of people. He takes pictures of places. He takes pictures of food. He samples the music playing in a bar. The phone is nearly constantly in his hand.

Mr. Kobe is actually Yakuza, naturally, and is painted from throat to wrists to ankle with Irezumi, the old school method of Japanese tattoos. Because it’s generally frowned upon to show your tattoos around other people that aren’t gangsters, Mr. Kobe keeps his shirt buttoned to the very tippity top, won’t roll up his sleeves (no matter how hot it gets), and is unlikely to so much hike up a pant leg to scratch his calf. To American eyes, this gives Mr. Kobe a sort of nerd-esque or conservative flair that dovetails nicely with the Japanese tourist image.

The Yakuza originally formed around the activities of two groups: gamblers and wandering merchants (steal stuff in one place, sell it in another). Although Mr. Kobe definitely hails from the gambler end of the family, he knows a thing or two about moving cattle quickly and quietly in the dark of night. He’s killed men before and has a particularly low tolerance for cheaters, which, thanks to his family history, he’s quite good at catching.

Mr. Kobe is accompanied by two younger Japanese guys that look as though they might have come directly from the set of The Fast and the Furious. These kids don’t have the tattoos, or the sense of honor of real Yakuza, but finding decent recruits to add to the family has become harder and harder as Japan (and Asia in general) continues to advance economically. Like I said, they may not have Yakuza “class,” but they still have guns stuffed in their oversized fanny packs. I’m not even giving them names. They won’t last long enough to need ‘em.

The Yakuza have fairly impressive organizations already at work in the US, and Mr. Kobe is just here on vacation. There might be a few other Yakuza around as well, but they are more likely here to gamble than they are to engage in a turf war for drugs, prostitutes, etc.

So, meet the only player at the table with a gun. Meet. Mr. Kobe.

Continuing with the character work for my next project.

Mr. Vegas

Mr. Vegas looks his name. He wears designer shades indoors, has expensive, lounge-lizard kinda clothes (complete with alligator/shark skin shoes) and slicked back hair that is just starting to thin to a widow’s peak. He’s slightly overweight as well. Not so much you could call him fat, just enough to give him the look of being soft. A nervous habit is to use the 100% cotton handkerchief in his pocket to mop his sweaty brow.  His fingernails are manicured and he has that orange spray-on tan. He tells loud, bad jokes, and smokes a stinky cigar. His cell phone goes off at the most inappropriate times possible and has Livin’ La Vida Loca as the ring tone.

Mr. Vegas tells the ladies he isn’t married, but thanks to the spray-on tan it’s pretty easy to white ring around his finger where a wedding band should be. In short, Mr. Vegas is a walking, talking cliché of all the things you’d expect from a Vegas douche bag. He should be. He’s spent a lot of time perfecting his act. The bit about not being married might be the only truth he speaks all day.

The truth is that Mr. Vegas is a cheat and a card shark. He’s so obvious that people underestimate him. Mr. Vegas isn’t just counting cards or scuffing the edges of aces with a sandpaper ring, no sir. He’s high tech. It’s not common knowledge, but a few years back, a Japanese company put out a cell phone with camera that was pulled from the market. The camera had all sorts of goodies and filters, and combined in just the right way it literally became the sort of X-ray camera teenage boys have fantasized about for decades.

The jerkwad shades Mr. Vegas wears are a variation on the cell phone. They provide just enough of an X-ray picture to let him see what cards folks are dealt. Obviously he can’t just walk around with his X-ray shades on all the time. Someone would become suspicious sooner or later. That’s where the hankie comes in. Each time he wipes his brow, he is actually turning the X-ray function of the shades on and off. The hankie contains a tiny chip that has a very short transmission range, which communicates with a similar chip in the shades.

Even with the shades, keeping track of multiple opponents’ hands is tough work. To help him out, Mr. Vegas has a toe-tapper counter that transmits to his cell phone. Any time someone has a really good hand, Livin’ La Vida Loca blasts out and he receives a nonsensical text message. The wording of the text message relays hand and opponent to Mr. Vegas.

Mr. Vegas rarely steps out of character around other people, but everyone has a weakness and his is booze. More often than not it’s the free drinks rather than the cards that defeat him.

Meet Mr. Vegas.

In the midst of finals and helping out other folks edit their stuff. Longer post tomorrow. Likely I’ll move on to a character study of Mr. Vegas.

Today I thought I might start working on a new project, and I thought I’d share some of that work with the class. We’re going to take a stab at a character study. One Mr. Idaho.

Mr. Idaho isn’t this fellas real name, of course. It’s just what I’ll be calling him. In fact, I have no intention of actually giving him a real name. I asked myself what the most boring state in the union might be and the answer I got back was Idaho. If you live in Idaho, I apologize. Give the potatoes a hug for me.

So, Mr. Idaho is very much like the picture I posted. A boring, suit and tie, wage-slave for the insurance industry. He probably went straight to a state college right out of high school, did the requisite amount of partying (not enough to get him in a frat, though) and scraped through with a C+ average. What? A C+ average isn’t bad. We had a president with a C+ average. But I digress.

Mr. Idaho marries the first woman to give him a hummer. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s unattractive or 40 year-old virgin material, that just means the girls in Hometown, USA had firm ideas about where a penis should be placed. He and the missus pop out the usual 2.5 children, buy a house with a white picket fence and settle down into American stupor.

Right now, Mr. Idaho is a boring motherfucker. That’s fine. Most people are boring. You ask a crowd of people what they do for fun and you’ll get way more “I watch TV” type answers than you will “I ski naked” type answers. Further, for the purposes of my study, boring is what I want. Now let’s tie boring to the theme I’ll be working with, which happens to be poker.

Mr. Idaho watches every poker program on television and DVRs the one’s he misses. He enjoys poker so much that he organized a weekly poker night, where the guys sit around, drink beer, curse, (but no smoking in the house) and play cards for penny ante. It turns out that Mr. Idaho is a pretty solid poker player. He ends up with way more pennies than he loses. He dreams of playing poker in a real casino for big time money.

Last Tuesday, Mr. Idaho’s boss asked him to accompany him to a insurances sales convention. The town the convention’s being held in just happens to have a casino. As an aside here, there’s no good reason to always make that town Vegas anymore, either. Hell, Pittsburgh has a casino. If you feel you must go all in (as it were) with the glitz of Vegas, cool, I’m just saying you have alternatives. Anyways, Mr. Idaho knows about the casino and decides to go to the convention. He spends the next few months saving up as much extra cash as he possibly can, maybe even quietly siphoning off some of the savings account, to make a credible stake for some serious poker.

What actually happens to Mr. Idaho while playing poker is the meat of the story, so that doesn’t really need to figure in the study. We will want to know seemingly trivial things like the names of his wife and children. My initial temptation is to name the wife Gladys, but I’ll resist. Mr. Idaho isn’t nearly old enough to have a wife named Gladys. Speaking of age, I figure Mr. Idaho is mid-30s. So, names. Here’s the thing about names. Sometimes a name should mean something, and sometimes it really doesn’t matter. Mr. Idaho doesn’t have a name because I want him to have a certain anonymity. I want my audience to be able to stick the name of whoever Mr. Idaho reminds them of on the character. I’m also tempted to just leave the wife with a cutesy nickname, like Honeybuns or Snookie. This is the only name we’d ever hear Mr. Idaho refer to his wife by (he will, of course, just call her “my wife”). It would even be on his iPhone. The kids need real names though. Simple names will do. Mr. Idaho and his Snookie Bear aren’t really that imaginative. We’ll go with Matt and Ashley.

Now we need something in Mr. Idaho’s background that would make him willing to take a risk. To this point he’s a pretty boring and low risk kind of fellow. For him to do something crazy, like snort coke and bang a hooker over the balcony railing in his hotel room, he’s going to need a shove. Maybe Mr. Idaho is a really bad winner. He’s a trash talker. The more he wins, the more excited and self-confident he gets. Eventually he passes the line from vaguely annoying to egomaniac. The penny ante games at home aren’t enough to bring out the worst in him, but if he won some real money, he might start to behave like a real jackass.

Meet Mr. Idaho.