Moving On

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moving-on

Moving On

Had a bit of a tiff with an old friend on Facebook this week. I really admire the guy but we’re communicating so poorly that the best thing was to get out of his way so I can get moving in my own direction.

Friction

I really bear the guy no ill will. I quite like him.

Problem is, even now, I’m still having the same circular argument with him in my head.

I just could not express my situation in a way he could actually respond to. He was too busy responding to what he felt like I was saying rather than what I was actually saying.

It was going nowhere and unlikely to get either of us anywhere but even more frustrated than we already were.

I usually block people over irreconcilable disagreements. When someone’s point of view is so diametrically opposed to mine that we can’t find a single thing in common, I just don’t need them in my feed.

In his case, he and I actually agree on a great many things.

Problem is, I’m not one to let things go. I would just keep restating the same thing in the completely vain hope that I might actually get him to respond (without preconceived notions) to what I was actually asking. I’m sure I was going to get on his nerves way before then, so I chose to remove myself from his feed rather than poison the relationship further.

I’ll miss him.

Dreams


Eurythmics
Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)
(Official Video)

I’ve been struggling for quite some time to figure out what I want to do.

When you’re absolutely nowhere, the options are seemingly limitless.

A measure of pragmatic practicality helps winnow out a lot of extraneous options.

I know I want to write. I’ve been doing it for decades. I even self-published a piece of fiction already.

The guy was on me to promote it. I couldn’t make him understand it’s just a candy bar by the register. It’s meant as an impulse purchase for someone who can’t be bothered to read the thing in serial post format. The story is online for free but the format is a bit awkward.

You see, I have a Christmas site. I write a post monthly from February through October on the 25th of each month. From Thanksgiving through Epiphany, I post daily. It has proved to be incredibly difficult to come up with topics for forty-odd holiday posts in years past, so I came up with the idea of writing an original story and dripping it out a scene at a time throughout the holiday season.

The first one seems to have gone alright. As a courtesy to those who come after the fact, I’ve compiled the thing into a complete novella that can be purchased in print form via Kindle Direct Publishing.

That’s all it is, though. It’s a candy bar by the cash register.

If you don’t feel like clicking through the story online, post by post, you can get the whole thing printed nicely for a couple of bucks.

It is what it is. I’m not hanging my hat on it. I’m not expecting to be the next shining star in holiday romantic comedy prose. It’s just there in case someone wants to read it all together for a modest fee rather than reading post by post for free.

No biggie.

I’ll be doing another one this year. Haven’t got my characters picked yet, but it’s going to be generally along the lines of holiday romcom movie tropes. Quite formulaic, really. Add a bit of a twist and hopefully, I’ve got another fun story for people to read daily throughout the holiday season. Sort of like an Advent calendar, except you get a bit of story in place of the chocolate.

As it turns out, I set the story in the fictional world where my Sentinels novels take place.

That’s the goal. I am working on a series of superhero action novels. That’s where I am focusing my energy. I’ve even joined a local writer’s group to learn from people who actually do it.

Aspirations

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity. ~Leo Tolstoy

Am I going to write the Great American Novel? Probably not.

I’m not expecting to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.

I do want to tell an enjoyable story for people who enjoy superhero movies and comics. I also want to do a sword and sorcery series at some point as well as a space opera collection.

These fields appeal to me. There are a lot of stories to tell and a lot of ways to tell them. I don’t want to tell the same old thing that’s already been done, but there are clearly tropes and conventions to adhere to in order to be in line with a given genre.

What I really like and aspire to achieve is the grand metaplot that you see in the Marvel movies. Of course, they had decades of comic book lore to draw from. I’d like to have that kind of continuity in my stories.

Sure, the three Iron Man movies were a character arc for Tony, but the Ten Rings terrorist group who captured him in the first movie was a teaser for the guys who will be the villains in an upcoming movie thirteen years down the line.

Likewise, the MacGuffin in a number of the different movies wind up compiling into a master MacGuffin for the master villain to enact his diabolical master plan.

Jeez, though.

As I said, Marvel and DC have over half a century of collaborative fiction to draw from for their movies. The milieux are well-established, thoroughly fleshed out by the efforts of decades of creative artists.

My world is brand new and springs entirely from my own fertile mind. A bit of pantsing has yielded rather a lot of suggested backstory and potential plotlines. That’s how I operate, but I need to refine it.

I not only want to write an engaging story (I believe I can manage that already) with a series-wide metaplot (that will take some planning, which runs somewhat contrary to my usual mode of creating) that actually says something about the world we live in (without being preachy and annoying about it, which is usually a challenge for those trying to encapsulate a message). I’m not sure what the message is yet, but I suspect that it will help in crafting the long story arc if I can figure out what I really want to say.

For the sword and sorcery genre, I’m an old D&D player from way back. It’s almost always a tale of good versus evil, but it’s not always clear which is which.

In the Song of Ice and Fire, despite all the medieval machinations of the various noble families, it’s finally about the big war between the King of Night and the Lord of Light. That’s kind of funny because for the majority of the story the majority of the characters have absolutely no idea who either of them is. Anybody who has an inkling of the existence of either of these considers them purely folktales or irrelevant mythology.

The funny thing is that the paragons of Dark and Light are equally horrific. There’s no obvious good guy here. Good and evil tend to exist at the level of individuals rather than movements.

The Starks and their bannermen seem a fairly good lot, particularly in contrast to the bastards-to-a-man Lannisters, but they’re not exquisitely good. They’re just basically decent in contrast to most everyone else.

That’s not actually “Good“.

That’s not Knights of the Round Table “good”. That’s not Charlemagne’s Paladins “good”. That’s just generally well-meaning and not quite as horrible as everyone else in a generally crappy world.

In the Lord of the Rings, it seems like a simple MacGuffin story but it’s really an epic struggle to finish the job started at the beginning of an entire Age. Good versus evil is much more clear.

Hobbits (for the most part) are good. The Rangers are good. The Wizards (except for the one who falls to temptation) are good.

The orcs, the Uruk-Hai, the trolls, the goblins and Sauron are bad without exception.

It seems, on the surface, to be a story of keep-away. The boss wants his MacGuffin back and the good guys have to prevent that.

Thing is, it goes far deeper than that. It’s a story of how evil tends to stick to you, like muck in a swamp. The ring isn’t just a MacGuffin, it’s a part of the big bad guy. The big bad guy isn’t just the Head Monster In Charge of monsterland as he seems to be at a glance. He’s the lieutenant of Middle Earth’s devil.

He’s all that’s left of Melkor‘s evil from the First Age. As you see in the opening scene of the Fellowship of the Ring, the forces of good are lined up toe to toe with Sauron‘s horde of evil. Sauron seems like the big bad, but he’s really just Melkor’s sidekick. Isildur cuts the ring from Sauron’s hand with his father’s broken sword and Sauron goes off like a tactical nuke.

Yay for good, Satan Junior is vanquished!

Not so quick, though. Sauron has imbued this master ring of his with a fair amount of his evil power and spirit. He isn’t actually dead yet. Elrond says, let’s go finish the job. Isildur is having none of it.

One of the many faces of evil is greed or covetousness. The evil, grasping nature of Sauron is oozing from the ring. Isildur wants a trophy. He thinks he can control the power of the ring. He doesn’t realize that by failing to destroy it as Elrond implored him to, he’s actually giving Sauron a way back.

He thinks he’s got a thing, but the thing’s got him. The thing about evil is that it clings and corrupts. Some fall to its poison more quickly, but it gets to just about everyone in the end. Nobody came away clean in this story.

Isildur couldn’t let it go and Elrond couldn’t bring himself to body check the guy into the lava (it was definitely an option). Frodo couldn’t let it go. Even Smeagol couldn’t let it go. Fortunately, for all involved, Smeagol lost his footing while doing his endzone dance and the last bit of Sauron’s evil essence was burned up in the flaming pit. Well, Tolkien was staunchly Catholic, so the symbolism is deliberate. Even so…

That is seriously deep plot work.

I’m not there yet but I know it’s where I want to be in order to write a story that is genuinely worth reading.

As for space opera, I’m a Trekkie from childhood. I like the optimistic version of the future presented in most Trek series. I think we can get there eventually.

The usual metaplot for space opera or futuristic fiction is exploring the question of what happens if certain things come to pass.

  • What happens if it becomes inexpensive to move stuff out of a gravity well?
  • What happens if we figure out how to surpass or bypass the speed of light?
  • What if a scientific experiment goes wildly out of control?
  • What happens if robots become commonplace in society?
  • What happens if we are able to settle other planets?
  • What happens if we meet extraterrestrials?

These are the most common questions. Certainly, there are many more.

I recently binged The Expanse. It’s an interesting story and fairly opposite to Star Trek.

  • It’s not hopeful. It’s bleak.
  • It’s not interstellar. It’s confined to our Solar System (until the ring appears) and conventional physics.
  • Ships have to flip and burn to slow down instead of just stopping like a boat in the water.

I like it anyway.

Like Game of Thrones, it’s a crapsack milieu and pretty much everybody is not good. Some of them are likable, but they’re not necessarily good. They’re just less bad than a lot of people around them.

Not everybody needs to be a super-enlightened, Shakespeare quoting paragon of virtue in the future. I suspect that few ever will. It makes for a strong contrast to the Star Trek adversaries, but that’s not where I want to go. Roddenberry had a particular view of the future based on his view of the world back in the 60s.

We had sociopolitical adversaries that paralleled those of Star Trek’s Federation. The Klingons seem to be aggressive militarists like the Soviet Union and their satellites. The Romulans seem to be implacably territorial conformists and long game schemers like the People’s Republic of China and their dependents.

Having these enemy empires to confront provided opportunities to make social commentary about cold war tensions, proxy wars and other concerns of the day. Having plenty of unexplored space provided opportunities to explore classic what-ifs and other social issues such as racism, delayed justice, overpopulation and plain old greed.

That was Roddenberry’s vision and his milieu. James S. A. Corey‘s vision is reflected in the pointlessly contentious Solar System inhabited by the UN-ruled Earth and Moon, the Martian Congressional Republic and the Belters. I’m not sure what my vision is yet. I’ll get there eventually.

In the end, anything I do needs to serve some value to some potential customer base. Sure, these three genres automatically provide an opportunity for basic escapism. Providing a bit of harmless fantasy has some value, but I want there to be something a little more substantial to my work. I want to make a statement. I want to make a difference.

Here’s hoping…


That’s the weekend in a nutshell. I hope you’re enjoying yours as well.

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