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Writing Soundtracks

02 Aug 2012 by KRAG

A Sixty-Fourth NoteBefore I started to write, I studied music. Classical music, ancient music, and modern; in orchestras (symphonic, chamber, and pit), in bands (marching, symphonic, jazz, and swing), and in trios, quartets, and quintets; as a student, as an amateur, and as a professional; as a violinist, a violist, on the tuba (Sousaphone and miraphone), with bass guitar, on percussion, and as a conductor: I did it all. For the first three decades of my life, music was my sole creative outlet.

When I swapped music for writing, music did not disappear. I brought it with me.

The world is filled with distractions, and it can be a challenge to block them all out so I can concentrate on the world inside my head. Music helps me do that.

Each of my books has a soundtrack. Sometimes it’s related to the subject, building an ethnic backdrop (like the Arabic pop music I played while writing Dreams…) but more often it’s completely unrelated, just providing the beat, the drive, and the mood (like all the Symphonic Metal music I’ve been listening to while writing FC:V). I specifically ignore lyrics—I was never good at picking them out, anyway, so ignoring them works fine. Foreign language and instrumental works are especially well-suited, and movie soundtracks are often the perfect choice, evoking a mood and drama.

k

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Agile Pablum

02 Aug 2012 by KRAG

Obey the Kitty!Sorry, but this is another of my rants against the Agile methodology.

The concept of “teams in the workplace” is a good one. I have worked in teams before, where we all knew what we were all doing and we all swapped roles as required. But Agile drives this down to the sub-floor and then keeps going, shedding all concept of organization and efficiency in its goal to push all functionality down to the “team” level. This idea that “all decisions are made by everyone” takes egalitarianism to its ad absurdum point, and creates an atmosphere where you intelligent, capable, professional people are treated like 5-year olds at a picnic. What the hell is wrong with delegation? Why is even the hint of a hierarchical structure so antithetical to “team”? Don’t real teams have coaches?

Here’s the deal. Someone “on high” has decided that we (our team) needs to have a quarterly plan and commit to what we can deliver in the coming quarter. (How they reconcile this with the concept that we only commit to what we can deliver one sprint at a time is beyond me, but hey, that’s senior management for you.) So, instead of delegating this task to a small group who have the best overall view of what needs to be done and how all the pieces fit on a macro scale, they’ve decided that we all have to travel to corporate headquarters for an all-day, face-to-face meeting, so that we can all agree on all decisions. So now, instead of just wasting the time of say, five people for a day each, we’re going to waste the time of 20 people for a day each, plus the family time lost by those of us who have to travel to CorpHQ, plus the expense of paying for that travel and putting people up overnight (since the all-day session starts at—get this—7AM).

All so we can all feel good about our decisions.

Bollocks. This is just another example of management pushing their job down to the worker bee. Now, instead of management actually managing the resources and workloads, they push that task down to the teams. The teams now have to manage their resources and workloads, the teams now have the responsibility, and management can just sit there and prime their muzzle-loaders, preparing to take us down should we miss our goals.

Making each team member an active participant in every decision means duplicating effort and wasting resources. I have been a project and team leader in the past; I can do it, and I can do it well, but I prefer to be down in the weeds creating solutions to problems rather than higher up wrangling priorities and schedules.  But why should I be required to do both? Especially (and this is what really steams my clams) when we have people who are paid to do it! All those folks with “lead” and “manager” and “director” in their titles? Why aren’t they leading, managing, and directing?

Blankity-blank.

k

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Vertigo On Top

01 Aug 2012 by KRAG

This just in from the “Are You Freaking Kidding Me?” column…

A recent poll conducted by the British Film Institute has placed Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” on top, as the “greatest film of all time.” The classic thriller unseats the long-reigning “Citizen Kane” from the #1 spot it virtually owned for the past 50 years.

I say again: Are you freaking kidding me?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m a big fan of the Hitch, but “Vertigo”? How can any film be deemed the greatest of all time when it has Kim Novak somnambulating across the screen like a Valium-popping golem. It’s ridiculous. There are plenty of Hitch’s movies I’d put up there with “Kane”—”Rear Window” to name the first that comes to mind—but never in a thousand years would I have put “Vertigo” up there.

How could “846 critics, programmers, academics and distributors” have gotten it so desperately wrong? It has to be mentioned that “Vertigo” has rated highly in the BFI’s poll for a while, climbing from 7th, to 4th, to 2nd, and finally, now, to 1st place over the past 20 years. So, if nothing else, at least these misguided muppets are consistent. Though why “Vertigo” should be the only one of Hitch’s 45 opera to break the top ten is a complete and utter mystery (“Psycho” rests down at #35, and no other title of his is to be found on the list).

Blimey!

I will say this, though: taken as a whole, the BFI list is much more interesting than the AFI’s, and I would recommend any fan of film to pop on over and jot down a few of the more esoteric titles. Take a chance on Lang’s “Metropolis” (one of my personal favorites) or Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” or De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves,” which took the top spot back in the poll’s early days.

k

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Rules of Engagement

01 Aug 2012 by KRAG

Obey the Kitty!Are there “rules” for genre fiction?

I’ve been called out by die-hard Alternate History readers for having “broken the rules” of the genre with my Fallen Cloud Saga. Charges that I “changed too much” or that “that’s not the way it was back then” were among the most common complaints. In response, I can only shrug. There are rules? I didn’t get any rulebook. What part of “alternate world history” is confusing these people?

When I sat down to outline the The Year the Cloud Fell (FC:I), I didn’t check to see what genre label it would sport. I had an idea, I worked on it, and I wrote the story I wanted to tell. My standalone novels, Dreams of the Desert Wind and Unraveling Time, are also good examples. Each one of those books blends elements of several genres: suspense, thriller, romance, time travel, adventure, historical fiction, etc. But I never set out to write a genre-bender. I set out to write a novel.

That’s because “genre,” as it’s used today, has nothing to do with writing, but it has everything to do with marketing.

Publishers want to make money; I can’t blame them for that, but in order to ensure the best return on their investment, they want to stack the odds in their favor. One way they do that is by giving books specific “genre” labels. Humor, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, plus sub-categories like Alternate History, Steampunk, Police Procedural…these are all genre labels and yes, the fans of these genres have expectations about what will be inside a book that bears a specific label. That’s what makes the product predictable, and helps the publisher maximize profits by targeting their budget where it will do the best work.

But it has nothing to do with writing.

The book you have in mind might tick all the boxes for one of these labels. Many books do, and publishers (and agents) love that type of book because it makes their job easier. Unfortunately, none of my books fit so neatly into one category. So, should I change what I write? Should I “write to the market”?

Writing to the market is like setting out to write a blockbuster. You’re aiming at a sly, wily,  restlessly moving target. You’re having to guess, months in advance, what will pique the public’s interest, what will go viral, what will be trending upward on Twitter. In short, it’s a nearly impossible task, and if you succeed, it’ll be more luck than skill.

I write what I want to write. I build my characters, my worlds, my storylines specific to my needs, not the unwritten rules of bean-counters in marketing departments. Writing a novel is hard enough, without burdening myself with writing a book I’m not in love with.

k

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FC:V Progress Report

31 Jul 2012 by KRAG

Today was a good writing day.

Ilene and I have gotten into the habit of taking “rehearsing for retirement” mini-vacations. This weekend we took another, centered around our 29th wedding anniversary. We had plans of doing all sorts of things, going places, trying new restaurants, seeing a movie or two to see, but we ended up pretty much sticking around the house, reading, watching the Olympics, and (in my case) writing. I can barely wait until retirement.

I’ve been working on a critical section of FC:V (aka Beneath a Wounded Sky), and today I finally punched through to the other side. I know the Faithful Readers over on my Facebook page are sick of hearing about this “critical section” of the novel, but hey. It’s critical. It’s the difference between crying “Checkmate” in move 25 and making sure you have all the pieces in place so that it means something. That means a lot of work, and a lot of re-work. And then some re-re-work.

But it’s also been rewarding. Any time, in writing Book V, you can make a serious call-back to a scene in Book I, that’s a hell of a lot of fun. Challenging, too, though, primarily because nearly everyone in the chapter has conflicting emotions, and my POV character shifts emotional focus a couple/three times in the last scene alone. While it’s a simple matter to map the “top note” of each character’s main emotion, it’s a different kettle to ensure that all the underlying emotional content is logical as you move through the shifts each character experiences.

I feel particularly free, though, after today’s work. While this isn’t the emotional climax or the action climax, it’s the pivot. For those keeping count, I’m about 75% done. About another 100 pages to go in the main product, and the production work will be complete. Then I go into “post-production,” editing, reader feedback, re-editing, and then…well, you get the idea.

Believe me, though, “production” is the hardest part. When I get that done, pop the champers.

k

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Precipitation of Disbelief

31 Jul 2012 by KRAG

I’ve just seen what is possibly the most ridiculous premise for a television show, ever.

It has long been a fact of life in my house that, if we like a show, it gets canceled. If a show is sharp and well-written, it will probably get the mid-season axe (Yes, shows like “Firefly,” and yes, I am a Browncoat, but let’s not even go there.)

Well-written shows are thin on the ground these days. Ironically, broadcast television and the major networks—once the movers and shakers of primetime—are sinking to new and totally unimpressive lows, scything back scripted shows like Death himself, while pumping the pabulum of competition and so-called “reality” shows into our living rooms like cut-rate meth. Basic cable is the new frontier, and it’s doing some great work, but examples are few and far between.

As a consumer of television fare, I’m a tough market, but I am willing to suspend my disbelief—a lot—if you give me a good plot, some good writing, and some good acting to carry me along. Shows like “Awake” and “Journeyman” (both defunct) came with the sort of setup that required a healthy suspension of disbelief, but they both paid great dividends in the writing and the intricate plots. The writers for these shows put some serious effort into building a basis for the shows, and as incredible and hard-to-believe as the premises were, they had a logic that was integral to the worlds they inhabited. They made sense, and you didn’t have to dump a trainload of fundamental truths in order to go along with them.

Every story, every novel, no matter how bizarre the setting, must have an internal logic. If it doesn’t make sense, we won’t buy it. You can have wizards and dragons and disc-shaped planets and time travel, you can break every rule of physics and change the course of history, but if you don’t explain it or worse, if you can’t explain it, your reader/viewer will be lost to you. If you don’t respect the reader enough to craft a believable plot, you just don’t respect the reader.

This weekend, while watching the Olympics, it was impossible to avoid the ad blitz for the new NBC show, “Revolution.” The JJ Abrams nametag was intriguing, as was Jon Favreau’s direction for the pilot, and post-apocalyptic setting (thankfully sans zombies) looked okay. But what was the premise? That suddenly all the electricity stopped working? No, seriously, what’s the premise?

I did a search to find out exactly what I was missing. I found that the show was set fifteen years after

…an unknown phenomenon permanently disabled all advanced technology on the planet, ranging from computers and electronics to car engines and jet turbines and batteries.

Oh my.

So, NBC has postulated a phenomenon that was somehow smart enough to know what it was going to disable (Batteries? Really?) I don’t know about you, but an old car engine isn’t “advanced technology.” The internal combustion engine is, essentially, just like, fire, you know? And not only is it smart enough to know what it’s going to disable, it’s completely undetectable, and the entire world is unable to figure out what it is or where it came from or how it did it. This big thing happens, and that’s it. Nothing else happens afterward; no alien invasion, no nano-technological Brownian machines ravage the world, no super-criminal demands a ransom. Nothing. So, this “lights out” moment is totally natural, totally unknown, and totally arbitrary.

But, it’ll probably be a hit because it’s got pretty people swinging swords.

k

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Surviving Marriage

30 Jul 2012 by KRAG

Today, marks my 29th wedding anniversary. During that time, I’ve learned a little. I don’t pretend to know the dynamics of same-sex couples or have any advice for women in a marriage. I’m a guy, I’m hetero-, I’m in a marriage; this is all I know. So, gentlemen, if you are interested, pull up a chair.

First and foremost: Commit to it. If you aren’t 100% committed to it, don’t even bother. There’s nothing better in this stressful world than knowing that your partner has your six, but if you’re unable to do that for her, if you’re still looking out for something better or worse, something on the side, you’re not ready. Naturally, the same goes for her, but right now I’m talking to you.

Next: learn to listen. Women are complicated. We males, we’re the red-shirts of human society; we’re the guys that go down with Kirk and Spock to the planet and never come back. We’re designed simply, our needs are simple, our thoughts are simple and straightforward. We see a problem, we solve a problem. Women are not simple. Women think things through. Women use words to think things through; lots of words. Here’s where it gets tricky. Sometimes a woman will tell you about a problem. She’s talking about it, thinking it through, maybe venting a little. You want to help, you want to solve the problem, but you can come up with solution after solution and she’ll shoot them down as fast as you can suggest them, because she doesn’t want you to fix it. She just wants to talk about it. This is foreign to the male brain, but it works for them.

When she does give you a problem to solve, finish what you start. Don’t put up new cabinets and leave the doors off, don’t redo the bathroom and not repaint. And this goes for big things, too, like cars and jobs and schools and kids. Follow-through is the best guarantee of success, and if you need a list to make sure you don’t forget something, write a list. Just get the job done and get it done on time.

Last one for today: be ready to apologize. This is a big one, because a little apology can go a long way. Sure, you may have justifications and rationalizations for why you’re an hour late (I lost track of the time. You said you weren’t hungry.) and you can get all big and scary and defensive (Why didn’t you remind me? Why didn’t you start without me?) but none of that matters because the moment you get steamed, you’ve lost. Just suck it up and say you’re sorry, and do it soon. Storm off and pout for twenty minutes if you must, but then suck it up, get back in there, and apologize. If you’re not man enough to do that, you’ve got bigger problems.

It boils down to this: grow the hell up, guys. Quit being that spoiled little brat or that randy teenager or that chest-thumping yahoo. Quit spending so much time being male and start being a man. Trust, transparency, and a little tenderness will help you avoid hard times.

k

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