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Marching In Place
I wanted to title this one something about marching to the beat of my own drum but that makes the hyperlink ridiculously long. I’ve had a fairly arduous week and it’s time to cut loose and work on my own projects after a rather extended Winter of discontent.
In Proportion
The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears. ~Stendhal
I love my wife and the very sight of her brings a smile to my face, particularly when she’s engaged in some project and she doesn’t even know I’m looking at her.
Even so, two people in love are still two people and we have our own agendas. We’re not always on the same page about stuff.
That’s actually pretty exciting. Even though it seems like the source of potential conflict (and there is some of that from time to time), it also provides the opportunity for delight. If I don’t know how to resolve something, she might have the perfect idea. If she’s stuck on something, I can sometimes help her get it done.
As much as going in different directions seems like an opportunity for problems to arise, it also helps us get a lot more done as a team than we could as individuals. We are, together, far more capable than we are alone and that makes me love her all the more.
New Series To Obsess Over
FALCON AND WINTER SOLDIER EPISODE 1 BREAKDOWN! Easter Eggs & Details You Missed! (“New World Order”)
The MCU has delivered over a decade of film that has given a new life to some of Marvel’s most popular characters. At this point, it’s hard to imagine Tony Stark being played by anyone other than Robert Downey Jr. The actors they’ve cast in these iconic roles have brought a whole new life to the Marvel Mythos.
This new series, like Wandavision, is eponymous. This one, however, allows us to delve into some characters who were secondary to the movies in which they were introduced.
Bucky Barnes was originally the Robin to Captain America’s Batman in the Golden Age comics. In Captain America’s origin story movie, Captain America: The First Avenger, they recast Bucky as not-yet-super Steve’s best friend from Depression Era Brooklyn. Bucky looked after the emaciated but plucky Steve until he joined the war effort. Once Steve underwent the Super Soldier transformation, it became his turn to rescue his friend from the clutches of Hydra.
Sam Wilson was originally a sidekick from the Silver Age comics who grew into a hero in his own right just as he did in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and subsequent films. He helped Steve track down the friend he thought he’d lost in WWII. The redemption of The Winter Soldier turned out to be as important to Sam as it was to Steve.
This new series will help to build on that unexpected friendship as they both adjust to a world without Captain America (maybe) that is also a world recoiling from the impact of the return of half the world’s population.
The alien warlord Thanos had used the Infinity Stones to delete half of the population of the entire universe in Avengers: Infinity War. Five years later, what remained of the Avengers brought them all back in Avengers: Endgame.
That five year interval is referred to as The Blip. Those who lived through it had to attend to a decimated world, deal with the grief of losing so many friends and family members and then adapt to the sudden reintroduction of all those missing people after they’d moved on and processed their loss. Those who had vanished suddenly found themselves with people who were mysteriously five years older in a world that had largely moved on without them.
This seems like typical comic book mayhem on the surface, but what we’re supposed to be looking at is an entire population of people who have been existentially injured in one of the two ways mentioned above. Either you had to take the long hard road without half the people you ever knew or you traversed what seems to be a single moment that is actually five years long and you have to try to fit back into a world that moved on without you several years ago.
If that’s not the very formula for chaos, I don’t know what is. Chaos is a smelting chamber for heroic drama in the movies. In reality, it usually just breaks people down in ways that are hard to predict or quantify. We can look for a lot of both in this series.
Wandavision focused on Wanda Maximov’s personal trauma and the effect it had on the community that she trapped in her mad hex. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is more outward-facing. Sam is helping the Air Force with secret missions while Bucky is undergoing therapy to meet the terms of his release from custody. Should be interesting to see how they address the harm done by The Blip and the way it shapes society going forward.
At War
To hold a pen is to be at war. ~Voltaire
At war with the empty page.
At war with your own imagination.
At war with characters trying to drive the story.
A whole world at war comes from picking up a pen or placing your hands on Home Row. Perhaps not if you can find your flow state but in many cases, it’s a full-blown war to draw your inspiration onto the page in some coherent form.
I did hear some useful advice for the umpteenth time and it’s finally beginning to sink in.
Promise ➡️ Progress ➡️ Payoff
This is one of the many formulas for delivering a coherent story. There are a lot of different kinds of promises that go into any story proposition. There are promises based on the tone of the story, the genre, the character arc and so forth.
Knowing what these are and delivering payoffs that are related to the promises proposed is key to delivering a well-constructed story. If you’re writing a series, as I am, you can open certain loops that will be closed in subsequent books is a great hook to encourage reading the whole series as long as you don’t take the cheap shot of leaving the core promise(s) of the first book unresolved.
The first book should be an entire story with most/all of the promises paid off. Leaving some threads open in order to make the series seem to be a coherent story is significantly different than leaving a huge dissatisfying cliffhanger at the end of a book.
The MCU has done this incredibly well. The first Iron Man movie had a core conflict. Tony had been set up by his dad’s business partner. This was the ultimate hostile takeover. Tony thwarted his plans by surviving the terrorist kidnapping, building the Iron Man prototype and blasting the terrorist enclave on his way out. Eventually, Tony faces off against Obadiah Stane and beats him after realizing his mentor’s betrayal.
Beginning, middle, end.
And yet, the terrorists who originally abducted Tony are going to be a key part of an upcoming movie. Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings features the Ten Rings gang who captured Tony back in the first movie. Those who know Marvel know that “ten rings” is the hallmark of The Mandarin. Not the impostor from Iron Man 3, but the actual Mandarin. This is a fine example of a loop being left open for future story-telling.
The Mandarin is one of Iron Man’s major enemies and they’ve been teasing him all this time, only to reveal him (maybe) well after Toniy dies in Endgame. It’s a bit anticlimactic from Iron Man’s perspective but it’s still kind of exciting from the perspective of the MCU as a milieu.
Strive to have that kind of open loop in your story rather than resorting to a cheap cliffhanger to try to force people to grab your next book.
That’s all for today. Plenty of other stuff to catch up on. Crap, weekends are supposed to be for relaxing, aren’t they?????