Fragments of Shadow

The clock said 4:57 when gunfire woke me from strange dreams. I think it was a revolver, or at least I counted five more shots after the one that woke me.

I lay in the dark, not knowing what happened, who was shot or why, or if the gunman was still outside. I was afraid to turn on the light, to draw attention. Still half-asleep, tangled in the vestigial strands of my dreams, my fear was amplified to an almost paralyzing level. If I moved, if light shone out the window, they would come for me. They would come for Kat, asleep beside me.

So I lay there, trying to go back to sleep. In the dark, the crack of the shots loomed. They became other gunshots, echoing from childhood. My father teaching me to shoot in the mountains of Arkansas. The deafening sounds of the pistol that would eventually take his life reverberating through the foothills while he drilled into my head that someone wanted to hurt me, hurt us, and that I had to be able to defend myself. Shades of the fear I felt when I hid under the bed while he volleyed fire with the men who came to repossess our car added to the fear I already felt.

Six gunshots in the darkness became all of these shattering moments in my head.

Now, in the sunny morning light, I know I should have called the cops. I should have done something. But I was afraid in the dark of my room, where shadows lingered and swelled rational self-preservation into irrational terror.

I understand the villagers of gothic horror so much more, now. As the sun set, they locked their doors, fearful of every crack and thump outside. The sounds of night creatures transmuted into the snarls of werewolves and the howls of vengeful spirits. In the dark, alone, it’s easy for your rational mind to run away and hide.

To wait for sunrise.

“You Mustn’t Be Afraid to Dream Bigger, Darling.”

People seem to have a hard time describing Inception. They get bogged down in the twisting dream imagery and lose track of its core. Basically, Inception is a super-serious version of Leverage. Yes, it takes place in dreams, but at its core, this is a caper movie.

I’m going to try very hard not to spoil things here. This will not be a play-by-play review, but I am going to give you the set-up, so you understand what we’re talking about. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team are thieves. They steal information. But they do so using a process designed by the military for combat training. They steal into a target’s bedroom, or train car, or first-class on a ten-hour flight, and they hook him up to a machine that lets them enter his dreams.

In place of a hacker, you have the chemist who makes tailored designer drugs to facilitate the process, and the architect who builds the dream world. Then you have the extraction team go in and con the information out of the dreamer, hopefully leaving the target none the wiser when they wake up. Now, the dreamer’s subconscious is aware of the external forces meddling in the dream, so the team acting in the dream have to avoid the people that populate the dreamworld. They are projections of the dreamer’s subconscious, and they act something like white blood cells, rejecting the foreign influence. To that end, the architect builds the dream as a maze, a labyrinth that the team can hide in, to give them more time.

The cast is amazing. DiCaprio is, I think, a little outshined by the rest of the crew. Ellen Page is adorable and curious as the new architect, Ariadne (whom you might remember as the Mistress of the Labyrinth in Greek myth). Tom Hardy steals nearly every scene he’s in as Eames, the forger. Ken Watanabe is fun, Marion Cotillard is beautiful and mysterious and subtle. Cillian Murphy is great and sympathetic as the target, though I wish (as always) that he had more to do.

And Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Well… The biggest thing that I took away from his performance was this: if you give Joseph Gordon-Levitt a suit? He. Will. Rock. It. Seriously. His performance was stellar, and he got a lot of really great scenes. But the only thing I could think of was how well he wore those suits.

Great setup. Really fun idea. The story is a tight, intricately woven puzzle, a Russian doll of dreams and reality. I almost loved it. Christopher Nolan is a great director in many ways. But his movies all have this… gravity. There’s a stateliness to his films that causes a slight emotional disconnect. Like a waltz, the whole movie felt like it stayed on an even tempo from start to finish. Even when Ariadne is learning how to control dreams, there’s no whimsy, no light-heartedness to contrast the DANGER and HEAVY EMOTION of the rest of the film. I mean, good job keeping a consistent tone and mood, Mr. Nolan! But at some point, I lost that vital emotional connection with what was going on. I think he burned out the circuit, or something.

I’m a crybaby. I go into movies wanting an emotional experience, primed and ready for it to make me feel. Kat and I bawled like infants at the end of Angel. The ending of the movie should have left us a puddle on the floor, but because of that mood fatigue, we were left feeling a little cold.

Inception is a great movie that, with a little more variation in the tone, could have been an amazing one.

It’s crazy when you think about how much the world has changed in such a short time. When I was born, way back in 1976, there were barely even home computers. There were no mobile phones. Now we carry phones in our pockets with more processing power than the supercomputers of the ’70s.

Louis C.K. says it best:

Thirty-four years ago today, I was born. Today, I thought it might be fun if we talked about things that shaped us. Movies, books, music… It’s all fair game. I’ll start:

Sherlock Holmes

I learned to read on classics. Treasure Island, Oliver Twist, Robinson Crusoe, etc. But none of them grabbed me like Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes.

Brains over brawn appealed heavily to me, since I was tiny and easily bullied. I mean really, I was tiny. I wore a size 2-toddler shirt until 8th grade. But beyond Holmes’ combustible wit and deductive skills, he could hold his own if things came down to a fight. My parents were judo instructors and, thanks to my size, I was a perfect fulcrum. Things rarely got that far, but when they did, I usually got out of it pretty clean.

I had a friend, named Kevin, who was also a huge fan of Holmes. He was a husky boy, muscular in the vague way school bullies generally are. But he was my friend, not a bully. Of course, he fancied himself Holmes, and me Watson, but whatever.

We used to watch Mystery! on PBS every week, he in his room, me in mine, tethered together by the telephone line. Of course, we’d both read all the stories, but Jeremy Brett’s Holmes was perfection. We talked about the changes we noticed between the story and the show. Kevin wasn’t my only friend. He wasn’t even my best friend. But he was the only one I could share Sherlock Holmes with.

I even wrote horrible stories about Holmes’ descendent and his assistant, Chip Watson. I’ll get back to him, but it’s my birthday, so I’m going to cut this short.

What about you? What shaped you?

When I was nine, my dad took me to live with his parents for a while. I’d grown up in Denver and Tampa, so it was my first real experience living on a farm and, for reasons I’ll get into later on down the line, it was a stressful, crazy time.

My grandfather Del was a ghostly presence, even then. He woke up early to do farming chores, then worked a normal job at a factory, then came home and did more farming. The main image I have of him is a grimy, sweating man in a light blue work shirt sitting in a ratty la-z-boy watching John Wayne movies in the evening. His glasses were thick, and his hair was always combed tight against his scalp, like Franklin Roosevelt, who took office a month after Del was born.

My grandmother  Patricia, on the other hand, was a constant presence. She was always there, taking us out to pick blackberries, or burning off the inevitable ticks we picked up in the process. Even if she was out working, she was within shouting distance of the ramshackle house we lived in. The strange thing is, I have less of an image of her burned into my head. I remember her hair was curly, and she wore an apron over old-fashioned dresses.

It was the most traditional environment I’ve ever experienced. In many ways, it was more like I’d been transported to the 50s than it was like 1986.

These were dark days. My dad’s mind had never really recovered from Vietnam, and this was deep in his final spiral. I spent a lot of time inventing stories with G.I. Joe figures (old-school giant ones, my modern Joe vs. Cobra toys were back in Tampa) and creating my own little newspaper. I buried my head in the sand.

One day, my grandfather took me down into the tornado shelter. He’d set up a makeshift desk in front of one of the low concrete benches and on it, there was an antique Royal typewriter.

“That belongs to your grandmother, so you take care of it, y’hear?” he said. “Figured you make a newspaper, you oughta do it right.” That shelter, cool and dark, safe under heavy metal doors… That fussy old typewriter… That was the first time I truly escaped into writing.

After my father’s death, his family blamed my mom for it, and I lost touch with them. I visited them once, years ago, but we never really got past the estrangement.

I just found out that Delano Otto Simmons died on December 31st, 2009, followed by Patricia Glenn Simmons on June 10th, 2010. You’d think that the attenuated relationship would make it hurt less, but somehow, finding out so belatedly hurts even worse.

They were family, no matter what stupid, broken drama had accreted between us, no matter what walls had been built by misunderstanding and pained memory. I’m sorry we never really repaired things, grandma and grandpa.

Farewell.

In my day, men pretended to be robots, and we liked it!

My dad was a Vietnam vet. The war messed him up, that’s no surprise… He had a screwed up knee that meant lots of trips to the VA hospital when I was little. And of course, back in the dark ages of the early 80s, before iPods and iPads and hell, even before Gameboys, we had to make our own fun.

Let’s just say that the VA hospital was not exactly designed for entertaining small children, at least not in the wing where I spent most of my time. In fact, aside from the odd copy of Highlights or an illustrated Bible, there was nothing. Well, nothing aside from the hall-cleaner.

The hospital  had an automated cleaning system, like the massive evolutionary ancestor of a Roomba. It came from behind a black metal door, and plowed down the halls on a system of rails near the floor. Seriously, this thing was like a zamboni mated with the rat-things from Snow Crash. And it had an eye.

An oscillating red eye, sliding back and forth like the front end of the Knight Industries Two Thousand or, far more important to me at the time, a fracking Cylon.

Yes, in my mind, the Cylon war had reached Earth, and the shock troops were scrubbing the floors at the VA. So I did what any good Jedi–

What? I was five. Bite me. If it was in space, it was fair game.

Anyway. I did what any good Jedi would do. I attacked the cleaners with my inflatable lightsaber. Down there in the bowels of the hospital, people rarely walked the halls. So when I heard movement in the hall, I ran out to do battle with the Cylon before it retreated back into its base. My mom didn’t care because, seriously, inflatable lightsaber.

And then, one day, everything changed. I heard the noise in the hall. I grabbed my trusty lightsaber, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age, and I ran out into the hall to catch the mechanical villain. Only, it wasn’t the cleaner.

It was a Cylon.

Seriously. There was a silver-and-black Cylon Centurion standing in the hall all red-eyed and “by your command.” I lost my shit. And I did what any good Jedi would do. I unleashed holy hell on that poor Cylon.

It turns out that a guy in a Cylon suit had come by the children’s ward, much like the Imperial 501st do now, dressed in Stormtrooper gear. One of the nurses had mentioned me, and he came all the way over to that wing of the hospital to try and entertain me while my dad was in surgery.

My mom had to pry me off of him.

And the next month, when Darth Vader made an appearance at Cinderella City, the local mall? She made me leave my lightsaber in the car.

I just read an article at io9 called “How to get John Scalzi and David Gerrold to Take a Restraining Order Out On You,” about people sending unsolicited, unproven scripts or stories to writers and the damage that can do to a writer’s career.

Well, duh.

Beyond the normal implication that yes, you are indeed putting the writer in an untenable position with regards to their ability to create things… Seriously, you wouldn’t be contacting this particular writer if you didn’t value their abilities, so why would you want to slap creative shackles around their wrists? If they do anything remotely related to the thing you’ve sent them, something even tangentially related… They do it in the shadow of a potential lawsuit. Yes, you’re a fan. Yes, you would never do anything to hurt your hero – except you already have, and they have no idea how you’ll react when you see their name on a book exploring ideas similar to the ones you sent them. A book that may have been in process for two years before you hit send and heard the little whooshing sound on your mac’s Mail.app. Of course you’re not going to believe “I already thought of that,” even if it’s the logical next step for the characters or the universe.

And here, I could tell give an example of where I’d like to see Scalzi’s Old Man’s War universe go, but I’d rather not guarantee that it doesn’t go there, should he come across this post.

Anyway… Here’s the big thing… Beyond that implication, and I’m sorry to have to say this, but… Who the hell are you? What makes you think you’re important or amazing enough that you should bypass the proper channels and get another writer to put his neck on the line and spend some (or all!) of his cred with his contacts to give you a leg up? If you’re as awesome as you think, you can make it through the gauntlet. If you’re as awesome as you think, you’re better served by following one big rule… Don’t be a douche.

I’m a writer. I have writer friends. We all give each other a head’s up when we can, or cheerlead for one another when something needs doing. I am blessed to have intensely talented and creative friends of all stripes and colors. In fact, I’m blessed to be able to consider one of my absolute favorite writers – someone I admire and look up to, someone whose writing amazes and delights me endlessly – to be a friend. And you know what I’ve never done to her? I would never ask her to slip a story of mine to her agent, or her publisher. I’ve never even asked her to critique something I’ve written before it’s been published.

If you look on my Twitter, I’ve asked for feedback from certain of my other writer friends (Eddy and crew), and I know you’re thinking “the Dude abides, and he sees your hypocrisy.” But it’s not the same. In Eddy’s case, we already have an editorial relationship, and I’d like to think we have that level of trust. That bridge is already there. Of course, if he said he felt uncomfortable with it, I’d have completely understood. Otherwise, it’s an open call for people willing to read it and let me know what I need to fix. I’m not putting anyone on the line who doesn’t volunteer their services.

Back to the point… I know these people and I’m wary of pushing my work on them. What makes it cool to do that to people you don’t even know?

Last night was my first “rehearsal” for the haunted houses this year. Technically it wasn’t a real rehearsal – costume fitting, learning our makeup, and getting the venue tour/becoming acquainted with our positions was the order of the night.

I love working these things. This will be my eighth year at the park, so in a way, it’s like visiting family. Our crew from After Hours was scattered all over the park in new houses and old, but I still got to see and spend time with a lot of friends last night.

I’ve retired my club kid glowboy character, Adam, from After Hours. He probably escaped when Club Muse was raided by the police, and apparently I didn’t. My new part is an inmate on death row. I stand on the gallows, waiting to stretch. What is wrong with you? How can you just walk by and let me die? And they gave me a microphone. This should be fun.

On the way home, I got an almost fully-formed idea for something that needed to be written, so I’ve been working on it all night. I’ll leave you with this little plug for some stuff my friends are doing:

Machine Age Productions: Terminus Est — David A. Hill, Jr. is in the process of building a new open source (Creative Commons) RPG that looks like it’ll be a lot of fun.

The Infi-Net Revolution – Martin C. Henley and Chuck Wendig explore the concept that by their nature, heroes are stupid. As in, a few whores short of a bordello. Also, it’s hilarious.

The Whitechapel Project – Eddy Webb crafts some democratized serial fiction about a man named VI (that’s six, not vee. Please, don’t be difficult, I’d like to get back to work). You can vote to guide the story, which means you can also vote to make life easier for VI or harder for Eddy, whatever floats your boat.

The Red Tree – It’s been out a little over a month now, so you have picked up Caitlín R. Kiernan’s newest novel, right? If you have, and you’re not fond of the cover, you’ll find an alternate cover I designed on her site that you can print out and paste onto your copy. If you haven’t, what the hell? Get out there and feed the tree, people.

It’s easier to fail. Success is hard, no matter how you measure it. For me, it’s writing. It’s easier and, usually, more fun to fail. Galloping across the farthest reaches of Northrend with Kat in World of Warcraft, or catching up on the latest episodes of Leverage, or rewatching Doctor Who or Battlestar Galactica… Failing is easier. Hours pass and I realize I didn’t write again today.

Deadlines are a little better. People are more likely to leave you alone when there’s a paycheck on the line than if it’s some ephemeral personal project. But I need to buckle down. More paying gigs would be nice, but there are three personal projects that are important to me. I have to stop getting in my own way.

To that end, I need to establish habits. In Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit, she says “first steps are hard… Turning something into a ritual eliminates the question, Why am I doing this?” (The book, by the way, is awesome. I can’t recommend it enough.) I need my rituals. This blog will become one of them.

Artists limber up by sketching. That’s one purpose this blog will serve… It’s hard to stare at a blank page, but once you get your mind in the writing mode, it’s a lot easier to just keep going. So I’ll see you here, right? It’s no fun without you.

Last night, we went to a sneak preview of 9, directed by Shane Acker.  Kat and I have been looking forward to this film for about a year, since we saw the first footage. If you’re curious about the backstory, you can hit up the 9 Experiment and look around the scientist’s lab.

First thing’s first: The PG-13 rating isn’t a joke. This is a bleak, bleak movie. The settings are beautifully desolate, and more than once, the ragdoll characters have to navigate through a landscape strewn with the corpses of humans murdered by the machines. Seriously. 9 – and this may be considered a very slight spoiler – has to pull something from beneath the withered, dead hand of his creator. The character designs are gorgeous, and the world is wonderfully realized. The mechanical monsters built by the synthetic B.R.A.I.N. are creepy tattered things, made up of an amalgam of bone, metal and other detritus left behind by humanity.

If there’s one complaint I have about the film, it’s that it is way too short. At 79 minutes long, it could have happily been expanded at least another half hour. I would have liked more time with the characters, to establish more of a rapport. I think they leaned a little too heavily on the iconic stereotypes of the dolls: the dictator, the brute, the crazy guy, and so on. It would have made the ending a bit more poignant, I think, if you could have identified more with the characters.

That said, I friggin’ love 3 and 4.

Oh, one more thing… It needs to be reiterated: this is not a Tim Burton movie. Shane Acker directed it, and I hope he doesn’t have the same issues Henry Selick has with A Nightmare Before Christmas. Burton only produced the film; he had no creative stake.