One of the assignments for my screenwriting class was to take a film we liked and break it down in a specific format, noting scene lengths, and seeing if/how the film conforms to a three act, eight sequence formula. Here’s one I did for Donnie Darko. (Warning: Obviously it contains a lot of spoilers.) I thought Donnie Darko would be an interesting challenge, since it’s such a quirky, idiosyncratic movie, but it actually fits the formula fairly well, with the inciting incident coming as expected around the ten minute mark and the emotional low point coming at the end of Act II. The eight sequence fit is a little uneasy, but it still kind of works. I did pick up a lot of things going through the movie like this that I never noticed before just watching it. One thing I noticed was how tightly plotted it actually is. I always thought of it as being a somewhat rambling, digressive story, but if you really look at it just about everything that happens is necessary to set up something that happens later.
Archives for August 2006
Crocodile Hunted
Whoa. Want to hear a messed up story? If not, stop reading here.
So I went along to the local bar after class tonight and met a young woman from England who told me about something that happened when she was volunteering in Australia. Some survivors of the Bali bombing had been flown to Australia for medical treatment. One of them wanted to go swimming in a local lake. She asked her guide if it was safe. Since there were dozens of signs posted everywhere warning people not to swim, he responded with a heavily sarcastic, “Yeah.” She spoke German and didn’t catch the sarcasm. She went swimming, and was devoured by a crocodile. They later caught the crocodile, who was blind in one eye and missing all of his teeth, and was probably extremely hungry and a human was all he could catch. He had swallowed her whole. The guide was put on trial, but ultimately found not guilty.
Yikes.
Ragamuffin Art
Check out the awesome cover art for Tobias S. Buckell’s second novel, Ragamuffin.
Worldcon Photos
Epiphany
Another brilliant epiphany. I pushed all the furniture into the center of my bedroom, creating a two-foot wide “track” along its perimeter. So now I can pace around and around (and around) while listening to Audrey read my story to me. It’s a huge improvement over pacing back and forth. I can’t believe I never thought of this before.
Sunburned
So here’s the whole story about why I wasn’t feeling so hot at KGB.
Last Sunday I got together with a bunch of relatives at the local lake. I swam out to the raft with my cousins, threw my cousins off the raft, was shoved off the raft by my cousins, did silly dives, told jokes, and generally had a good time. I’ve done this many, many, many times in my life and have never had any problems. A bit later we were all sitting around at a picnic table in the sun and my shoulders started tingling. I said, “Hey, you guys want to move into the shade?” And they were all like, “No,” and “Don’t be such an old man!” I moved into the shade anyway, and then they were all like, “Hey, stop being such a pussy and come out in the sun with us!” But I stayed in the shade anyway. For all the good it did me.
When I got home I could see that my chest and shoulders were sunburned, but it didn’t look that bad. I felt fine all Monday and Tuesday, but then Tuesday night I was awoken by an awful prickly, itching on my chest and shoulders. I tried slathering them with moisturizing lotion, but that either made it worse or didn’t help, because it quickly started to hurt more and more. As I became increasingly uncomfortable and increasingly less rational, I started trying anything I could think of to salve it — ice, Gold Bond powder, milk, but nothing worked. The pain became absolutely excruciating. I started wondering if I was having some sort of allergic reaction. Finally I got in the shower and turned it to icy cold and stood there shivering with the water blasting me full in the face, and as long as I stayed like that the pain was almost bearable. I started wondering if I should call 911. I wondered if they’d give me morphine for a sunburn, because I didn’t think anything else was going to do the job. Finally, after maybe 3 hours like that, the pain subsided and then it just felt like a really, really uncomfortable itch. I got out of the shower and got back in bed, but I couldn’t lie down because I couldn’t stand to have my shoulders or chest in contact with anything, so I basically just sat there awake until daybreak.
Despite all that I felt pretty good in the morning. I’d made a lot of plans for Wednesday: Meet up with The Slush God for lunch, go see A Scanner Darkly, play frisbee in Central Park, go to the KGB fantastic fiction reading series, go out to dinner afterward, go out for drinks after that. It was probably insane to try to do all that after the night I’d had, but I was heading back to L.A. on Friday morning and this was the only chance I’d get until probably next spring to see some of these people. Plus The Slush God had already rearranged his schedule to have the day off. Plus I really wanted to do all that stuff. I crossed my fingers and headed into Manhattan. I felt fine at first. Then during the movie I started to develop a mild headache (otherwise I really loved the movie — though I’m a diehard Philip K. Dick fan; it’s certainly not for everyone). I figured some fresh air and frisbee would be just the thing to kick my headache, but it hung around, and by the time I showed up at KGB it had become moderately bad. Then by the time dinner rolled around it had become splitting and nausea-inducing. I told people I’d have to pass on dinner and went to contemplate the toilet bowl for a while. Nothing was happening, so I decided to try to walk back to Grand Central. I figured maybe some exercise and (relatively) fresh air would do me good. I stumbled along, trying to walk and hold my head at the same time, feeling a lot like Tom Cruise at the end of Mission Impossible 3, and noting every garbage can in case I needed to barf. By the time I reached Grand Central (40 blocks), my nausea had mostly gone away and then I just had a splitting headache, so I got on the train and went home.
I was really, really, really bummed to miss dinner, and I’ve spent the last several days trying to plot some way to destroy the sun. Or my cousins. Or both.
Update: Oh yeah, and thanks a lot to The Slush God for snapping this photo. That pretty much sums it up right there.
Audrey
Here’s the best writing aid I’ve come across in a while: a program that reads your story aloud to you in a sort-of human-sounding voice. You can even export the reading as an mp3 file and put it on your iPod. Then you can pace around the kitchen listening to your story, and if something strikes a wrong note, you can fix it and quickly export another audio file. This has a few advantages over working at the monitor: You get more exercise. You don’t wear out your eyes as quickly. You’re more likely to catch typos, since your eyes play a lot more tricks on you than your ears (at least, mine do). You also get a better sense of what the story sounds like when read aloud. This is important to me, because I’ve been trying to focus more attention on writing stories that work well when read aloud. After some very cursory poking around on the net, I bought NaturalReader, which works pretty well. (Someone else may know of some better and/or cheaper alternative.) You have to choose from a whole list of voices. I finally settled on “Audrey,” a female voice with a British accent. Audrey sounded slightly less grating than any of the American accents, which is important if you’re going to spend hours and hours listening to her. She actually sounds (to me) a lot like Victoria Tennant’s character in L.A. Story, one of my favorite movies. That is to say, her voice is kinda sexy. I admit that on a few occasions I’ve succumbed to the temptation to use her voice for non-writing-related purposes — that is, having her say stuff like, “David, I can’t stand it anymore! I have to see you! Fly to London tomorrow. We’ll have tea and crumpets in bed,” just to see what it sounds like. Anyway, having the computer read your story to you works really well. Give it a shot. So far the only real drawback is that I think maybe I’m starting to fall in love with Audrey.
Back in L.A.
I made it safely back to L.A. The lines to get through airport security looked mighty intimidating, but they ended up being not that bad. Still, the trip took eleven hours door-to-door, so I’m pretty wiped out. I’ve had enough bad luck with USC administrative stuff that I was afraid something would go dramatically wrong with trying to re-integrate into my life here (such as being told that I didn’t have housing after all, or discovering that my car had disappeared from the parking garage), but actually everything went very smoothly. In fact, I’m back in the exact same apartment in the exact same room with the exact same roommate, so it’s almost as if I’d never left. And this year I actually have a parking permit for my apartment, which means no more “ghetto gallop” for me! (This is a term I coined to describe the process of parking on the street at 2:00 a.m. and then sprinting back to your apartment to avoid being mugged.)
Airplane
Blurgh. Still feeling kinda crappy (more on this later), and I have to get up at 4:00 a.m. to get on my flight out to L.A. To make matters worse, I usually entertain myself on long flights by gargling a mixture of toothpaste and gatorade, but it looks like now that’s out.
Readers React to My Short Story “Blood of Virgins”
The October 2006 issue of Realms of Fantasy, which includes my story “Blood of Virgins,” has been reviewed by Tangent Online. Some people are also starting to post their reactions on the Realms of Fantasy message board.
Photo
Here’s a pretty good picture of me (and Andrea) chilling in the East Village. Photo by The Slush God. Just one more week before I say goodbye to New York. *sniff*
Free MechMuse
The free version of MechMuse is online, which means you can pop over there right now and listen to my stories “The Second Rat” and “Veil of Ignorance” for free. (You can also subscribe, and get versions with no ads and higher sound quality.) Right now it seems to only be working with iTunes. Once you click the link to subscribe to the Podcast, go into iTunes and click on the purple “Podcasts” icon. You should then be able to download whichever stories you want.
Horse Armor
So yesterday I met up with The Slush God and Amy Tibbets (watch for her fiction in an upcoming issue of Black Gate magazine) to go check out the extra-special exhibit on medieval horse armor at the Met. I enjoy going to museums so that I can glance at each piece and make a joke about it (e.g. re: a four-foot-long series of hinged armor plates, “This must be the horse’s cock protector”), but Amy explained that it’s actually possible to read those little boxes of text next to each piece and actually learn something. I always wondered what those were for. Amy even amazed us all by knowing off the top of her head what happened in 1588, one of the most important dates in history. (Of course, I know what happened in 1588, but a lot of people don’t.) After that we meandered through Central Park, then met up for dinner with a few other friends (Rob, Carol, Andrea) to congratulate Andrea in person for making her first fiction sale.
Yay!
My amazingly talented friend Andrea Kail just made her first fiction sale! Watch for her story “Soft, Like a Rabbit” in a future issue of Fantasy magazine.
Roof Fishing Video
So I’ve told a few people about how I got my frisbee off the roof of a two-and-a-half story building using only a water bottle and a flip-flop tied to a spool of yarn. Some people seem to think I’m embellishing a tad. Videotaped evidence proves otherwise. You can’t make this $#!& up, people.
MechMuse Update
Two of my best stories, “The Second Rat” and “Veil of Ignorance,” are available in the spring issue of MechMuse audio magazine, which you can pay to download. Starting on Friday, MechMuse will also be offering a free version, which has ads.
I think I saw a kiwi bird. I did, I did see a kiwi bird!
So when I was eleven I went on a three-week backpacking trip through of the interior of the south island of New Zealand. I remember it being a magical place of startling geographic diversity, where a quick stroll could take you from grasslands through forests and onto beaches and back. Where we crossed swaying, rickety bridges over rocky, rainbow-shrouded gorges. Where we stayed in huts on the beach while kiwi birds frolicked all around. For years I’ve been telling everyone about how it was the coolest place on earth, and generally doing more to bolster New Zealand tourism than anyone except Peter Jackson.
But then last week I met
Look, I know what I saw, so I started to suspect that she was only pretending to be from New Zealand. But after consulting eight encyclopedias about kiwi birds, all of which confirm her account, I’m willing to admit the slight possibility that I didn’t see any kiwi birds there, but rather saw some other form of long-beaked, long-legged, brown-feathered, kiwi-bird-looking bird. Still, it’s awfully disillusioning. I’m reminded of this quote from Roger Zelazny’s Amber (which I can quote for any occasion): “Inside stories seldom live up to one’s expectations. Usually they are grubby little things, reducing down to the basest of motives when all is known. Conjectures and illusions are often the better possessions.”
And so, in the spirit of tearing away naive illusions, I offer this chilling expose into the seamy reality of the New Zealand fruit export industry [dead link].
It’s Out
The October 2006 issue of Realms of Fantasy has started appearing in mailboxes and, as of yesterday, is available in bookstores (though not in the Barnes & Noble at Union Square because I bought them all). If you can’t find a copy in your area (because say, to pick a random example, you live in New Zealand) and you really really want one, email me and I’ll see what I can do.
My Short Story “The Black Bird” to Appear in the Anthology The Dragon Done It
My story “The Black Bird” is an odd heat-and-insomnia-induced philosophy lecture/nightmare in which Sam Spade faces off against a talking maltese falcon who is also somehow Poe’s raven. In 2003, “The Black Bird” appeared in the DAW anthology New Voices in Science Fiction, and I just got word that the story will be making another appearance, in an upcoming anthology of supernatural detective stories, The Dragon Done it, published by Baen and edited by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint. Spiffy!