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Or as we in Australia like to call it – the day we head out and vote. I did my civic duty a few hours back, so now I’m waiting things it in tentative fear about the possible result.

Elections are always a time of fear for me. I’m a fairly moderate lefty whose spent most of my adult life enduring the seemingly endless reign of the Howard Years when the country routinely decided they preferred a very different ideology at work running the country. And I’ll be honest here – in most of those years I could at least respect the country’s choice on some level. One of the things that always struck about Howard was that he was the kind of idealist that people seem to think of as the exclusive domain of the left; he just idealised a very conservative viewpoint. Even when I railed against him for being an evil fucking bastard, there was at least the belief that there was some kind of thought and passion happening there.

I can take no such comfort should the Coalition win this election. There’s a visceral dislike there, but with the number of people on my blog roll banging on about Bret Easton Ellis’ trip to Australia recently I’ve finally put my finger on why he bothers me so much – I can’t shake the feeling that the main difference between Tony Abbot and American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman is that one of them bangs on about Huey Lewis and the News quite a bit and the other has a 50% chance of being PM of Australia by tomorrow morning.

I could live with a Right-wing idealist. I could live with a ring-wing idiot being managed by folks in the background. For a few months last year I was actually looking forward to an election that pitted Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull against each other, which was possibly one of the few combinations of major party candidates that meant I’d go into the election with a feeling of excitement rather than reticence. It’s the prospect of a national leader whose using a veneer of civility to cover a heart of grade-A, whack-a-mole crazy that’s filling me with fear at the moment, and I suspect that the traditional Election Night drinking will start any minute now.

1) There’s is nothing quite so pleasant as heading out to one of your favorite bookstores on a rainy night and having someone read to you, but it’s doubly awesome when the topic du-jour is the Art of the Reading. The irony is that this totally wasn’t my idea – my sister e-mailed a few days back and asked if I’d be interested, and I was all “sick now, whatever, yeah? Put me down as a yes and leave me alone.” And so I was put down for a yes and Tuesday night rolled around and after I remembered I needed to be somewhere at somewhen there was much confused flailing and wondering what the hell I’d gotten into and then…then…then there was a pleasant night of awesomeness. And Nando’s chicken for afters, ’cause nothing says “pleasant night of literary discussion” like following things up with fast food.

2) I’m finally starting to find my routine again after nearly two weeks of being knocked about by allergies and the flu. The Spokesbear is pleased, although that may have more to do with the fact that my first resposne to bad news ceases to be curling up in ball and whimpering pitiously. The Spokebear has no pity.

3) Due to the pharmaceutical-induced cold-and-flu insomnia I happened to be up late enough to see episodes of Brad Garrett’s dire post-Everybody-Loves-Raymond sitcom, ‘Til Death. And it’s truly dire, not least of which because it’s falling back on the increasingly familiar trope of portraying married men as perpetual adolescents who need to be mothered by their wives. This shit makes me mad. Throwing stuff at the TV mad angry, actually. There is a rant brewing in the back of my brain about the need for male-oriented narratives that find a response to the rise of feminism beyond “act like children”, but ranting with lingering flu-brain is not the best idea.

4) Every time I use du jour in a blog post, I keep thinking about this scene from Josie in the Pussycats and giggling. If you haven’t seen the Josie and the Pussycat’s movie, you really should. It’s awesome. And Du Jour means crash positions!

Over the weekend I spotted a billboard that delivered some very bad news: Hey, Hey It’s Saturday is coming back. Online research reveals they’ve been given a run of twenty episode based on the strength of last year’s revival shows, and that they’ll be aired on Wednesday nights in an act of true cognitive dissonance. Darryl Summers is still going to be at the helm, although there’s no news as to which female co-host he’s planning on denigrating this time around.

I’ve only got three words in response to this: What. The. Fuck?

I’m not entirely sure there’s a good way to explain the lurking evil of Hey, Hey It’s Saturday to non-Australians, but suffice to say that it’s got a fine history of being hosted by a malignant, misogynist gnome who simply refuses to die no matter how many fucking gaffs he makes over the course of his career. It’s a show that routinely built its humor out of the humiliation of others and the othered, and I actually celebrated the first time it got cancelled (and wailed in despair when they announced Summers as the host of whatever Celebrity dancing show he hosted a few years back, for in that moment I saw Hey Hey’s return and trembled). Worse, it’s evil is kind of insidious, because it cloaks itself in a defense of nostalgic Australiana and normalises its behaviour. When Harry Connick Junior protested the inclusions of a blackface skit of the Jackson Five during last years nostalgia showcase the tide of public opinion quickly turned towards some bullshit defence of the skit under patriotic grounds.

It’s rare that I get seriously mad, but come on: fuck that shit. Hey Hey It’s Saturday is fucking evil and it deserves to die without it’s passing being lamented.

I’m quietly hoping that this return is a temporary abnormality, or that they’ll fuck-up early on and get their slot pulled. If that doesn’t happen I’m going to swear a lot and try and genetically engineer a deadly virus that only attacks people based on their AC Neilson figures. ‘Cause I swear to god, if there’s anything that’d convince me to sink the next ten years into unrealistic micro-biological research despite my complete lack of aptitude for the sciences, it’s the continued existence of this fucking show.

Possibly a dangerous question to ask, given that I am the energizer bunny of Avatar-hate, but the movie came up at one of the regular games last week and everyone else at the table seemed to like the film (except the one person yet to see it, who isn’t likely too) and I realised that where I see stunted story that doesn’t do anything after the set-up* a bunch of other folks are seeing unmitigated awesome. 

And I continue to not get it, just as I never got the appeal of the Transformers film and the Matrix and a bunch of other things, and while I’m normally okay with that given that everyone reads a film differently it’s starting to bug me a little this time around. I find myself wondering whether the expectations of films have shifted so far into the boundary of spectacle that story ceases to be important, or if there’s been some kind of fundamental shift in the genre of film-making that I just haven’t figured out yet.

So I turn the question over to people who did like the film: what’s the appeal?

*Incidentally, there’s an interesting article on the Avatar-that-might-have-been if it’d followed the original treatment of the film. It seems to answer every major problem I have with Avatar and reads like a film I would have been gushing over if it’d actually made it to the screen (hell, if even a fragment of it made it to the screen *besides* the pretty FX)

1) I’m going to find every mother-fucker who tried to convince me I’d like this film and I’m going to punch them in the arm. If they trotted out the “you just have to turn your brain off” logic, I’m going to punch them twice. I turned my brain off, as advised. It was still too stupid for me to actually like it.

2) To be fair, there were some good bits. Many of them recycled from Aliens, the last film James Cameron made that I actually liked. I liked Giovanni Ribbisi’s evil corporate guy far more than I liked Paul Reiser’s evil corporate guy. And Michelle Rodriguez in an ornithopter makes up for a variety of ills.

3) At the end of the first hour, I hoped that this might not be an utter disappointment. The opening is solid, the characters get onstage pretty quickly, the set-up is full of bad naming conventions but otherwise okay. Conflict is established: the marine among the field researchers; the humans against the world; Ripley versus Paul Rieser; that second Avatar pilot getting jealous of Jake’s success with the Navi. Sure, most of that conflict disappears once Sully is inside the Avatar, but maybe it’ll come back.

4) At the end of the second hour, I decided there really should be some Disney song about A Whole New World playing over the top of the long sequences where we learn that the world is magical and interconnected for the ninth or tenth time. Said sequences do a great job of showing of the technology and creating spectacle, but also eliminates every character arc but one. Most of the more interesting arcs are blatantly written out via voice-over.

4b) I’ll be honest here – Avatar is primarily about spectacle. I don’t do spectacle. My first response to the Grand Canyon was “It’s a hole in the ground; lets go do something else.” Couple this with being an SF fan from way back and most of Avatar is really just well-rendered vistas of standard SF/Fantasy landscapes. If they wanted to do that, they should have just made a computer game.

5) At the end of the third hour, the movie had tried to perk me up by saying “Dragon’s versus Ornithopter’s, dude. Come on, this is cool.” For the most part, it was too late – I was bored and irritable and just wanted the fucking film over. Still, it was a cool fight scene. It lured me in. Then things got really stupid. Deus ex Machina stupid. And it tacked on a hand-to-hand fight scene it didn’t need, and tried to play out the character arc I would have been interested in if they’d actually bothered to build it at some point.

5b) The worst line in this film – and there are some contenders among the rather generic dialogue – comes in the finale twenty minutes when the hard-arsed marine captain squares off against our hero Sully and asks “how does it feel to betray your own race?” and you’re left thinking “you know what, it’d be nice if someone actually put some thought into that before this point in the script.”

6) Okay, the turning off my brain thing mentioned in point one? I can do it. Honestly, I can. I own copies of The Chronicles of Riddick. And Desperado. Heck, I own a copy of the Core. And I really, really liked Aliens. The thing is, most films where I turn off my brain basically say “look, if we have subtext it’s primarily accidental. We’re just chasing after the next cool thing.” They know that Subtext is a two-way street – you can’t promise it and walk away just because you have pretty visuals and nice action sequences. Avatar promised subtext and meaning. I paid attention. It decided I wasn’t getting it, despite the fact that the subtext is relatively shallow, and proceeded to beat me around the head with said subtext for the final hour of the film.

7) Seriously, the best thing in this film is Michelle Rodriguez flying a gunship.

Pandora? Sully? Grace? UNOB-FRICKEN-TANIUM? Worst naming conventions since the Chronicles of Riddick. And at least the Chronicles of Riddick knew it was an unrelenting sequence of cheese and action-sequences with all the depth of a wading pool.

9) 3D movies give me a headache.

10) Good things about this movie: Michelle Rodriguez; Sam Worthington; Paul Reiser Giovanni Ribisi; Ripley; the ability to endlessly snark about its failings; ornithopters. If someone would just take these elements and, say, remake Dune or put out a new Alien movie (without Predators), I’d be a happy man. ‘Cause there’s potential there for something awesome, especially now that Avatar’s gotten the obligatory “new film technology’s endlessly wanky film that’s really about how awesome said new film technology is” out of the way.

End Note: All of this leaves off the original objection to the film I posted on facebook a while back – that it’s going to be the same tired replay of white post-colonial guilt we’ve seen in shit like the The Power of One and Dances with Wolves and every other story where a white block from the conquering nation saves the tribe by becoming one of them. Needless to say, that objection remains, but I’m saddened to discover that there’s really no attempt to complicate the the narrative beyond that. Here’s one of those hints to take home – you can write a gritty story about the evils of corporations, or you can write a fairy tale. It’s fucking hard to do both in the same story, and Avatar falls apart about the point that it tries.

It’s been a rough week thus far (yes, all two days of it) and I’m in a covety kind of mood. I can’t help it, honest. Coveting things is one of those survival tactics that kick in when I’m otherwise unsure of what’s going on in the foreseeable future. And I figured I’d share some of the coveting. A tiny big of it, anyway. It will distract me until my jelly is ready to come out of the fridge and do it’s comfort-foody magic.

And so, in approximate order, the six things about America* that I tend to covet:

1) Home-delivered Chinese food that comes in neat folded cardboard boxes.

Oh little paper boxes full of wontons, cashew and noodle, how I dearly covet thee. In the fifteen years I’ve actually been eating Chinese food (I started late in life, after some bad experiences in my childhood) I have always been disappointed by the plastic containers in which Chinese take-away is served.

To say nothing of my disappointment upon discovering so few Chinese restaurants will deliver in my homeland; Pizza, I can order in, and a good Indian curry if I pick the right suburb. Thai food, maybe, should I be very lucky; heck, in recent months I’ve even had the option of home-delivered schnitzel, though the cost of delivery is prohibitive (and unlikely to be taken up on, were it not for the novelty of the experience). Home delivered Chinese food? Never seen it. And even if I had, there would plastic containers and the disappointed wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I have heard, of late, that the folded boxes are on their way out, a conceit retained in movies and TV shows because they’re far more aesthetically pleasing than plastic tubs. If this is true, I shall be a sad panda. Should I ever actually make it over to America to visit the various friends I don’t get to see often enough, you can bet that my default response to the question of “what do you want for dinner” will inevitably be “Chinese” in the hopes of eating from said cartons. And this is in spite of the fact that Chinese food and my digestive tract rarely get along.

2) Constitutionally protected right to free speech.

Because say what you will about the bits of your constitution and its many amendments that seem outright crazy (yes, constitutional right to bear arms folks, I’m looking at you), this one is just plain cool. That you have folks who recognise how awesome it is to have this and fight to keep it from getting stomped into the mud is likewise very cool.

Those of us stuck in Australia don’t actually have this right, though it’s a fact that catches most people by surprise. It would depress me less if we used it to silence the vocal-but-utterly-moronic segments of our populace, but unfortunately we tend to celebrate them and offering them a spot on Dancing with the Stars.

3) Doctor Pepper

They tried to launch it in Australia, they really did, but many of my countrymen just didn’t seem the glory in a fizzy drink that tasted, primarily, like cough syrup. I suspect it’s because they never got around to putting bourbon in it, but that’s just me.

I would also be covetous of the fact that you have Jolt, but there are enough hardcore geeks in Australia to ensure you can usually find it lingering in the back of some non-franchised twenty-four hour convenience store somewhere. Six weeks ago I would have coveted your Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, but it appears there’s now a supplier importing them to my local store, and that fucking rocks.

I don’t, however, covet your tendency to use high-fructose corn syrup in such drinks. That shit is just wrong. And it makes your cola taste funny.

4) Stamps

Not for any aesthetic or monetary value, just for practical reasons. I need to send self-addressed stamped envelopes to America pretty regularly, so coveting stamps is just a business decision and will remain so until the SF magazine industry is run entirely via internet submissions.

This would be higher on the list, but I’m fortunate enough to be well-stocked in American postage for the moment. I’m just, you know, coveting on the principle that I’ll need them eventually.

5) Southern Gothic…

…because kudzu, ghosts, vampires, and melodrama warm my heart. And because Australian Gothic involves too much red dust, dry heat, and empty landscapes to be much fun. And because kudzu is a fun word to say out loud.

6) Population Density

Yes, I know this isn’t universal, but you guys have a lot of people. Even your small cities are big enough to dwarf most of the urban areas in Australia. I’m sure it comes with its own problems, but with population density comes interesting pockets of subculture and more people who are likely to be interested in whatever weird-ass thing you’re interested.

As a guy who tends to like weird-ass things and frequently finds himself with limited options for talking about them locally, population density is one of those traits that looks particularly promising.

*disregarding the various awesome American peeps who’d I’d gladly steal from you, the fact that America tends to be the  biggest market for English language fiction in the world, and the fact that it’s the hub for SF industry. ‘Cause those go without saying.

Right what is says on the tin – it got inspired by a facebook meme but my natural love of verbage meant it raged out of control. Anyway, this is actually a pretty good summary of what the interior of my head looks like when the subject of writing comes up. Some are me-specific, some a general, and most were written down fast in order to see what the first twenty-five thoughts that came to mind actually were. I take no responsibility for accidents caused if you follow any of these hastily constructed thoughts and give the usual warnings of upcoming writer-angst (it’s been that kind of week):

1) There is no “one true way to write,” but there are several commonly touted pieces of advice that both make sense to me and largely represent an decent list of “things worth doing unless you’ve got a good reason not to.”

2) This list is not one of them.

3) There is nothing I can achieve as a writer that will silence that little voice in the back of my head urging me to do more. I will never do enough and I can always do things better. This probably isn’t a bad thing, since the alternative is stagnation.

4) Fear is the mind-killer. Many problems with getting something written can be traced back to fear of some kind.

5) Writing does not lend itself to sick days. Nor does it lend itself to holidays. It would be nice if it did, but the realities of putting writing first means it’s unlikely to happen.

6) Writing is a stupid career choice. You will know this, because people will tell you the same thing in a myriad of ways – the low rate of monetary reward, the sneer people get at parties when you tell them what you do, the prolonged conversations with family members who still think things like “owning a house” and “getting a real job” are in your future. Eventually it will sink in and you’ll start having these conversations with yourself.

7) Once six sinks in, the primary thing between you and writing tends to be yourself (see point four) . There are no issues that cannot be fixed by writing more.

Focus on the things you can control (submissions, practice, wordcount), because it’ll distract you from the things that you can’t (acceptances, the publishing industry, society frowning at you because you’re a jobless wastrel).

8b) Wastrel is one of those words, you know? It just begs to be used.

9) It’s never seriously occurred to me that I wouldn’t make it as a writer. This could result in a very rude shock sometime over the next two decades.

10) Writing exists in isolation from the rest of the world – I have trouble seeing the correlation between real world issues (such as the nightmare busy periods in the day job, when I have one lined up) with low-energy-periods in writing. These things will be obvious to everyone else, but I keep missing them.

11) Writing is a million times easier once you’ve got a network of folks who understand how writing/publishing works than it is when you’re surrounded by people who don’t. The former understand why you’re excited by getting a short story published while acknowledging its not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, while the latter just think it’s “nice” or “a very big deal.”

12) Most writing advice and editorial conventions are much easier to understand and implement once you’ve been told why they’re in place. For example, understanding the history of poetry as a purely verbal Epic form helped me wrap my head around why rhyme and meter became important (and understanding that helped me figure out why free verse came about and started doing what it does).

13) There are many things in writing that you need to learn, but everyone assumes you already know how to do. Some of it is covered in how-to-write books and courses, but the really important stuff isn’t – how to deal with page-proofs, how to run your finances – and by the time you need to know it, people usually assume you’ve already got it under your belt.

14) Banging your head against a brick wall might not be the most effective way of bring it down, but it both works and proves enormously satisfying when you eventually succeed.

15) There is a point in every project where everything feels like its going wrong and it needs to be scrapped. Even something as simple as this blog-post (Incidentally, the self-critique on this kicked in right…now. This is doubt point for this list. I am giving myself permission to be a pompous wanker in order to get this finished – see point 4).

16) The primary manifestation of fear tends to be self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy, and a sense of self-depreciation in regards to writing.

17) Talking about writing with other writers can be a source of exquisite pleasure, but also a source of distraction. At some point you need to stop celebrating the fact that there are other people who ‘get it’ and get back to work.

18) Rejection is your friend – you instantly have a piece of writing that’s ready to send elsewhere, and a market that’s sitting empty and waiting for you to send them something. It may be frustrating at the time, but in the long-term having someone say no is a good thing. Acceptance mean you need to write more in order to keep the cycle going.

18b) Not that I’m knocking acceptances – they’re pretty damn sweet.

19) Writing is not art. Nor is it entertainment. The thing you have written at the end might be both, but conceptualising the act of writing as anything other than a job that needs doing tends to result of frustration (‘Course, conceptualising it as a job results in frustration as well).

19b) You aren’t allowed to hurt people who say things lings “I want to write to be more creative” or “I don’t care if I ever make any money, I just want to do this for me.” You’ll want to, really you will, but it’s impolite and the cultural myth around art largely means they’re over-romanticized the job.

20) None of the following things are mandatory parts of being a writer: coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, promiscuous sex, road trips, silly hats, cups of tea, an interesting life, drug habits, a garret in France, fame, fortune, volatile personal relationships, angst, suicide, fishing for marlin off the coast of pain, pining for a muffin and promising yourself you can have one after you’vefinished the next thousand words of your screenplay, neurotic self-destruction, a black turtleneck, anything else you can think of that doesn’t involve some aspect of either writing or submitting things. And yet, for some reason, I’ve made the mistake of thinking many of those are part of the process at least once.

21) You are not a real writer. There is no such thing. People-who-don’t-write will not think you’re a real writer unless you have Stephen King/JK Rowling/Stephanie Meyer-like success. There is no writers union who will drop past and give you a real-writer business card. Therefore, you should probably go back to work. Unless you’re a poet, because they do have a union in Australia. Although I’m not sure it does much, and they probably don’t have cards that’ll make you a real writer either.

22) Odds are, I will not have Stephen-King-like success. I’m okay with that, really. I probably won’t be JK Rowling or Stephanie Meyer either. I’m cool with that too.

23) I want to hide this list under a clicky-cut because it feels pompous and arrogant. This fear stems from the suspicion that I haven’t done enough to justify writing a list of thoughts about writing. Presenting myself as a writer who knows stuff invites a frightening level of public censure.

24) You will inevitably come to dislike most of the things you have published, if only because you can see the flaws. That’s a good thing – it means you’ve grown as a writer. When you can see the flaws even before something is published, you’re probably better off saying no and re-writing it rather than living with the nagging guilt.

25) The next draft of this list would be so much better. If I was sensible, I’d probably listen to myself on point 24. At the very least I’d go back and make sure it was all in first or second person. Unfortunately it’s time to go work on something else.

The Speed Racer movie fascinates me. Not because it’s a good movie – it’s not – but because it’s made by people just smart enough to do interesting things and just dumb enough to make some very simple mistakes. As a writer, this is a combination that keeps me looking at something, wondering what the hell happened and why it all falls apart.

I’ll be honest for a second – Speed Racer should be the kind of glorious failure in the style of films like Southland Tales. The Watchowski Brothers remake has a lot going for it in terms of a really strong aesthetic, a willingness to be stylized rather than naturalistic, and a moderately strong cast. It was never going to be a successful film because the choices they were making ran up against the basic demand for pseudo-realism in cinema, but at the very least it was ambitious and willing to take chances.

Sadly, this is coupled with the kind of bone-headed narrative decisions that make it a fairly mundane failure rather than failed attempt at genius. Which is why I’d probably recommend people who are interested in writing should watch it, if only to see why certain things don’t work, narratively speaking. Things to pay attention to, when watching Speed Racer as a learning experience:

1) They Haven’t Decided what the films about.
Not entirely true, since on one level they’ve got this down – Speed Racer is about futuristic cars and remaking a cartoon. But underneath that, on the thematic level, this film is overburdened with themes and it handles none of them particularly well. On one hand it’s a personal story about Speed living up to his brother’s legacy, on another it’s a story about the individual against big business, and on another hand its the thematic equivalent of Star Wars where man conquers the machine through the all-knowing power of the force (or, in this case, listening to the car and driving on instinct). There’s no problem with a story being these things, but it’s never all of these things at the same time – each theme gets set up seperately and independently, taking far to long to integrate.

2) Flashback Mania
In the opening ten minutes of the film, we have about six flashbacks. All these flashbacks undercut the speed and action of the opening race, but most of them add very little to tension. In SF we call this info-dumping and it’s something to be used with caution, but in the film it’s the very literal equivalent of stopping a story to insert “as you know, Bob, Speed’s older brother was once a great racer himself, but he came to a bad end…” over and over again. This would probably be bearable – not good, but bearable – if it was setting something up, but at the end of the race and the flashback sequence we’re given a new problem…

3) The Film has Two First Acts
There’s a structure to the first act of a story – the world is established, something threatens the status-quo, the hero walks away from it, things get worse and people keep saying “fix it”, and finally the protagonist is forced to address the issue. The act basically ends at the moment the decision is made to go and deal with the problem.

Speed Racer does this twice, and really  this is where a lot of the problems mentioned above become unforgivable  – the combination of opening race and story sets up one set of narrative expectations (two, actually, since they cram the background on Trixi and Speed’s relationship in there, rather unnecessarily). The conflict is all established – Speed wants to live up to his older brother’s memory, but also needs to understand why Rex Racer walked out. He relived Rex’s departer, sees the effect it has on his family, gets told not to listen to the gossip that follows. He makes a decision – not to break his brother’s record in the race, to limit himself from surpassing his brother’s memory. We get to a nice point where things are ready to move forward, and….

Then the movie starts all over again. We literally get up the following day and a whole new set of conflicts are introduced -  Speed is being courted by big business sponsors, the big business vs individual is set up, and although there’s some real tangential links to the first story it feels like the start of something else entirely (although this, too, is cut short when the seemingly-nice-big-businessmen reveals himself to be corporate-scum-who-hates-individuals at the end of this sequence).

There’s a notable shift in the way the whole film works after you get past the first half-hour or so – basically, as soon as they hit the rally race everything gets wound together, and things don’t start falling apart again until the very end when they have to end the film three or four times to get everything wrapped up. This is basically one of those signs that you’re layering in too many metaphors and themes at once, and they really could have done something extraordinary if only they’d focused things on one story and hooked everything else in as a sub-theme instead.

4) They didn’t adapt the style to the medium
The Speed Racer cartoon is layered in goofiness and weird stylistic choices – some parts are serious, some parts are cartoony to the extreme. Largely, the difference comes down the presence of Chim Chim and Spritle in the scene. In making the film they’ve tried to keep this stylistic approach, but what works okay in a half-hour television cartoon is death in a film, particularly when those choices are predicated on the comedic talents of a young actor and a chimpanzee in live-action sequences.

I can see the argument for keeping the goofy Spritle/Chim Chim scenes as a means of connecting this film to kids, but on the whole that was probably the wrong choice given how heavily stylized everything is. This is far from a realist film, but it’s also a long way from the kind of stylization that would appeal to anyone who isn’t plugging into the camp nostalgia of their approach. There are times when this leads to some really entertaining irony – the ninja, for example, or the major fight scene – but when that’s pushed to far it becomes inane rather than clever.

5) It Telegraphs Its Punches
Bless it’s heart, it tries not to – but the fact that Matthew Fox is Rex Racer despite the fact that another character plays him early on isn’t exactly a surprise. It’s not just a hold-over from the cartoon series either – Matthew Fox appears at exactly the right point, narratively speaking, to be the missing Rex Racer/Mentor figure and they don’t work hard enough to throw off that suspicion. Much like everything else, thematically speaking, it’s heavy-handed and overstated. It’s even forshadowed in terms of motif, where people are not what they appear throughout the film (the big-bad-businessman in the first act, the man Speed and Racer X work with in the second act). What should be clever narrative decisions are let down by the flaws in the structure and become far to noticable.

The reason I say watch this film isn’t necessarily because it’s irredeemably bad, although it looks like it is on the surface. Rather, it’s interesting because there’s enough good points to it that the really obvious failures are killers – or, at the very least, they put Speed Racer on the wrong side of the line between mundane and glorious failure. It’s such a great example of getting things wrong, structurally, that I kind of sat there wondering how they’d missed it (although this is probably a cautionary tale to writers in that respect – it’s easy to think you’ve linked things well enough in a narrative to justify having them there). There’s a part of me that pines for the film this could have been and keeps going back to it in the hopes it can be redrafted and fixed.

Stop what you’re doing, right now, and go back up your computer. Not just saving your on a zip drive, but actually backing your files up and keeping them somewhere far away from your PC.

I usually say this once a year in October to commemorate the computer crash of 06 that complete wiped out about seven years of work, including a bunch of stories and the PhD thesis I’d been working. Like most people, I thought I was safe because everything was backed up on my zip drive. Unfortunately, said zip drive was plugged into my computer at the time, so the power surge that wiped my PC out took the back-ups with me.

It was, needless to say, a very bad day. I cried for a while. Eventually I started throwing things.

This warning comes early this year because I just lost my second PC in three years. It just went “nope, done with this,” and stopped working while I was in the middle of typing. Fortunately, I learned my lesson last time, so all I lost with this crash was the work I’d done from the last few hours and a bunch of computer game save files that don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. At most, if it’d taken the zip disk with it, I would’ve lost about a weeks worth of stuff. While this is stressful – I was trying to hit a deadline for Gen Con Oz this afternoon – it isn’t the catastrophic loss the last PC death.

I figure a goodly portion of my friends list are writers. For the love of god, people, back up your files. Your computer isn’t as permanent as you think, and it truly sucks to be sitting there going “but, but, but” when the techie man tells you there’s nothing left.

As a side note – I’m broke and can’t afford to pay said techie-type people to tell me why the latest PC died and it’s well out of waranty. If there’s anyone local who’se got the know-how to poke at the parts and tell me why it’s gone, let me know and I’ll offer a) gratitude, b) um, whatever form of payment we can work given my limited means.

So I’ve been thinking about where ideas come from lately, because I keep seeing this idea floating around that explaining where they come from is somehow secretive and difficult to do. I didn’t get that, the hesitation thing, because I’d always thought the ideas were kind of simple to explain even if no-one was asking me to do so. Then I got interviewed for the first time and realised how hard it is to come up simple, easy answers off the cuff, and there’s petty good odds that if I had been asked the idea question (which, thankfully, I wasn’t) I would have resorted to some kind of “writers hate that question” rhetoric on the basis that it’d stall for time while I thought up a decent answer.

So, as an in-case-of-emergency measure, I figured I’d work out an answer before I needed it. And my explanation goes a little like this:

Imagine an equilateral triangle. Put “confluence” at one point, “other people’s ideas” at the second point, and “knowing how stories work” at the third. The ideas happen in the middle of the triangle,  because ideas are basically a combination of those three things. Sometimes I’ll lean towards one point more than than the other two, but all three are usually at work in some way.

I think it’s probably the “knowing how stories work” work part that makes the entire idea process so mysterious to non-writers. Ideas are actually pretty cheap and easy. Everyone has them, all the time. Hell, I’ve had three in the last five minutes [i]. You can take pretty much anything and use it as the hook for a story once you know the structure and techniques of telling one, so finding a good story idea is largely a matter of knowing the right processes to develop a small concept (say, I’m going to write a story about a guy with a clockwork arm) into a full-blown narrative. The trick here is realising that the initial idea is almost never a full story – it’s just a hook to hang other things on while the story develops around it. Once you’ve stepped over that hurdle the ideas themselves are largely secondary. Or perhaps its in realising that stories are really lots of ideas, come up with over time. Either way, I think the whole story thing is important – an average idea can be turned into a competent story, but the absence of storytelling chops will kill even the coolest concept.

“Confluence” is borrowed from a short story by Neil Gaiman in his collection Smoke and Mirrors. Partially I use it because it’s a good explanation, partially because I like the word (and it’ll give me an excuse to use the word conflate later in this post, and conflates just one of those words, you know?). In Gaiman’s story the logic goes something like this: “Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra.” And sure, it may have been put forward by a fictional writer talking about the creation of the fictional story he’s written inside the story we’re reading, but if you can remember that one aspect of the pyramid then the other two tend to take care of themselves.

Basically we’re talking about two ore more seemingly random elements coming together, fusing in your minds eye and becoming the basis of a story. It doesn’t matter what those things are – experiences you’ve had, stories you’ve been told by friends, short descriptions of a place, stuff you’ve heard on the telly – once you find the right connection between them you’ve got the beginnings of a story. Sometimes this happens by coincidence, sometimes its’ an active process. Either way, it’s not terribly difficult – a lot of beginner writing exercises are based on this principle. Two examples, off the top of my head: pick a character, put them in a setting they obviously don’t belong in and write about how they got there; or pick three different places (say, a cemetery, a shopping mall, and a water-slide park) and figure out a story that uses one each as the setting for the opening scene, middle scene, and final scene.

There’s a great essay/writer’s talk thingy on imagination by Sean Williams where he posits that the imagination is like any other muscle, and it works better the more you get used to using it. Thus the easiest way to have ideas is to pay attention when you have them. It’s not like they’re things that happen uniquely to writers an artists – most people spend much of their everyday life making connections between things that are going on around them and other stuff floating through their head, so it’s just a matter of paying attention. It’s all about asking the right questions to get you started. For me, questions are less interesting than that moment of confluence. The way I write is all about finding the right combination of concepts, finding the tension when two things come together in an expected way. I like putting things at right angles and what develops, then asking the questions that’ll flesh it out into a story. The stories that start with big flashes of energy are almost always the result of two things that create a lot of awkward tension (say, unicorns and autopsies) that immediately link to one of my big narrative kinks (aka, the stuff I really exploring as a writer). This isn’t necessarily inspiration energy that comes from the muse – the combination above led to Horn, and they came out of some fairly dogged and conscious pursuit of a concept to pair up with “virgins and unicorns” that’d lead the story away from familiar territory.

As for the importance of other people’s ideas, well, you know how science is basically a process of one person coming up with a new theory based on a variation in someone else’s ideas? Writing works much the same way – people building new work on top of other people’s ideas, finding new twists and permeations that suit their own narrative kinks. Over time the continued repetition of certain ideas gave us the basics of narrative structure, which gradually led to the accretion of genre traits, which lead to movements within genres, and so forth. Things clump together sometimes, and those clumps become the basis of new ideas (after unicorns and autopsies, the real energy in Horn came when I conflated the big clump of tropes known as Noir into the mix. Ask people who were there when I wrote it what I was like, and I’m fairly sure the phrase giggling like a schoolgirl may come up).

Other people’s work is probably the only place that I really see inspiration at work in the writing process, because while I don’t buy into the mythology of the muse I do believe in responding to other people’s awesomeness. If someone does something utterly cool – and I mean utterly, enviously cool – then my natural inclination is to try and achieve something similar. Not necessarily replicate it, because imitation isn’t that much fun, but finding the new angle on the same technique, or idea, or setting. A new twist, a new tension. Interestingly, I also find a lot of inspiration in ideas that haven’t worked out – not just the merely bad stuff, but the stuff that starts with a good concept and fritters it away. These moments tend to come in more of a “oh god, that should’ve been so much cooler” kind of vibe. Because cool is relative (again, see my note on Narrative Kinks above) and the way I’d like to see an idea play out isn’t necessarily universal.

And that’s me and the idea process. I’m not sure how universal this is, but I’d be interested in hearing how it fits into other people’s processes. It certainly works as an explanation for my approach though – pick any story I’ve written and I’m pretty sure I can unpack the origin of it’s various components using these three vectors as a guide (and they probably would have been easier to explain with a specific story in mind, but it would have taken three or four blog-posts instead of one).

[i] if you’re really interested, they’re I should write a series of speculative fiction love stories set in a Laundromat, I should start a website called readings from a couch that features authors giving youtube readings of their work from a big red couch, and a story that starts with wet footsteps across the floor, leading towards the toilet and the family pet drowned within. Pretty ordinary ideas, and unlikely to get used for anything, but I could probably do something with them if I really wanted too. And before you ask, I know exactly where all of them come from.