Category: Writingthoughts

Posted on

“I Thought You Meant They Were Funny”

CUT TO: INT. JOSH’S BULLPEN AREA – NIGHT
Josh walks past Donna then notices her and comes back.

JOSH
The Internet people have gone crazy.

DONNA
[sarcastically] You’re kidding.

The two of them start to walk together.

JOSH
They’re calling the GAO “General Josh’s Standing Army”, and saying I don’t understand it’s mandate and purpose. They’re saying if I could get a review of anything I want, that I should start by reviewing the job of Deputy C.O.S. Then one guy compares me to a poor man’s Clark Clifford, and a page and a half of posts, debating whether or not I was mocking Egyptians with the Sanskrit reference.

They come to a halt.

DONNA
[snappishly] I told you they were hysterical.

JOSH
I thought you meant they were funny.

DONNA
They’re not.

This is my life.

(From “The U.S. Poet Laureate” teleplay by Aaron Sorkin – of course – from The West Wing.)

Posted on

Two Things That 2013 Means to Me

Weird but true; 2013 marks not only the tenth anniversary of my starting Fanboy Rampage!!! the blog that launched what I laughingly referred to at the time as my writing career, but also the fifth anniversary of the launch of io9.com, the website that actually made that joke into a real career. It’s actually io9’s fifth anniversary today [EDIT: Apparently, I was a day off, and it was Jan 2]; for all my mixed feelings about my time there – Short version, I didn’t appreciate the opportunity it presented at the time (or maybe, I mistook it for an entirely different opportunity?), but it was also a really bad fit for me for various reasons and I think I’m better off out of it – it’s the thing that made me think that maybe I could be a writer full-time, and for that, I’ll always be grateful to the site and everyone involved.

Happy Birthday, io9, and happy oh-my-God-I’m-old to me.

Posted on

And I Feel Fine

Appropriately enough, my final Time essay of the year is all about the end of the world. In the real world, I’m just trying to get all my deadlines hit before the holidays so that I can have something resembling some time off next week (Note: I’ll still be working on some things, just less than usual. Yes, I’m at the point where that pretty much counts as a vacation for me…).

Posted on

On Being Ready To Start Over

The trick — and it’s imperfect and can take a while, but — is simply to write something else.  Don’t let your hands go cold.  Don’t let yourself stop thinking.  Shift to something different.  I think it was Robert Silverberg who used to do his (type)written correspondence on bad days, and then “trick” himself into writing by slipping manuscript paper into the machine once his fingers were flying.

It’s about letting your backbrain chew on the problems while your frontbrain is amused by the new and shiny things.  Find an essay to write.  Do some flash fiction, or a short story, or a novelette about dancing gravediggers written in the style of Cormac McCarthy.  An audiobook about dirigible vampires who shit sexy babies down chimneys.  Whatever.  I’ve read of several writers from eras past who would type out passages from their favourite writers, to get a feeling of what it’s like to make sentences like that.

Write something else.  Anything else.  Either you’ll solve the problem in the background, or get the taste back for what you’re stuck on — or, guess what, maybe that whole thing was dead and you were just shoving electrodes up it to make it twitch in an awful semblance of life the whole time.  I mean, that happens.  It doesn’t mean you were blocked, it means that you were zapping a big stinky corpse with all your electricity and wondering why it wasn’t sitting up and calling you Mummy.  It was dead.  Bury it and never speak of what you did to it again.

From here.

One of the lessons I’ve learned this year, in terms of writing, is to recognize when things aren’t working and be okay with just starting over. It normally happens with the Time pieces, although SpinOff has had more than a few, as well; depressingly, it usually only occurs to me right at the end, when I realize that it’s really not coming together like I’d hoped, and I also realize that I’ve wasted a lot of time in trying to make it work. There’s a depressing moment where I want to give up because, wow, that was a lot of time/effort down the drain and the deadline is now even closer, but instead, I start over and hope for better with Attempt #2. Or #3. Or #4.

Posted on

“To A Point, Stress is Helpful. Then There’s A Point Where Stress Becomes Overwhelming”

“All journalists are constantly negotiating stress in both positive and negative ways,” said Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma in an interview by phone. “There’s the stress of the deadline itself, there’s the stress of the subject matter in the story, and there’s whatever personal stress and professional stress we’re carrying. To a point, stress is helpful. Then there’s a point where stress becomes overwhelming and performance declines.”

From here.

Posted on

Outsider Art

Think of it this way. These non-fans, the ones who haven’t decided whether they’re going to see your sequel. What if Regular Joe Non-nerd comes up to me and says, “I liked the first Trek movie all right. What’s this new one about?” I DON’T KNOW, REGULAR JOE NON-NERD, BECAUSE J.J. ABRAMS WON’T FUCKING TELL US. This is not something that will tantalize Joe into pre-ordering tickets. He’s just going to wait until someone can tell him what the premise is.

We can’t do that without a name, and here’s the crazy part — the name barely matters! If I could tell Joe “The Enterprise crew fights Gary Mitchell/Harry Mudd/The Mugatu/Whoever” — the actual name barely matters. The names won’t mean anything to regular people anyway. But it’ll still be a hell of a lot more interesting than “The Enterprise crew fights… somebody.”

From here.

I am becoming oddly obsessed with the sense of entitlement and indignation that’s becoming more and more apparent in nerd culture. There is so much to unpick from this above quote, whether it’s the panic at the idea that – by not confirming fan speculation that the bad guy in a movie is someone familiar to the nerd audience – JJ Abrams is somehow preventing them from looking forward to the movie, the notion that not revealing the entire plot of a movie that doesn’t even come out for half a year is somehow selfish, or my favorite, the anger at being removed from the position of information gatekeeper for the non-nerd audience. “Regular Joe Non-Nerd” along is just amazing. Talk about self-otherization.

This is from a piece called “Dear JJ Abrams, Just @#$%ing Tell Us Who Benedict Cumberbatch Is Playing In Star Trek 2 Already,” by the way.

I’ve pitched something to Time about this; it might not be all there yet, but I’m hoping it’s something I can pull together nonetheless.

Posted on

This Week and The More Distant Future

This week’s Time piece, about Dungeons & Dragons and why it isn’t a bigger deal in pop culture, is up. While it authentically mirrors my thinking in researching/writing the piece, I’m unsure about the wisdom of the last minute reversal in the piece itself (No spoilers; it’s not that kind of thing, anyway), but I have to admit that even moreso than usual, I’m beholden to those who helped with research for this one. Especially John Rogers, who sent me a couple of emails that just blew my mind early on, in a good way.

As I start thinking about my workload in 2013, I admit that this kind of thing – Stories where I can get more in-depth and have time/space to think about them – is becoming more and more appealing to me. In part, it’s the desire to escape the insane production treadmill that I’ve been on for the last year or so, but it’s also the enjoyment I get from the surprise of discovery available in longer-form writing. Fingers crossed that the thing that I really want to happen job-wise actually falls into place, I guess…

Posted on

Fun with Cognitive Dissonance

From io9, on Monday, explaining why the site has pulled theFan Fiction Friday column after two posts:

When io9 makes fun of Damon Lindelof or the latest episode of Beauty and the Beast, we are picking on targets who are our own size or bigger… Our goal as satirists is to mock targets our size or bigger — or, alternatively, to criticize ideas rather than individuals.

From io9 on Tuesday:

Admittedly, it’s not what it seems – the headline/pic is misleading, because (a) that’s not the “worst Star Wars fan in the entire world” in that pic, and (b) the post is actually complaining about a quote from an anonymous fan from Deadline Hollywood, and is actually a pro-fandom piece in spirit – but still: That the latter headline/pic combo made it onto the site the day after the “We only go after bigger targets” post is one of those “How did that get through?!?” moments.

Posted on

Too Big To Fail (or Write, in This Case)

This week’s Time piece is all about Twitter, and storytelling on it. For some strange reason, I didn’t want to write it when it finally came time to do it; I found countless other things to do instead, putting it off until the very last possible moment; even the rewrites yesterday after getting notes from my editor, I was very “Oh, I’ll save that until last because, oh God” for some reason. It’s not that I didn’t know what to write, but that I just found myself entirely daunted by the idea of writing a long piece this week. Strange but true.

Posted on

Journalist as Human

Working between the crowd and the algorithm in the information ecosystem is where a journalist is able to have most effect, by serving as an investigator, a translator, a storyteller. Without leveraging the possibilities of either the crowd or the algorithm, some kinds of journalism become unsustainable, falling behind the real-time world of data and networks available to audiences through everything from the sensor on their waste bin to the trending list on their Twitter stream. The journalism layer within the ecosystem thus becomes about humanizing the data and not about the mechanizing process.

From here, which is just the introduction to a much larger report.

Putting this here as much as a reminder for me to dig through the whole thing as soon as possible as anything else. I feel like I’m nearing another of my “This is what I should be doing with my time!” brain dumps.