Some links may be affiliate links. I may earn money if you buy something or take an action after clicking one of these links on this site.
Rob Knowlan is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
National Chocolate Day 2023
Today is National Chocolate Day, and that’s reason enough to be happy.
🦇 Loving 🎃 Halloweekend 👻
To live is like to love – all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it. ~Samuel Butler
Okay, there is so much to love about this particular weekend.
If there is anything that is a uniquely 🍂Autumn🍂 holiday, it’s 🎃Halloween🎃.
First, and always foremost, I love Kelly. There aren’t enough words to express how much I love this woman or how much I always will.
I love my children, my fuzzies, my extended family and friends. I love this country, regardless of the mess it is currently in.
I love that I grew up in a time when it was largely safe to go to the doors of complete strangers and come away with a sack of candy.
I love that I grew up in a time when I could walk the streets of my town anonymously as a monster, a comic book character or whatever crazy costume I cobbled together without negative consequence.
I love that I got to watch us transition from a primarily analog, localized world to one of global digital interconnectivity. It was one thing to have pen pals back in the 70s and 80s, but today I can have friends and colleagues on each of the 7 continents at a moment’s notice.
I love that we can do nearly anything and are working hard on whatever we can’t already do. The science fiction of my childhood has largely become the ho-hum facts of today. Granted, we don’t all have hoverboards or flying cars yet. We are currently living something beyond the sci-fi dreams of my younger self.
I love that I don’t have to wait for a given season or a Saturday afternoon UHF specialty program in order to see certain movies or shows. I can watch Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin in March. I can watch Christmas movies in August or April. I can watch pretty much anything anytime I feel like without buying a DVD box set or stopping by Blockbuster.
I love that I don’t have to depend on traditional publishing houses to get my stories in the hands of people. The idea that people could have a paperback copy of one of my books was beyond my comprehension back in high school and even college.
I love that I don’t have to go to an office anymore. I never minded going early or staying late, but being beholden to the regular hours came with an annoying lack of reciprocation. Also, if I did stay late to get something complex hammered into shape, the fact that I had to drive an hour or more home made the whole thing less worthwhile. Today, I can work as long as it takes to get the job done and take a few merciful steps to crash in bed.
Despite the ubiquitous interface with the world, despite the ability to live outside the hours and seasons of reality, I love the fact that life still largely goes on as usual.
People have pumpkins, scarecrows, inflatable witches and ghosts in their yards simply because it is 🍂Autumn🍂. The leaves still change colors. The temperature still drops to a delightful chill. Hurricane Season still draws to a tumultuous close. Live goes on and I love that, too.
Tigger: I want to scare myself…
National 🍫 Chocolate 🍫 Day
National Chocolate Day!
Needless to say, I love chocolate. As a diabetic, I could have lamented the lack of access to it in days gone by. Fortunately, the modern world affords me this lovely treat and I’m tremendously grateful. A life without sweets would be a bitter pill indeed.
Since there are plenty of sugar-free chocolate options, I try not to be gluttonous about it. Everything in moderation, so I spread it out as best I can.
However, with the onset of my favorite season and in the spirit of all things hygge, I find it very difficult to avoid a daily mug of sugar-free hot chocolate. Is there anything quite as soothing, comfy and seasonally delightful as a warm cup of creamy cocoa to make the frustrations of the daily grind go a bit more smoothly?
And I’ve had some doozies this week. Dude, a subreport simply self-deleted while I was working on something. That’s NUTS! Poof, damn thing was just gone. I had been working on this stupid thing for hours and a piece of it just spontaneously freaking poofed into nothingness. I was 🤬red💢hot🤬. Time for some hot chocolate. ☕ Ah, that’s better. I found a copy elsewhere and loaded it back in. What a bunch of nonsense…
Getting 🕵🏻 My 🔬 Geek 🤓 On
Research is creating new knowledge. ~Neil Armstrong
So, I’ve been trying to take better care of myself by taking a daily walk before bed. Part of that exercise is to have my text-to-speech PDF reader narrate my WIP book in progress.
This allows me to listen for mistypes, logical or narrative inconsistencies, overall flow. It reinforces the established narrative so that I can focus on writing the story at hand instead of getting scattered and painting myself into a corner, as I often do.
It also gives me 1½ miles per lap. I tried my 2nd lap last night. It was pretty hard on my left ankle, so I’ll need to do something about that for future walks. I have an ankle brace that I can wear, but it’s a bit cumbersome to put on just for going on a nightly constitutional. We’ll see which way that shakes out.
Since I went for the 2nd lap last night (in the interest of offsetting a day of sitting on my tuchus, beating keys and frazzling my brain), I had a chance to listen to the WIP text of both Carol’s Christmas and The Sentinels: New Blood. I’m satisfied with the Christmas story, so far. Less so with my superhero action tale.
Both of them tend to jump around in the interest of brevity, but I’m not sure that approach fits the needs of The Sentinels novel. I think I’ve crunched it a bit too much. I’ll need to start reading some other contemporary works to see how they handle this.
As for the bouncing around, I think that’s more in keeping with contemporary serial drama. There are specific, tightly defined scenes that establish certain salient facts in the overall story being told. The rest is largely inferred from what occurs in the scenes that are shown. This is, however, more to do with the mystery and police procedural genres.
I don’t think that’s the model I’m really looking for. Superhero stories are not inherently like police procedurals. Some can be. Batman is known as the “World’s Greatest Detective”, but that’s not the story I’m telling. Mine is a team/ensemble story, a slow burn adventure, if such a thing exists.
We start with a small core of a superhero team who are hamstrung by the police department, city government and the police union. The story builds as a new member invigorates the team, questions the restrictions, challenges the assumptions, draws the ire of the big bads, redefines what it is to be a superhero in that milieu and ultimately confronts her own demons and her role in the madness that ensues.
The Holiday Season Serial Romances take place in the same world after the end of that👆series📚. They focus on the normal people of that world with normal people problems and normal people issues. Sometimes, The Sentinels show up. Sometimes, they’re just mentioned. A lot of people don’t even know who they are or what they’ve done.
I’m not interested in the “save the world” paradigm. As frequently mentioned on AuthorTube, nobody believes you’ll actually end the world. It’s astonishingly anticlimactic and likely to lose you a fan base.
In the entire 1967 Spider-Man series, I cannot think of a single end of the world story line. There were some who credibly threatened New York City, but even if they went through with their dastardly plans it was still just the Big Apple at risk.
You could believably do a save the world story in Sci-Fi that ended up in the bad guys succeeding and the world being destroyed (see: Alderaan), but the “world” is not really any given world but rather the star system, galaxy or universe at large. There is someplace else to retreat to.
If you destroy New York, you can bag out to Long Island, Connecticut or over to Jersey. If you destroy the Earth, you might have the option to go to a space station, Moon base or possibly Mars. If you destroy the Sun and it’s cohort of planets, you might have the option to retreat to other habitable star systems in the galaxy.
If you don’t, the story ends abruptly and it’s pretty damn bleak. Maybe that’s your angle. Maybe you’re taking cosmic horror to its alleged conclusion. Maybe you’re writing an epic tragedy that can have no logical sequel. Whatever the reason, the end of the world isn’t necessarily off the table as a storytelling angle, but it is not in keeping with where I’m headed.
In the comics, the Incredible Hulk is tremendously powerful. There is even a “World Breaker Hulk“, but Bill Bixby spent five seasons in a low-level, down-to-Earth struggle to deal with his literal inner demon and it was fantastic storytelling. (Note to all the whiners bitching about the MCU’s CGI work lately, I spent 6 years watching a body builder in skin paint and a funny wig throw stuff around and it was just fine, so fuck you.) You do not have to be in threat of blowing up or otherwise depopulating the world to have tension and stakes.
Okay, end of the world tangent aside, the original topic was about doing research. In order to create a sense of verisimilitude in your storytelling, it helps to have the particulars of specialty personnel. Do 911 call centers say what I had them say? Would the cops and EMTs say and do what I had them do? How would public and private sector lawyers react to the existence and actions of superheroes?
As I was taking my walk last night, it occurred to me that I need to do that research. Would the 911 person ask those particular questions? Are there more? Would they stay on the line until the cops showed up? How would a cop and an EMT deal with a guy who had been subjected to an unknown super power attack? Having many more questions than answers get my nerd-brain churning in high gear.
This is what they actually mean by “write what you know”. Certainly, if that was a hard and fast rule, Tolkien could never have written The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings. Any speculative fiction could easily be derided as non-experiential BS. In certain circles, it is. Even so, some authors do the necessary research to create that sort of verisimilitude.
Going backwards is easier than projecting forward. Sure, there were never orcs, but there is a massive historical corpus of knowledge on how medieval nations conducted diplomacy and warfare. It’s easier to extrapolate how orcs, trolls and dragons would impact a known quantity like medieval combat than it is to figure out how warfare, diplomacy and civilization develop in the depths of interplanetary or interstellar space.
The Expanse did a wonderful job of trying to make low-tech sci-fi realistic and believable. Star Trek and Star Wars can deal with artificial gravity and faster than light travel with a hand wave. Oh, they figured that out a while back. Don’t worry about it.
The Expanse occurs during that discovery period. It’s restricted in scope. You can’t just jump halfway across the galaxy because you want to. Well, not until the later seasons of the show. Even then, there’s a specific method for that. The ring enables access to various habitable worlds. You can’t just thrust any old where at Warp 10. You’ve got the Solar System and the worlds accessible through the ring at a tech level only slightly higher than today’s.
If you’re doing straight up fantasy, great. If you want it to simulate some sense of reality, you need to do the relevant research. So do I.
That’s all for today. Hoping you have a 🕸️Happy🧛Halloweekend⚰️