Marc Norman, co-writer of Shakespeare in Love, came to speak to my program the other day. He said that as a freelance writer, he had trained his kids from an early age to come up with ideas for him. This paid off big time when his son, who was in college studying theater, called him and said, “All right, here’s an idea. Shakespeare is a young, struggling playwright.” Norman says he knew instantly it was a great idea, but it took three years of hard work to figure out how to make a screenplay out of it. He was often tempted to give up, but couldn’t bear the thought of admitting failure to his son, so he kept at it. Things finally fell into place when he started thinking along these lines: Shakespeare is struggling to be a better writer. Shakespeare’s earliest plays (e.g. Two Gentlemen of Verona) aren’t very good. Out of his early great plays, the only one that’s familiar to most people is Romeo and Juliet, so use that. What inspires Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet? He meets a girl. But Shakespeare’s whole life revolves around the theater. He’s not as interesting a character if you take him away from the theater, and women aren’t allowed in the theater, so how can there be a romance? Well, what if the girl pretends to be a boy? Voila.

Very little is known about Shakespeare’s actual life, but there’s a wealth of information about his times, and Norman immersed himself in this. The more he studied, the more confident he became that he could write about the Elizabethan stage because he felt like, “I know this industry. I work in this industry.” Within about a ten year period, the Elizabethan theater developed all the accoutrements of the modern entertainment industry — agents, contracts, etc. The clincher came when Norman stumbled across the records of a court case in which a writer was being sued by a company of players. The writer had signed a contract to work for this company for one year and write three plays. He had only delivered one, and the company was suing him (for breach of contract) and demanding their money back. The writer’s defense was that his work had been interrupted by the outbreak of plague. Included among the records was a copy of the contract the writer had signed. The contract included provisions such as that the writer must not work for anyone else during this year, must be available to do rewrites of other writers’ work, and must be available to write jokes and such. Norman, who was working on a one-year studio contract at the time, said to his wife, “I’ve seen this contract before. I signed this contract last year.”

Then last night I went to an event sponsored by the newly-formed USC chapter of League of Women Voters. They screened Iron Jawed Angels, a quite good and very eye-opening drama about the struggle to pass the women’s suffrage amendment. I had no idea that the fight had been so brutal, and some of the parallels to contemporary politics were striking.

In case anyone was wondering, I made it back to L.A.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now has a presence on Myspace. Won’t you be its friend?

Realms of Fantasy magazine has a spiffy new website [dead link] and message board. I introduced myself over here, and a number of nice people have already dropped by to tell me how much they liked my story “Seeds-for-Brains.”

I lost a friend this week. Well okay, it was just a Myspace friend. But it still hurts. I used to have 66 Myspace friends, and now I’m down to 65. And as always, I’m left with so many questions: Was it something I said? Did? Blogged? Or does it have nothing to do with me? Did they just decide to cull their friend list down to less than 1,000? Did they just get sick of getting so many messages from random bands, webcam bots, and/or stalkers that they deleted their whole profile? And of course, the biggest question of all: who on earth is missing from my friends list? I’ll probably never know the answer.

My dad‘s work graces the cover of new issue of nature physics. All you hardcore physics fans out there will probably want to run out and pick up a copy, so you can check out his article, “Angle-resolved phase-sensitive determination of the in-plane gap symmetry in yttrium barium copper oxide.” Or you could just check out this larger picture of the cover, which shows a pretty colored ring.

Next week is spring break. I’ll be escaping the L.A. winter doldrums and jetting off to sunny New York. Expect to see me at KGB, at Lunacon, and generally just out and about town.

Drove out to Ventura to watch the Oscars with family. My cousin Brian Barr worked in the art department on Crash, so there was much rejoicing when Crash won Best Picture. (If you’ve seen the movie, you probably noticed the awesome screen door that the little girl stares out of. That was all him.) Back before Brian became famous, he directed a short film based on my story “Lest We Forget.”

Just got this: “I am a junior in high school and am looking for a strong undergraduate creative writing program. I am particularly interested in writing fantasy. Any suggestions for strong programs, preferably in the northeast?” Any thoughts? I have no idea.

I was awakened at 5:30 a.m. today by the sound of a party still going strong next door. I was torn between irritation and admiration.

Sometimes you see something that makes you realize that not only is the world is much stranger place than you ever imagined, it’s a much stranger place than you ever could have imagined. I had one of the moments yesterday while watching Grizzly Man. The part where he’s feeling the bear’s poo. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about it. Oh man.

I also went to campus last night to see an appearance by Judy Shepard (mother of Matthew Shepard), which was sad, but inspiring.

I ran into the student in my program who’s working on The Itty Bitty Titty Committee, and she said that the director decided to use a clip of me yelling “SHUT UP!!!” in the movie. How exciting! My first on-screen dialogue. If I do any more movies, maybe “SHUT UP!!!” will become my signature line, like Arnold Swartzenegger’s “I’ll be back” or Keanu Reeves’ “Whoa.” I wish I could say that “SHUT UP!!!” was a brilliant ad lib on my part, something I produced by delving deeply into the motivations of my character, but really the director just told me to yell that.

Brad Listi will be reading in Manhattan on the 27th at 7:00 p.m. at Barnes & Noble at 396 6th Ave. I can’t go because, d’oh, I’m in Los Angeles, but I recommend any New Yorkers out there check it out. His debut book, Attention. Deficit. Disorder, is the most entertaining novel I’ve read in a while. If you go, tell him I said hi.

I got mentioned in a Locus Online “Blink” in connection with MechMuse.

One of my film student friends is shooting a film here tomorrow and asked if I could help her out and hold the boom mike. I said yes. I’m hoping that this will involve less physical strain than being an extra did.

Last week I got together with the gang from the local chapter of Brotherhood Without Banners (the George R. R. Martin fan group) to play the Game of Thrones board game. I’ve never been much of a wargamer. (I’ve never even played Risk.) Most wargames I’ve tried to play have taken too long and have seemed to mostly involve endless arguments about the rules. But this game was a hell of a lot of fun. The rules are simple enough to actually apply, but complicated enough to provide enormous strategic variation. The game is basically a very complicated five player version of rock-paper-scissors, and success lies in anticipating, surprising, and manipulating your opponents. The game does a remarkably good job of replicating the power struggles, fragile alliances, and backstabbing of the books. I don’t usually like games that involve bluffing, as I feel bad about lying to my friends, even within the context of a game, but something about the milieu of Westeros just unleashed my inner schemer, especially since I was playing House Lannister.

Only about 10% of the rules had been explained when we started playing, and I had no idea what I was doing. I figured that if I played conservatively, the other players, who’d played the game before, would inevitably edge me out, and so my only hope was to do something bold and unpredictable, and either win or lose big. As Clausewitz says, any movement is better than no movement at all. Besides, I still didn’t understand how the rules for combat worked, and I wanted to figure it out early in the game. So I threw every resource I had into warfare and immediately marched on Highgarden (the seat of power for House Tyrell). This surprised everybody, and I seized the city before any defenses had been set up. The Tyrell player probably could have taken it back, but I told her, “I’ve got Highgarden now and I’m keeping Highgarden. If you let me have it, I’ll leave the rest of your territory alone. But if you try to take it back, I will march on you with every army I have. I’ll clear out Lannisport [my seat out power] and let these guys have it. I don’t care if I lose the game in the next two turns, I’ll take you down with me. Wouldn’t it be better to just let me have it?” She decided that it was, and I kept Highgarden.

I’d also taken Riverrun, and was facing a Greyjoy army. I kept reinforcing the city, but he never attacked. His power was growing faster than mine, so I couldn’t just wait him out. I figured he’d wait at least one more turn before attacking, as there was undefended territory to the east he could still grab, so I set the city to production rather than defense. Then he attacked, the bastard, and took the city, and was then poised to march on Lannisport. I told Tyrell I’d let her have Highgarden back if she’d ally with me against Greyjoy, and she agreed. I gave her Highgarden back. I couldn’t hold Lannisport anyway, so I withdrew my armies and marched south, planning to take back Highgarden in a surprise betrayal. Fortunately, I got more troops the next round, which reinforced Lannisport, and Greyjoy took Highgarden, so I could take it back without betraying my ally. I told Tyrell I was going to sit on Highgarden for another turn and see if I could get any troops out of it, then I’d turn it back over to her. The last round was quickly approaching. Now there were dozens of units on the board. I conceived a grand scheme that involved simultaneously betraying two allies and taking back Riverrun. If it worked, I’d hold 4 castles while Greyjoy held 5, so I’d still lose, but it would still be pretty damn impressive. When Tyrell saw my marching orders, she said, “I thought we were going to attack Blackwater?” and I said, “Yeah, I lied,” and took one of her castles. Everybody laughed (except her). I had also promised to help Baratheon attack Harrenhal, but I left him out to dry, moved all my forces around, and attacked Riverrun instead. Riverrun wasn’t set to defense, since Greyjoy had expected our attack to come at Harrenhal, but he still had a hell of a lot of troops there. It was going to be a close one. I would have won, but he played some special card I’d never heard of that negated my leader, and I lost. If I’d known that card existed, I could have easily played a different leader and won the battle. Oh well.

I was still pretty happy with my performance. Everyone said it was the best they’d ever seen House Lannister do. (Lannister is felt to have a weak starting position.) I made a bunch of stupid errors thanks to not understanding the rules, so I’m curious to see how I could do now that I actually understand how the game works. On the other hand, maybe I’d do worse, since now they all know not to trust me worth a damn.

I got permission from the artists to incorporate the art from MechMuse into my website, so my site is looking even more spiff-tastic than ever. I also fixed some weird display bugs and cleaned up the HTML code a lot. Plus I added a banner ad for Crystal Rain, the exciting debut novel by my buddy Tobias S. Buckell. I’ve really been enjoying the free chapters he’s been posting. I just ordered myself a copy of Crystal Rain, plus another debut novel by one of my Clarion ’99 classmates, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl by Tim Pratt.

I did the extra gig yesterday. Oh man.

I sort of imagined that being an extra consisted of mostly sitting around munching free sandwiches and chatting with the other extras while everyone else set stuff up or argued about what they were going to do, then every once in a while someone would be like, “Okay, extras, go stand over there for a minute,” and they’d shoot a few takes, then you’d go back to lounging. I imagined that the biggest issue to contend with would be boredom. But that’s not how it turned out at all.

In the scene they were filming, a group of girls shows up at city hall, where two groups are protesting the issue of gay marriage. One of the girls gets into a shouting match with one of the anti-gay protesters, and a shoving match ensues, which escalates into a brawl between the two sides. The girl’s friends drag her out of the fray, and they all run off. Now, how long do you think it would take to film this scene? If you said eleven hours you would be — incredibly — correct.

They had wanted 75 extras to form the crowd, but due to the rain only about 20 showed up. In order to give the illusion of more people, they had all the extras walking back and forth and back and forth in the background. I can’t believe that no one in the audience is going to notice that the same twenty people keep walking back and forth for no apparent reason, but nobody on the crew seemed that concerned, so maybe there’s some magic of the movies involved. We had to keep redoing every shot because the background was too empty, and they’d give us vague hints about how we should correct this, but since none of us could see what the camera was seeing, it was basically a totally random process. So for five straight hours, without any breaks to sit down, we walked up and down a marshy hill, in the rain. It was cold enough to numb your fingers and toes. I had brought my friend Erica along. Like me, she had anticipated that we would mostly be lounging, and she’d worn very nice-looking but horrendously uncomfortable-looking high-heels. She was not a happy camper. But I felt even worse for one of the lesbian couples. They had been directed to be kissing in the background, and so they had to make out more or less continuously for five hours straight, subject to constant directions to change their position or pose. They’d been at a party the night before (where a friend had roped them into this) and hadn’t slept at all before coming.

There was a lunch break, where we were finally able to sit down. We ate pizza and talked to some of the other extras and got the lowdown on the whole extra gig. This was more what I had been envisioning, but it was over all too soon, and then we were back on our feet. Well, I was, anyway. About half the extras apparently decided that they weren’t being paid enough for this and snuck off during lunch, but some new ones had showed up, so there were still about 20. Next we had to film the sequence where the crowd starts brawling. This was a lot more fun, but was even more physically demanding. Even fake fighting, if it’s going to look at all real, involves a fair amount of inadvertent crushing, elbowing, and foot-stomping. Once, after the cut, a guy asked, “Okay, who bit me?” though I think he was joking. As a pro-gay marriage protester, I had a poster that read, “Homophobia is sooo ’80s.” Every take of the fight, the poster got a little more ripped, and we did take after take after take after take. Four hours of this. They had to keep taping the poster back together, but it was hopeless. The thing just got shredded to confetti, until the whole back of it was just a solid wall of tape. I don’t know if it’ll show up on camera, but the audience has got to wonder why my character came to a protest (in the shots before the fight breaks out) with this poster that looks like it was mauled by a bear.

After filming the fight, they went back and shot more stuff from earlier in the scene, so we went back to walking up and down the hill. It was at this point that the filming really became hard to endure. I’d gone to bed the night before at 2:00 a.m., gotten up at 5:00 a.m., and then spent almost eleven hours on my feet, most of that walking, shouting, or grappling. I had paced the same stupid route a hundred times. I wasn’t getting paid for this. I was losing my voice. I was badly sunburned. It was starting to get dark and windy, and I couldn’t feel my toes. Every muscle ached. I think it was the worst pain I’ve ever felt that didn’t involve a hospital. I said to Erica, “You know, my entire life up until this morning seems like some vague, silly dream. This hill is my only reality now.” And she said, “Can you imagine — prison camps are worse than this. Worse than this. Worse. Think about that. How can that even be possible?”

Finally, mercifully, we wrapped. I’ll be curious to see the film. There were so few extras there, it seems inevitable that I’ll have a pretty visible screen presence, though I hope they use the earlier takes and not the ones where I look sunburned, bedraggled, and am stumbling about in zombielike fashion, wearing an expression that probably screams, “Kill me now.”

MechMuse has their new site up and running. To buy the first issue go here [dead link]. It costs $3.50 if you use this coupon:

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This first issue now includes two of my best stories, “The Second Rat” and “Veil of Ignorance,” in audio format, done with professional performers, sound, and music. Each story is also illustrated. In fact, the whole site is amazing-looking, one of the coolest-looking websites I’ve ever seen.

Went to a free magic show on campus last night. It turned out to be a Christian thing (no mention of this was made in the publicity), where two young-ish guys alternated magic tricks with really crass sermonizing. The theme was that if you could be deceived by magic tricks, maybe you should consider that you’re also being deceived by your secular, materialistic culture. Or something like that. Actually, they didn’t need to do any magic tricks — the fact that I could come for a magic show and end up being prosleytized was all the evidence I needed that I could be deceived. They even took shots at other religions, and at the whole concept of religious tolerance. I thought the whole thing was incredibly tacky, and in incredibly poor taste.

Halfway through, they offered the audience the chance to leave, if we wanted. About a quarter of the audience took them up on it. I stayed, as I’m sure a lot of people did, just out of inertia and morbid curiosity. In for a penny, and all that. Then one of the guys opened a strongbox and pulled out a .357 Magnum (though he referred it as a “Colt .45”). At any normal show, I’d be confident that this was all part of the act, but with these guys I wasn’t sure, and tensed to hit the deck. When some dude’s spent the last ten minutes waxing eloquent about the afterlife and then pulls out a gun, you have a small but significant fear that, at best, he’s going to off himself on stage, and, at worse, going to start going all Dick Cheney on the audience. Fortunately, he merely proceed to do the magic bullet trick. (Apparently these guys did this same trick here three years ago and pretended that one of them had actually been shot, and had the guy carted off in an ambulance, or something. I got the feeling that after that they were asked not to come back, and were only allowed back this year on the condition that they behaved themselves.) What dumbasses.

I really hate this sort of purposely misleading publicity. Back when I was an undergrad, the programming board was so desperate to get students to come to events that they created grossly misleading posters to make events look more interesting than they actually were. The one I remember best had three pictures of Hitler and said: “CLONING: HUMANITY’S WORST NIGHTMARE?” A packed house came to see a scientist talk about some of dangers he saw to cloning in his line of work, e.g. the chance of inadvertently introducing toxins when cloning soy beans. After an hour of really boring discussion of genotypes and phenotypes, someone finally asked, “What do you think about cloning Hitler?” The scientist, caught totally off guard, responded like, “Um … I guess that would be bad?”

I love how Fictionwise mixes everything together. At the moment, my story “Seeds-for-Brains” is the #4 highest-rated story on the Fictionwise’s Under a Dollar page. The first three slots are occupied by The Call of the Wild by Jack London, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and The Gettysburg Address(!) by Abraham Lincoln.