Simple Perl script and regular expressions

Since I've started posting "Before and After" not only to FFN but to the Fanfiction Mailing List (FFML) as well as The Fanfiction Forum and SpaceBattles creative writing forum, I've had to juggle a number of formats. I still use latex2rtf for the FFN upload, but I've had to develop techniques for the other formats. For FFML, I send out plain, ASCI text (so no macrons over letters, no fancy ellipses, no italics except that denoted by underscores). For the fora, I have to use [i] and [/i] respectively for italics, replace the LaTeX primitives that denote accented characters with their unicode equivalents, and so on. I know well enough that this procedure is some tedious find and replace stuff when done by hand, but Perl's capacity to handle regular expressions makes it easy to automate. For a primer regular expressions, see wiki, but the basic idea is thus: a statement in Perl using regular expressions might look like

$str =~ s|``|\"|g;

where $str is the existing string to be altered. The syntax is basically =~ is for changing in place, s for search, | (or any other character) as a delimiter, `` is what we're searching for, \" means replace `` with a quote (escaped because " usually means a literal string), and g means do this everywhere in the string, not just to the first match. The other | should be the same character as the first | (in other words, you can use whatever character for the delimiter; they just need to all be the same).

The script I use now is below. It's written for use on my linux partition, but the gist of it ought to be portable to windows.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use utf8; #allows for utf characters in input and output
use Getopt::Std; # allows parsing the -b flag to convert to bbcode instead
my %options=();
getopts('b',\%options);

if($#ARGV != 0) #0 means 1 argument (not a flag); -1 means 0 arguments, etc.
{
        print(
"strip-tex [-b] tex_file.tex
        renders a latex subdocument into plain text or bbbcode

OPTIONS:
        -b: renders in bbcode
        default (no flags): renders in plain text
                (does not auto-wrap; use par on result)\n");
        exit;
}
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
open(FILE, $ARGV[0]) or die("Open failed\n"); #kills the script if failure
@lines = ; #each entry in array is a single line (paragraph)
$str = "";
$length = scalar(@lines); #the number of lines (paragraphs)
for my $i (0 .. $length-1)
{
        #common statements (not in if...) are for both formats
        $str = $lines[$i];
        $str =~ s|``|\"|g;
        $str =~ s|\\qs| |g;
        if ($options{b})
        {
                #\x{####} denotes a unicode character by its hex code
                $str =~ s|\\ellip{}|\x{2026}|g; #ellipsis
                $str =~ s|---|\x{2014}|g; #em dash
                $str =~ s|\\=o|\x{014D}|g; #macron o
                $str =~ s|\\=O|\x{014C}|g; #macron O
                $str =~ s|\\=u|\x{016B}|g; #macron u
                $str =~ s|\\=U|\x{016A}|g; #macron U

                #this while checks for nested \emph{} or other commands
                #latex allows nested emphasis, but bbcode doesn't
                #allow nested [i]
                while($str =~ m!\\([^{]*){!)
                {
                        $str =~ s!\\([^{]*){([^{}]*)}!\[i\]$2\[/i\]!g;
                }
        }
        else
        {
                #plain text portion
                $str =~ s|\\ellip{}'|...'|g; #difference in ellipsis
                $str =~ s|\\ellip{}|... |g;  #handling for better breaks
                $str =~ s|---|--|g;
                $str =~ s|\\=||g;
                while($str =~ m!\\([^{]*){!)
                {
                        $str =~ s!\\([^{]*){([^{}]*)}!_$2_!g;
                }
        }
        $str =~ s|''|\"|g;
        $str =~ s|`|\'|g;
        print $str; #hence, output is to stdout; redirect to desired output
}
close FILE;

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The myriad ways in which life is (and isn't) a story

Let me take a break from the life of a physics grad student, from seven homework assignments and a test to take over nine days (this is day 1, by the by). Let's instead, for the moment, talk about a guy named Eric Show.

You see, aside from writing and World of Warcraft and the physics world, one of the things I like to follow is baseball. And the Braves are just a touch out of first place, so that's good, but I happened upon this article about Eric Show, a name I'd never known before and that I doubt most casual baseball fans like myself know, either. In fact, it may be the only reason people know his name on a national level is because of the hit he gave up to Pete Rose.

Pete Rose is a name more people know. Most people only know that he was the Cincinnati Red and that he bet on baseball. Maybe you know he got banned from baseball for doing so and, in turn, might never be inducted to the Hall of Fame, an honor he'd be otherwise more than deserving of. He was that good.

And it was on September 11, 1985 that Rose was celebrated once again in the annals of baseball history. It was a game against San Diego, and he scored his 4,192nd hit, breaking (what was thought, at the time) Ty Cobb's record for hits by a major leaguer (Cobb actually had 4,181). And Rose hit that ball off of Padre pitcher Eric Show.

The story of Eric Show, which you can read if you like, is one of childhood abuse, of a father living vicariously through his son and making a man who never quite knew what he wanted or how he should be. It's a story about drug abuse and guitars and the phases of the moon.

But is it a story at all? You might say of course it is, but I'd differ in that respect. Writers craft stories, and the odd thing about stories is that everything in them is deliberate on some level. It's put there by the mind of a person, and every detail, no matter how insignificant, has some intended meaning. It can be trivial ("I thought of it on a whim") or it can be deep and insightful.

Does life work that way, too? Perhaps not. The elements don't always add up and come together. Some things just are the way they are. If you were a writer, telling the story of Eric Show, what would your message be? The dangers of a father trying to make his dreams come true through his children? The horrors of drugs and how they affect the mind? Both of these? Something else?

It's tempting to say that we make our own stories as people, and that's what separates us from characters, but I suppose that's the fundamental question: how much do you think Eric Show made his own story? How much of it was made for him? Was he a character, or an author of his own tale? Or is it better to say that he, and all of us, was a little of both?

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Translation and connotation

For those of us who write fanfiction based on anime and manga, there's a continual task of deciding how to convert Japanese words and concepts into English, even if we're not dealing with a direct source. I use the word converting here because, while not all of us can read Japanese or make sense of it (I know I can't), the concepts still exist and, if they're foreign enough to the culture we come from, they demand to be presented in a fashion that makes sense.

The history of dubs and translations (whether official or otherwise) has been one of increasing tolerance and presentation of Japanese concepts as they are, rather than trying to force them to fit more familiar Western constructs. More and more these days, manga is sold in the original right-to-left format, honorifics are largely left intact, and so on. In part, I think as anime and manga have become more mainstream (I won't say that they are mainstream, but I think there's a much greater cultural awareness of them than in previous decades), publishers and distributors have been more willing to leave these subtle details--these aspects of Japanese culture--intact. I've said before that writing a piece of fiction means that anything you do, any choice you make, has a statistical chance to turn people off and walk away. I think the same applies to that market (or at least, the belief that it does holds), and it's only when publishers could reasonably think most customers won't be deterred would they do it. It's not about art--at least, not all the way. Money matters, and just like natural selection leaves only the organisms and parasites fit enough to survive, the marketplace leaves only those companies and organizations that are fit enough to sustain their operations, to profit.

Often, translations are caught between capturing the literal sense of what is said and the sense of it instead. Puns are especially difficult--it not almost always impossible--to translate and still carry the humor they would've had in the original language. The same goes for aphorisms and other sayings. Translators have approached this problem in different ways, and you might even say the best approach still depends on audience and context. Fans are more likely to know some of the cultural tidbits that might be present in anime and manga and thus we can handle them being presented intact, but not everyone is like that, hence the effectiveness of the Woolseyism in some contexts.

It's the sense of things, the connotations of words, that I want to focus on more, though. An author must understand how the connotations of words--the ideas and feelings a word conveys aside from what it literally means--affect the overall depiction of what's being portrayed. It means different things to call someone a bold explorer versus a brash adventurer. The latter brings about images of rash, reckless behavior while the former only speaks of courage in the face of adversity. In this way, writing is like painting, and the color and tone of the words we use is like subtle shades of pigment on a canvass. It can change the feel of a work from positive and exuberant to dark and melancholy. It can make a character look like a brave hero or a foolhardy meddler.

This all goes double for dialogue, where you not only have to worry about the connotations of words but sentence structure and vocabulary. That is, what is a character likely to know? How do they speak? Do they call the call the car that just passed by a convertible or a corvette? Do they call it red or crimson? Is the storm coming in making it windy or blustery? The distinction between plain words and fancy words is usually enough to distinguish someone of "education" or high upbringing or what-have-you. Even if you can't translate the Japanese way of honorifics or polite verb conjugations, you can have someone speak formally even in English dialogue and get the idea across. For the Ranma fans out there, Kodachi is a good example. She's a little nuts, and someone like Ranma might have no qualms saying so to her face. How would she respond? "I'm not 'nuts'! I've been to eight doctors, and they've all told me I'm fine!" Or more like, "I assure you I'm perfectly healthy. Several physicians have assured me that my faculties are sharp and intact." Even the exclamation points make a difference.

Now, what motivated this post was just that: the writing of dialogue and how it reflects on the person saying it. In particular, the differences between commercial translations of a source and scanlations, which can of course be of varying quality (both of them). For the moment, I'll confine the discussion to Mahou Sensei Negima, volume 4, chapter 33.

To begin, page 6, panel 1 (top right):

Left: Del Rey version; Right: version currently on Mangafox. I apologize for the crappy scan of the Del Rey version. Clearly the art of scanning manga isn't done by placing the book on an HP scanner and hoping the spine doesn't get in the way, but I digress. This is a case where the intended meaning that comes across is virtually identical, but the construction of the sentence, in my mind, gives the two versions subtly different flavor. In my mind, the Del Rey version comes off more boldly yet also more negative--as if Miyazaki, the character in the panel, expects to be rejected. The scanlation here seems more neutral, but already it seems like a valid question: is this a girl who has a negative conception of herself, or is she merely shy and deferential?

Admittedly, I think the proper interpretation is a little of both, and the different versions simply emphasize it differently. Even so, I think the slight discrepancy in characterization is important. I think what we have next is a much more clear-cut case:

Page 14, panels 5 and 6 - Characters shown: Miyazaki (far right), Kagurazaka (next to her), Sakurazaki (left and leftmost panel)

Scanlation:

Del Rey:

Without pulling any punches, the discrepancy here really bothers me. This is, as I described above, the big difference between formal and informal speech, between an ordinary 15-year-old girl and the very aloof, very stiff character that Sakurazaki is. She's stoic. She's a little strange (well, maybe not so strange if you bring out Negima standards, but she's surely not meant to be normal). Is it a big deal to have her say "no biggie" in response to something? Is it that much worse than "it's ok" or common variations of that? Maybe not. Maybe it doesn't matter that she refers to Springfield as a kid rather than a child, but like I've said, this stuff adds up. And perhaps this was done intentionally, to make these people sound more colloquial and, thus, make them feel more familiar. That's a possibility. But I also think that people have a much greater tolerance for unfamiliar cultures in literature and art than we give them credit. What about Lord of the Rings is immediately familiar to the modern reader? Don't we still accept the vast and myriad ways of the people of Middle-Earth regardless?

It's hard, in this context, to show thoroughly all the things I might nitpick between these two translations, but this is something that broadly applies to fiction--fan-made or original, translated or native English. The words we use matter, and choosing the right word for the person, for the situation, gives an author a great chance to convey complexity and feel without having to outright tell the reader.

And really...

There's just this little nagging part of me that says, "This girl's carrying a sword--why is she even using the word ditching?" Yes, even if it does mirror what Kagurazaka says. You might say it just bugs me.

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Scenes, Fluidity, Goals, and Point of View

Something I've often looked at is the nature of a scene and how different lengths of scenes and passages affect the fluidity and reading of a work. I'll admit I draw a lot of influence from Randy Ingermanson's method of scene structure. To save people from having to parse that whole page, I'll summarize his basic ideas:

Ingermanson says that scenes have a large- and small-scale structure. On a large scale, a scene requires that a character in the scene have a goal, that they face conflict in trying to reach that goal, and that ultimately, some sort of disaster occur to ultimately make that goal moot---whether it becomes impossible and requires a new goal be achieved first, whether it be accomplished and allow for the next goal to ensue. Whatever the reason, the disaster kicks off a "sequel" to the scene, in which the character experiences an emotional reaction, faces a dilemma about what courses of action to take, and finally decides on the next goal.

I tried this structure for a time in a strict sort of way, plotting out every scene and sequel scene with the three fundamental components. Ultimately, I found it very slow doing. One of the conceptual problems I had was that I couldn't really figure out what scale these concepts work on. It's easy to see how this works for, say, a platoon of soldiers trying to take an enemy position. It's harder to think how that may apply as cleanly or easily to a romance or another type of story.

That said, I definitely ascribe to the idea that characters have goals and that the turning points in stories occur when those goals change: they're accomplished, failed, or rendered moot. Those are the fates of goals, and it's not bad writing to suggest that most goals fail because then, the character must replace it with another one or given in to defeat. Goals need not be material; they can be subjective. Escaping pain can be a goal---it's just not one that a character is likely to be conscious of sometimes.

It's also important to realize that the driving goal of a scene may not be the POV character's goals. The opening scene of "Before and After" occurs with Gendo questioning Rei about her behavior. It's Gendo who wants to understand something. It's Gendo who faces conflict in Rei's inability or even refusal to understand. But viewed oppositely, maybe you can say it's Rei who's trying to say the right thing, to say what Gendo wants her to say, and that the rest of the chapter is her further effort to comprehend what Gendo meant by questioning her---and whether he's right.

I speak of "Before and After" in particular because it represents a bit of a contrast for me compared to third-person pieces like Identity or Echoes. One of the things I decided to do early on in "Before and After" was to avoid scene breaks at all, instead using narration to smooth the gaps. It's not that I don't think scene breaks are bad for first-person; I just considered it as much of a challenge as something I thought Rei would do. It's long been something I wanted to work on: the fluidity between scenes. I've often thought that frequent scenes under a thousand words or so to be too choppy on a regular basis. I don't strictly monitor scene length anymore. Act 4.7 of Identity is a good example: there are scenes that change POV without breaks (which Ingermanson considered a big no-no), there are short scenes, there's a long battle scene and a short one. With 4.7 I really tried to introduce actions in a sequence that made sense, using the idea that X happens and this is how Ranma and company react. Hence, I jumped POV's a lot mid-scene because a break would separate the action from the reaction.

Point of view is another big topic. A while back I read "Simplicity," by Tender Falling Rain--on the review I left I complained about big paragraphs, not because big paragraphs are bad, but I felt it might help to start small and ease people into the story, but that's another topic for another day--and the author there did exactly what I was talking about earlier: they changed point of view rather abruptly, I thought. It's something I read a lot in fanfiction, often to accomplish one thing: to show two people's internal reactions to the same scene. As always, I won't say that this shouldn't be done (again, I've done it myself), but I often ask myself when I see this technique done: was it necessary? Are these reactions that absolutely can't be portrayed with a single camera, so to speak? Do we need to jump from set of eyes to set of eyes to really comprehend the scene? Don't get me wrong; I think the versatility of an omniscient POV is a great thing, but I also think the personal nature of a limited POV (and here I use the terms loosely--I think narrative mode can temporarily be either and overall be neither) is really powerful. When you're unwilling for whatever reason to do a first-person narrative, sticking with the thoughts and feelings of a single character through the completion of a scene can really hit home what they see and how they see things...or how they misunderstand things, how what they see isn't reality.

That's a big point where I must disagree with Ingermanson. He speaks later on about the small-scale structure of scenes, about "motivation-reaction units" or MRUs. To summarize, motivation is what characters outside the POV character do and say, and reaction is what the POV character feels, thinks, says, and does to react to them. Ingermanson says that the motivation is "necessarily objective," and this is a big thing where I've felt I must diverge. I like the idea that what people see and hear is subjective and colored by emotions. I deal a lot in the notions of hallucinations and visions. What we experience is subjective. When I describe a sunny day as bright and warm, it carries a different connotation from hot and blinding. But then, maybe blinding is a bad word, and I should simply say it's bright before I say that Paul shaded his eyes, squinting, and reached for a pair of shades. As always, we balance show versus tell in writing.

Perhaps I've rambled enough. What did I mean to say? That a scene is done when it's done? That you can use as many or as few breaks as you like and it's fine? That goals can be as lofty as world peace and as petty as buying a bag of coffee grounds? That POV can be as nose-in-the-dirt or watching from orbit as needed? Yeah, something like that. Writing's all about appropriate place and time. There are few hard and fast rules, just a lot of choices. What conveys the meaning stylistically? Do you want to call attention to a scene with a break or keep the flow going? Do you want people to feel immediately a character's heartache or joy, or do you need to cover a hundred years of backstory in a few short paragraphs? It's all about finding the right tool for the job, I guess, and it's best, as a rule, to not rule out any of them.

Most of the time, anyway.

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Editing Methods

With the Fourth of July coming up, my family and I headed south to Florida to visit some relatives in West Palm Beach, and knowing that that would mean a good ten hours or more in the car with not much else to do but sleep, eat, drive, or read, I thought it'd be a good idea to print out act 4.4 of Identity, "Water," and look over a hard copy for errors. This isn't something I've done before, but I'd heard it could be useful. People look differently at words on a page, after all, even compared to words on a screen, and a good bit of the editing process is about taking the words out of a familiar zone and putting them into some other place, where you can't just skim over them and know what they say but actually have to read.

In the past, I used to read my chapters aloud from time to time. This can be very useful for dealing with the small-scale structure of a work. You have to pay more attention to sentence structure and syllabic rhythm--the kinds of things that will make readers get bogged down in the writing if you do them wrong, just because the words don't flow. It's important, but this method can be time consuming, and with a lot of the Japanese names in Identity, I admit I rather lost patience for this method, if only because I felt I was spending more time trying to pronounce names correctly and yet reconcile that with normal English cadence and vowels. It was, in short, a bit jarring any way I did it.

It's at this point I must admit I've never had a beta reader. I've always paid a lot of technical attention to the things that tend to get overlooked by some would-be writers: punctuation and spelling. That's not to say I started out a good writer; I'm quite sure I wasn't when I was 13 or so, which is when I began. I've actually written quite a bit since then and still have a lot of ideas to expand upon, and with each story, writing improves. I think that's natural. I think we all improve as we learn by repetition. Eventually, you get a feel for things you found difficult and can focus on even more difficult and challenging tasks. And that's good.

But I've never had a beta, in part because I feel there must be many different types of betas for many skill levels of writers. There are betas who may only be technical proofreaders, but there are likely others who are adept at critical reading, finding holes, and giving feedback on them. Writers don't often have the keenest sense of what's clear to a reader. I feel I don't need much technical work--just another set of eyes to catch the odd mistake--but perhaps the input of a beta as to pacing, plot, characterization...those could be useful. Truth be told, though, I really don't know how that whole process works.

I did take my hard copy of "Water" with me and looked over it, and I felt that was a constructive process. It gives me the opportunity to identify things I dislike or want to change without the pressure of actually fixing them on the spot, which is good. That's something that can be done with LaTeX comments, too. I did use LaTeX to format the chapter in a monospace font double-line-spaced manuscript. That's something some publishers want a writer to do, anyway, and it gives some flexibility for me: I can keep one template to look like a book and another to format the novel like a typewritten manuscript and not have to change the content from one to the other. But anyway, I like having this printed-out copy of the chapter, and I may do that again in the future. We'll see.

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What is fanon?

Of late, from several directions, I've observed debates over whether certain interpretations of source material constitute fanon. Don't worry if you've never heard the term. It's a bit nebulously defined, and what it means is something of the topic in and of itself.

When people talk about fanon, I think there are actually several distinct concepts in play. In the long and difficult task of interpreting a work, readers often make assumptions to try to fill in the gaps in stated facts. To reference tvtropes once again, it would be an assumption to state, for example, that balance within the force is balance of good and evil. It's a natural assumption, coming at Star Wars and the light and dark sides as constructs of morality, but it's also just that--an assumption, something not specifically stated, even though it seems sound and, indeed, common or ubiquitous. A fair bit of what's called fanon falls under this category: people take literal text and extend it perhaps one or two steps too far. People think the text says more than what it really does say.

But there's another type of fanon, one that differs, perhaps, only by a matter of degrees. This is where people totally make up story elements and those elements become accepted and treated as if they were canon. As you can imagine, this is most prevalent coming from fanfiction. One particularly popular work, with a totally valid means of filling in holes in canon (like, say, Akane's mother's name) can be referenced in other works as a shout out or whatnot, eventually spreading to the point that nobody can remember where the name Tendou Kimiko came from, but suddenly, a bunch of people assume that's Akane's mother's name. As you can see by this example, when one person invents something on their own, with original creativity, it's merely doing what a fan-author needs to do in order to tell a story without having to avoid the unfilled canon pot holes. It's the morphing of this once original, invented element into something treated as fact that makes the idea fanon.

Or does it? Does any suspect interpretation of the source work make that idea fanon? Or is it the statement of that interpretation as fact that makes it fanon? It's the difference between being factually inaccurate and factually unsubstantiated, between "not known to be true or false" and "provably false." Of course, any interpretation likely relies on several different elements, each of which may be one or the other and in total make all assertions fall on a continuum, an plane with axes of certainty or uncertainty and truth or untruth.

Perhaps I don't really know what fanon is, either.

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Rape in fanfiction, warnings, one-shots, and the author-reader dialogue

While playing with Google Reader today, I came across an interesting post from fanficrants, a community on livejournal that I've followed from time to time (I think, of course, I was introduced to it by tvtropes, but I can't be sure now). I actually read it a lot less now than I used to, but maybe this Google Reader thing will let me keep with stuff more easily. We'll have to see. I like fanficrants, though; it gives you a good idea of what really turns off chronic readers of fanfiction, from bad formatting to just bad writing. It's not the end-all be-all of what a writer should or shouldn't do, but it gives a pretty amusing perspective.

Anyway, the post I'm talking about comes from a writer who has survived a sexual assault, a writer who plans, in the future, to deal with a rape of one of the characters in their story. And readers, being readers, had correctly guessed from vague hints and warnings that this might be the case. Some of this author's readers tried, through various means, to dissuade the author from pursuing this plot point.

The topic of rape and trauma in fiction is one that fascinates me. So often, we as authors want our characters to grow, and trauma--whether physical or emotional--is a valid means to instigate that growth. In fanfiction, this is frequently underdeveloped however: bad writers, I think, try to make this growth happen too quickly, without fully exploring consequences, without (as tvtropes would say) doing the research. Even a writer who does try to do research may end up coming off totally flat because, well, these issues are woefully complex.

How fast one can approach this topic also depends on the story one's writing. One-shots have to do things in a small amount of space. In truth, I think one-shots are a very different animal from all other kinds of fanfiction: they're like prepackaged morsels to be tasted and digested until one moves on to the next box. That's not to say they're not worth doing or unsatisfying, but because they're so very standalone, so very standardized, the way people look at one-shots is in almost assembly-line manner. Every one-shot must come appropriately labeled with pairings, warnings, ratings, etc, like the nutrition label on a pack of crackers. Anything a reader doesn't like on the label prompts them to move on and leave the package unopened.

Longer works of fanfiction are very different. While some, like one-shots, depend almost entirely on a single, simple premise and can still be easily categorized, others are not. I myself have struggled viciously with simple things like genre categorization, with labeling Identity as being a Ranma/Akane story (which...it is) when the number of characters with room for growth and significant POV time is much much broader than that. And that's a weakness of my story--people want things to fit in categories they understand.

But in general, I think there's a subset of fanfiction readers right now who are very discriminating in what they spend their time reading--and with good reason, for most fanfiction is crappy, after all. And after seeing rape be used as a cheap plot device without the seriousness and attention it deserves, readers are rightly wary, I think, when an author starts giving signals in a longer work that that's coming. Nobody wants to see a story ruined because a plot device was critically mishandled, as rapes often are.

That said, I think the author of that ffrants post had a significant point: not all survivors handle their trauma the same way. And for my part, I say this: a story you've enjoyed for years gives the author the leeway, I think, to do something dramatic, to do something drastic. And while the reader has reason to be concerned, I don't approve of readers actually trying to dissuade an author from pursuing their plot as they see it. Discussion is one thing, but I'm certain there are stories where rape (and any other serious traumatic event you can think of) has been well-handled, in a way that's appropriate to the tone of the story and to the personalities of the characters involved. Give the author a chance to do it well. Complain after the fact if you want, if you feel it was poorly done, but to preemptively do so? Unless the author already has extended an ear to your opinions, unless you're a beta or someone else trusted to give sound, critical opinion, I think readers should sit back and let the story be. Stories are not meant to be mutable to a reader's will (well, choose your adventure aside). They're meant to be cohesive and express an author's vision, however much one may agree or disagree with it.

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"If you thought your cruise wasn't entirely perfect, then that would be a 1 to a 3..."

So I'm back from southeast Alaska, and I dare say the entire experience was...pretty cool. We ate too much at the deck 14 buffet. We rushed dinner to get to the shipboard shows. We really only had three days in Alaska proper, with two days each way to get there and back from Seattle. But the weather was fantastic: it only really rained on the first day, in Ketchikan. And while I suffered greatly for the lack of free internet. It was worth it.

In terms of writing progress, I outlined in rough detail the final three chapters of book one of Identity. While I'd hoped to make some headway in fixing book two (which I feel needs a good bit of work; book three I'm relatively happy with right now), this is good stuff. The next three chapters now have that much more material feeling that you get when you actually know what's going to happen in gritty details, as opposed to having just a vague idea of what you want to happen. That's how I've been doing things, anyway, and it's nice to know there aren't too many serious problems to the plot.

But let me talk about Alaska for a minute. Traveling to Alaska, we encountered a good deal of stuff relating to the native tribes, particularly the Tlingit. With the Tlingit, you're dealing with totem poles. A lot of totem poles, actually; we met with a carver who's been doing this stuff for decades. We're talking about a years'-long carving process with prices in the range of thousands of dollars per linear foot (and 20+ foot poles). We're talking about remote, isolated areas of the world where access is expensive and limited--Juneau, for example, has no roads in or out of town. In Skagway, we're talking about a town that is two miles long and four blocks wide and basically depends on tourism to survive, with mountain passes that killed pack animals and men by the hundreds on their way to Klondike gold.

This, folks, is what we call fodder for stories. The Tlingit themselves are a case in storytelling. It's a big part of some of their totems (some totems tell stories; others are like family crests or seals, and others still are actually made to ridicule a family who's yet to repay a debt or throw a party to make up for the other family throwing them a party, etc.). The gold rush and how it created Skagway is another story. Stories are all around us, I feel, and just coming off this trip, I've had the first idea for an original (non-fanfic) story in a couple years (I call the story Caroline, for now). That's good stuff.

This is one of the reasons I encourage people to travel when they can, when it's within their means. There are things about the world that you don't question, but outside the confines of our everyday lives, there are tons of little things out there worth talking about, thinking about, and writing about. The intricate clan and family structure of the Tlingit, for example, and their oral tradition of stories. The tale of newspapermen holed up in a tent city outside Skagway, fabricating columns about a gold rush they couldn't witness because the way was too dangerous. The way the glacier outside Juneau has carved out a place for the city over the last few thousand years and may yet take it away again.

Discovery Channel likes to say the world is awesome. I'm not sure if I agree; in a lot of ways, the world simply is what it is. But it's certainly complex, and it has a richness that, at times, is easy to forget.

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Structure, Structure, Structure

There's actually been a surprising amount of internet access on this vacation. Free wi-fi on the plane (thanks AirTran). Free wi-fi at the hotel (thanks Holiday Inn). Makes me wish I'd brought my laptop, so I can actually work instead of just outlining, but that's also part tradition. I've actually written most of my outlines for stories while on vacations. And then torn them up, but I digress.

While waiting to leave the hotel and check in at the cruise ship (on which, dollars to doughnuts, there will be no free wi-fi, and if there is, I will be extremely irritated that I didn't bring the laptop), I figured I'd write up a quick post about story structure.

A lot of the way I structure stories comes from Babylon 5 which, ironically, J. Michael Stracynski (creator of that show) called a "novel for television," more or less. I actually admire the television format quite a bit for telling arc-based stories. Arcs develop slowly and with great buildup. In Babylon 5 there might be week-to-week, episodic plots, but the arc would always be there until it finally kicked into high gear and really took over the story, integrating elements that one might've thought would just disappear. In my mind, it's a really powerful methodology. All too often, I think writers try to make things happen too quickly and don't give time for characters to organically grow. This slower pace feels more natural, however. It feels like the characters are truly the sum of their experiences.

When I was writing Echoes, I was coming at it from the approach that I'd had with my last original works, which are called Nicholas Torrence and Shepard Clay. I won't talk about plot there, but structurally, I'd done each of those as chapters with 10-15 scenes. The chapters were almost all invariably eight thousand words, which I kind of took as a red flag. Indeed, starting with Echoes, I realized I wanted some smaller subdivision of action. It was from there I started doing numbered acts, and with Identity, I've really put a lot more importance on these structural units. While the chapter in Identity is still extremely vital, the acts have much more standalone footing here than they did in Echoes, I think. And I think this is also a big reason why they're larger than their Echoes counterparts, even though I still generally aim for 4-6 acts per chapter.

I will say that this structure is not a one-thing-fits-all stories structure. For what I do--right now, that's stories with several different POV characters and multiple plotlines--it's a structure that makes sense to me. I'll note that Nicholas Torrence and Shepard Clay were not those kinds of stories (they're both first person POV). "Before and After" isn't that kind of story either; while I'm writing it like I write acts in Identity, it doesn't have that mid-level structure.

I don't think a writer will necessarily know the structure of his story even at the outlining stage. You may have an idea, but often the story demands to be told in a certain way and pacing. It's a process of discovery, and you have to figure out what gives you room for your characters to grow and for plot to unfold at the place and time that you like.

And now that I'm back from vacation, no, there was no free wi-fi on the ship. It was 75 cents a minute, and I used it very, very sparingly.

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On hits and writing action scenes

Rather that clutter up the new act posting and commentary, I wanted to make a separate post with other thoughts, not necessarily related to the posting of "The Amazon Charter." This, then, is everything else I've been doing over the past week.

I've come to realize I actually really dislike action scenes. Or at least writing them. Or, perhaps, I'm just a bit out of practice doing them. A lot of chapter four has been writing action scenes, and I think perhaps I've turned a fundamental corner in the story so far. Almost everything so far has been preparation, introspection. There are a few action scenes, but not many. Chapter four, however, is a big battle over Jusenkyo. Chapter six is another big, almost chapter-long conflict. The gap between 3 and 4 may well be a dividing line, after which the story kicks into high gear, so to speak.

Writing action is tough. At least, there's a temptation to be mechanical, to describe every action in perfect detail. It reminds me of an old piece of advice I heard about a different topic: writing sex scenes. "Write sex scenes like you're making coffee, and write making coffee like you're having sex." The way I've always interpreted this has meant that mechanical, high levels of detail get in the way of the emotions of an action. That is, it's better to step back for a sex scene and be very broad and figurative. That at least applies when the only thing the characters are doing is having sex. If, say, you had one character trying to pump another for information while they're having sex, obviously you have to approach the scene quite differently. That's a case where each detail has consequences. Depending on how or why one makes a cup of coffee, the same reasoning may apply. The question is whether the details are important from a plot or significance standpoint, I suppose.

Applying this logic to action scenes, I think the guiding principle has to be whether the details of a battle are important to the plot as a whole. If you're just having a big fight, broad descriptions are good. Step back from the level of an individual fighting an army and look at the big picture. That's what I'm shooting for, anyway. Even still, there are times to zoom in, to take a look at the battle from one character's eyes and examine how it affects him. As always, one's distance from the characters, from the action, has a significant affect on how events are perceived.

Let me digress, however, to something of more pragmatic interest to a fanfic writer like me (as I happen to be at this time): hits. I actually monitor trends in my stories' hit counts rather closely, at least as I'm updating and posting. It's the reason why I decided on this experiment of weekly posting. All in all, I'm trying to increase the number of people who give the story a shot and increase the carry-over from first chapter to second, second to third, and so on.

Today I tweaked the FFN summary of Identity to something I felt might resonate better with the average Ranma fan--something that more closely hinges on the characters and their relationships. In some ways, I worry that this is misleading. Identity, I suspect, is rather plotty compared to most fanfics, and that's not something the new summary gets across. At the same time, I do think a summary should get across the premise without necessarily encompassing the whole story. This new summary is certainly closer to the initial premise of the story.

Is it a good thing to worry about hits? I suppose it depends on one's approach to storytelling. To me, most of the story is outlined and conceived of; there is very little I would do differently in terms of the actual content. I'm not here to cater to people's requests, although I do welcome and enjoy input and opinion. It's what I do to sell my story that I'm willing to experiment with. Looking at the stories that get lots of reviews, some are several years old and have been updated off and on for the better part of a decade. Some are new, however. Some are from authors with many one-shots and thus likely a decent-sized following; some are from authors on their first story, so who knows what really grabbed people. In the end, this isn't exact science. There are certainly things I could do that I don't--review spam is one way, I think. Even if I don't outright plug myself, reviewing would get my name out there, and if I give good feedback perhaps it would be win-win, but right now I'm cautious to even consider the notion. I don't review much at all; only when I feel like it. And that attitude is what I have to deal with from readers, too. So it's not like I expect a lot of reviews, but I do try.

Something I find sobering is that now, already just 5-6 months since I posted the first chapter, I'm about to have received more hits on Identity in the last month than Echoes ever had. Again, this saddens me, but it doesn't surprise me, either. I really enjoyed writing Echoes; in a lot of ways, it gave me the model for Identity and its overall structure. But I do find it interesting, all the same.

I'm almost done with 4.2 right now, so in theory I'm a day behind schedule. Things may slow down as I go into finals week, but I have a vacation scheduled for mid or late May (I don't recall) where I'll probably have to go on a week hiatus from posting anyway. That will be a convenient time to catch up. Overall the writing of chapter 4, despite my problems with action scenes, has been fairly good. I think I want to clean it up a lot, but it's coming along, at least, and in a way, I'm glad to not spend as much time on heavy introspection. I can let events add up and slowly take their toll on characters. It's a good place to be, balancing action with thought.

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"Before and After"

I started work on the last two days of a story I call "Before and After," an Evangelion story about the growth of Rei, her relationships with Gendo and Shinji, and her realization of her purpose as a tool for Instrumentality. It's a short piece--I anticipate around 30-50k words total, in about 10 chapters that are, roughly speaking, comparable in size to acts in Identity, which are each around 3-4k typically but can range up to 7-8k. The first chapter of this story is done, but I anticipate this only to be a side project, that I will work on at my leisure and not all the way through. And that...is okay.

Identity is still coming along; I'm about halfway through act 5 in "Journey to Jusenkyo," but writing "Before and After" does give me perspective. It's a lot easier to get words going when you don't have to make them synch up with a lot of established history and baggage (or, by extension, stuff you have planned). I think, in large part, this is what's slowed down work on Identity---what I might call logistics---and I'm hoping that working on another project will overall make me a little fresher with my writing.

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Creativity

I finished act 4 of "Journey to Jusenkyo" on Tuesday or so. I had to re-outline the last three acts in order for it to make sense (and then, working on act 5, I had to reoutline that whole beginning in order to make that work). Again, I'm somewhat displeased that I've gone through so many iteration cycles with Identity outlines. It may still be that outlining only in broad strokes is biting me, even if I would've had to redo those outlines. Modifying an existing outline at least might've saved me some time and a step. I did, however, outline all of chapter 4, knowing how connected 3 and 4 are, and while that may require modification, it does give me an idea how where I need to go. A better idea.

All this reinforces, in my mind, the idea that writing is a creative process. That may seem obvious, but it's also a continual process. If you're like me and you write, you come up with a story idea and maybe you have one or two specific things you see in your mind. A premise, a concept, a beginning or an ending. With Identity one of the big things I saw in my mind was Wuya (bear in mind, I didn't even have a name for her as a girl, only the name Kohl) tracking down Ranma in Nerima, squaring off with him, and bringing her Sorcerer Guard minions to attack Ranma in the Tendou home and chase down Akane as she revisited the events of the day in the rain.

You'll notice right away, if you've read the story, that this doesn't happen. Ranma fights Kohl, but at Jusenkyo. The idea went through an iterative process, where I wanted the connection to China and a compelling reason for Ranma to go there. What Shampoo and Ukyo did on that day are the same. What Akane did is the same. But early on I made the choice that Ranma going ahead to get his cure was something that shouldn't be interrupted by Kohl and his men just happening to track him down in Japan. Ideas change. And the ending I had for that chapter, while still largely intact (Ranma summons the power of Shishi Hokoudan), one of the big reasons he does so is changed (and will appear in chapter six). Again, modification, evolution of ideas. You have to think about things and get them to fit. And while I do have a plan for this novel and all three of its books, it does require some polishing. I'm certain when I finish book one, I'll take a couple weeks and outline book two in greater detail. Perhaps chapter by chapter, scene by scene, even if I end up tossing those outlines like I did with Echoes. I hope I don't, because I want to be fast, but you can't make it fast.

Even on a smaller scale, this is so. This chapter I have a battle scene at the end, a scene I've hardly outlined any detail of because battle scenes are so particular, and this one is especially complex. I think this will probably bite me, for while I know what needs to happen, I don't know what needs to happen to get to that point. This is what I've come to call narrative glue, and it serves several purposes. Sometimes, you need it for pacing. Sometimes, you need it just to make things make sense. I do worry, though, for I feel like I'm writing a lot of glue and not actually gluing a lot of things together. Part of it is the reason I want to be writing this story, though: it's all about characters and state of mind, about people making sense of the world and themselves. It's introspective. And it's wordy. I mean, I'm about to finish third chapter and will probably be around 80k. Worrisome, perhaps. Who can say.

More and more I'm certain that I'm going to start posting Identity in weekly act installments. I think this will overall make it more readable. It will also be something different; I don't know of any other story that advertises doing that. The big question will be whether I can finish, say, chapter 4 in the six or seven weeks I'd plan to post 3. That's a big if. Maybe a deadline will be good, but I don't want to set myself up for failure either.

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Revision phase

I've finished Act 4 of "The Village," so revision will probably start on Wednesday.

Of late, I've also been thinking about a sort of 1-deep rule for "show, don't tell." It's good to leave something for readers to infer, especially if that inference is something obvious, but in more complex scenes, more naturally must be explained. Is it still desirable to avoid telling completely, to leave at least one level of detail inferred, so as to keep the reader interested? This is something I may explore more later, after this chapter is finished, but I find myself considering it from time to time as I write, which I can't think is a bad thing.

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Progress, Dreams, and 2012

I don't have much progress to report regarding Identity; I've been rather bogged down in the first act of chapter two among other real life issues (finals, etc.).  I do think I'm getting somewhere now, but as always, we'll see.

An interesting dream I had last night, though, may provide an idea for a story (original) at some point.  The idea was a commune of foreign nationals in China, collaborating to get information out of the PRC.  They're led by a man, an idealist, a visionary, and this attracts the main character, a woman, who's taken by his charisma to enter the scheme.  These rogue reporters meet in an apartment and have a complex technological setup to get around blocks, but increased government scrutiny leads to a raid on the building, one that the reporters cannot resist, and when they make a scheme for escape, the leader betrays them all--it turns out he's an agent of the Chinese government, trained to infiltrate and impersonate, and everything he's done here has been a lie.  Our main character escapes, however, and...

Well, maybe there's more to it.  Dreams are incomplete, after all.  I have visions of the main character returning to the building to try to get information, but we must remember, a dream doesn't craft things the way a writer needs to have it crafted.  A dream gives ammunition, the creative imagery a writer needs to bring life to the events we write, but a dream by itself won't necessarily be on point or message.  You have to have a purpose, I believe; it keeps the story focused.

Anyway, the other day, I saw 2012.

I won't bother with the long summary of the film (it's almost 3 hours after all), but even in an epic disaster film, we should look at the contrivances a writer uses and ask if they're needed and just to maintain suspense, if they're natural and a consequence of previous characterization or internal logic, or if they simply push the story forward illogically.

I'll give the filmmakers some points: anybody could be planning a trip to Yellowstone National Park, a region of known geological phenomena, and it'd be natural for a conspiracy theorist who believes the world is melting to go there, to want to witness it first-hand. That Jackson works for someone who has the fortune to buy a ticket on an ark isn't that far-fetched, either. As usual, contrivances are more forgivable, even expected, at the beginning of a story. We don't have any characterization to contradict them. Internal logic hasn't been established yet.

It's the midgame of the story that begins to unravel. We know the earth's crust will begin to float atop hotter liquid mantle, that it can shift by any rotation. This has the curious effect that Wisconsin houses the magnetic south pole. It also shifts landmasses such that our heroes' jet can reach spitting distance of the arks instead of ditching in water and being totally screwed. Convenient. Jackson's employer just so happens to get stuck in Vegas, where Jackson has to land too. Again, convenient (and also seeming to serve no purpose except give both groups a second pilot. The president chooses to stay behind to satisfy some noble drive when his leadership will then be missed on the Ark (as the vice-president conveniently dies too), leaving command of the Ark to a royal prick that leads to a final confrontation. The scientist who discovered the catastrophe is (admittedly, deliberately) left behind, but he dies in a tsunami that nobody saw coming, that moves up the time to impact by over an hour. For that matter, anybody wonder why the cell phones still work?

I enjoyed this movie (yes, I enjoy most of the movies I see, regardless of the criticism I post here). Yes, these oddities detract. What detracted more, though, what made this a simple piece of entertainment and not a work of art was the lack of pertinent theme. We're supposed to believe that the point of this movie is to be human and show compassion, even if it risks annihilation, but this viewpoint is only in passing juxtaposed against its opposite, the desire to save any section of humanity no matter the cost. That motive is embodied in pretty much only one man, a man portrayed to be a prick and totally unsympathetic. There is no depravity here, no signs of true desperation, no struggle not just for the survival of the human race but the continuation of its soul. That's why, as entertaining I find this movie, it's not wholly satisfying. I know that's probably not what the intent was, either, but still, I feel like the moral conflict, while set up, just didn't matter for most of the story.

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Working.

So I've been busy somewhat. Over the months since I finished the first draft of "In the Cold Rain," I've vacillated. I've gone back, tried to outline from scratch, change the ideas, work on other ideas (I did, as a matter of fact, make some work on Eclipse, and I could stand to do some work on The Color Red). Throughout this experience, I've felt I couldn't see the future clearly, that no matter what I did, I wasn't happy with what I felt might evolve organically from the story because it didn't fit the constraints I had on the story. And there are constraints. As a continuation piece, Identity must focus a lot on Ranma, I feel, which caused me to reject some ideas I had. I tried to make it overall tighter, but each idea was no clearer than the last.

In the end, I've decided to go with what I've got. Not the first draft--I do have improvements I can make to that--but the original outline I will largely stick to, until I reach a point where I can improve it and not merely run around in circles.

So that's where we stand, kids. Identity 01, "In the Cold Rain." Now working on act 3 of 5. Here's to the future.

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The Snowflake

Good morning, folks. It's been a while. I've been working on my outline for Identity, which, in retrospect, I realize I haven't said much about, only mentioned obliquely. What I used to outline Echoes as an experiment was Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method, a ten-step process to fleshing out a novel. Overall, I think the process is sound, but I did have to adapt it somewhat to my structural style. As I've mentioned, I write each chapter like it's own story, a structure influenced by my experience with Babylon 5, an epic television series where most episodes moved forward an overall plot yet still managed to be stories that could be understood (to varying degrees) on their own. His Dark Materials is what got me writing, but Babylon 5 has been the basic model on which I base my novels.

For my part, I think the structure has some advantages. It means the plot is fast, as each chapter brings about a new conflict (or an extension of an old one). Furthermore, each chapter has some stand-alone quality that is very well-suited to the serial nature of work-in-progress posting. The Snowflake Method doesn't naturally accommodate this structure, though. I found with Echoes that I was stuck on chapter two (yes, out of twenty) with a chapter outline that simply wasn't well-developed, couldn't stand on its own. In part, that was my fault, not realizing what was needed to truly structure the chapter, but at the same time, I grew comfortable with re-outlining each chapter as I came to it. Even then, however, it wasn't a perfect process: I wrote three or four outlines for chapter twenty, none of them satisfactory really until in the end I kind of winged it and got through with Echoes at last. Maybe in that sense outlining isn't going to be a perfect process anyway, something that must be iterated to really arrive at a story. Who knows.

But, I do recommend the Snowflake Method. Right now I'm on the "one-page outline" stage, where you take a book and outline it in paragraphs. I've expanded it somewhat, for this is to be a trilogy, so it's really going to be three pages. And there are more steps beyond that, of course. It's all a process of going forward.

So what's Identity all about, anyway? Well, without giving too much away, it's a Ranma 1/2 continuation story. I've long thought that the end of the manga provides a great opportunity to explore changing relationships and emotions in the characters, the consequences of what happened at Jusenkyou and the failed wedding. Ranma, at least, has admitted to himself how he feels about Akane, and she surely thinks he's admitted it to her, too. Shampoo and Ukyou must naturally see a strengthening relationship there, and that would be ample cause for much more desperate attempts to win Ranma back. And the sobering effect of seeing someone you love nearly die in your arms shouldn't be understated, either. I think the change in character dynamics is key.

At the same time, Identity introduces new characters, foils for the emotional and psychological issues that the main cast has, issues that, while humorous, are also tragic in their own way. Identity is a dark story, about the need for love that we all have, the terrible consequences when that need overshadows all else, and the insecurities that cripple us, especially, we think, in the eyes of the ones we love. I can't wait to write this story, for though I've hit some road blocks in outlining it and considered working on something else until those cleared, I've known since I wrote Glimpse that this is the story I want to write next, without a doubt. It's going to be a blast to do.

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It's done.

Chapter 20: Being Human, on FFN, with an epilogue and an afterword also posted as well.

I've said enough in the afterword about the whole experience. I will just say here that I'm immensely gratified to have finished Echoes and will be looking forward to finishing my outline and getting to work on Identity or maybe even Eclipse. It's a strange feeling to finish a long story like this one; I remember the immense relief I felt when I finished The Blind Illusions, my first trilogy (which I intend to completely throw away and rewrite, I might add), and the same catharsis from finishing Nicholas Torrence, my second (well, fourth) novel, the first one I've seriously considered publishing. This sojourn into fanfiction has been a fascinating one, and I still have stories to tell, but I still see it as merely a diversion, a way to improve myself on the way back to original work. For now, though, I am satisfied. For a day, and a day only, I can rest.

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Back from vacation

I'm back from vacation in Florida, just yesterday now. I learned how to ride a bike (and fell off one the day before we left). We ate like kings without breaking the bank, either, as the three families rotated cooking duties. All in all, a relaxing trip.

My work on the last chapter of Echoes continues, however. To give some perspective, I now have three different drafts of the chapter, all over 7000 words (though most of them have some shared content), and none of them are finished. I do think I'll finish the current draft I'm working on--I'm stuck on the fourth act--but it'll be a few days before I've completed it, let alone proofread that and the epilogue.

To relieve some of my frustrations, I put typing fingers to paper on Identity, breaking the rule I'd tried to adhere to not to start the story until I outlined it fully, but it was a refreshing exercise (even if I throw away everything I've written, which is only about 2500 words). I'm still ambivalent about whether to use first-person or third-person in this story, whether I should do something closer to Nicholas Torrence or to Echoes. Echoes is very choppy on balance: I could easily jump between half a dozen perspectives in the course of a chapter, or three or four in an act alone. The times I haven't done this (really just "The Brothers Hikari" and the first three acts of chapter twenty) have been, in my opinion, more artistic than the others (although "Imitations of Roll" and "Selfishness" are among the best chapters).

Writing Identity in first-person rather than third vastly changes the dynamics of the piece. Instead of an ensemble plot, I have to put most of those extra plot lines into subtle scenes that don't spell out the whole story (because the narrator, which I strongly believe will be Akane) couldn't know them. Third-person would allow me to make explicit more of these plots and allow the reader to anticipate the disasters that come when plots collide. Hence, a drawback in terms of plot, but the first-person always lends itself to a certain fluidity, one that only a single-perspective third-person could match, but only at the cost of intimacy. First-person really draws you in...or spits you out, as the case may be. When I outline the story, though, I think I'll have a better idea of how I want to do it.

Which brings me to another question, one I've always struggled with: is it better to work on one story, and stay stubbornly focused on that story even when it frustrates you, or is it better to have many concurrent projects, and as one puts up a block, move on to the next?

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Star Trek

I've been reworking chapter 20 of Echoes from a different angle (which may necessitate a chapter title change; too bad, I liked "Prodigal Daughter" so much, but this angle works a lot better to tie things together, so I'm sticking with it for now).  I've also put a second look on "Glimpse," and I may be posting that shortly.  For now, however, let's talk Star Trek.

I'm a big Star Trek fan, have been for years now.  I've watched most of the series before Enterprise, rather like how I watched basically all of Stargate SG-1 but disconnected with Atlantis.  But, I was intrigued to hear of the new film, and thus, at 10:40 this Mother's Day morning, I went to see it at the AMC by the mall.

On IMAX.

I'd read the review on IGN.  The commentator said that there were logical snags, but if you could suspend your disbelief, you would overall enjoy the movie, and I agree with that assessment.  Indeed, I viewed these snags as, for the most part, what they were intended to be:  moments to increase dramatic impact that, sadly, were awkward to handle.  Spock being marooned on another planet to witness the destruction of Vulcan has all manner of physics fail unless we're talking about a moon, after all, something that was never said.  The idea that the Enterprise couldn't escape a black hole at warp and had to "eject the core" to create a blast to get away was total and utter bull, as well.  The mark of bad artistic license is when there are perfectly good ways to avoid such liberties:  keeping Spock on Nero's ship, for example, would easily accomplish what he wanted and wouldn't be as mind-numbingly stupid as to leave him on a planet where he could be found.  I can see why they didn't--it allowed them to work in Scotty and so on and so forth, but already the movie feels like a set of amazing coincidences, perhaps suggestive of fate, perhaps of laziness.

But overall, it's a fun movie.  I liked it quite a lot, especially the visual style used to make the Enterprise look both futuristic and grounded in the real world.  The one thing that really bugs me, though, is the ending:  that we're stuck with an altered reality, one where things did not turn out as they should, with Vulcans decimated to all but extinction levels.  Personally, I would've liked to see old Spock find some way to undo the damage, restore the old timeline, and check in with the Enterprise just to make sure that everything's all right and they way it should be.  It would've worked.  Maybe this is a sequel hook, but it does...bug me.

Something they said in the IGN review is that the movie is a bit soulless, lacking Roddenberry's exploration of scientific and moral issues.  In truth, I feel these aspects are best suited to the episodic nature of television.  For a movie, you have to choose one big thing, and the choice here was character, the growth of Kirk and Spock into heroes.  Spocks Vulcan/Human conflict, Kirk's own reluctance to meet authority and come into his own--these things are eternal and will transcend our time in ways that a more prescient film may not.  There's room for both, of course; it's just a choice.

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Echoes 19 on FFN, First Person Present

Chapter Nineteen, "Resurrection and Life," on Fanfiction.Net

Something I notice a lot when reading fanfiction is the scarcity of first-person and, strangely, the correlation of first person with present tense.  The first person itself is a deliciously tempting perspective, and it's not one I see done well often.  Just in dialogue, people have to be able to talk in a distinctive manner--word choice and variation of grammatical structure are pivotal to making characters distinct even when you avoid the more obvious means of varying speech patterns, accents in particular.  I dare say it's much stronger to keep the former two effects in mind rather than pepper someone's dialogue with contracted vowels.  There's a great difference between a chair and a recliner or stool.

First person really takes that to another level; everything described and seen has to be filtered through one character's eyes and ears.  It's not easy, and all too often I read what's not filtered through the character but through the author--the vocabulary and focus simply match...well, a teenager.  And that's great for characters that are teenagers, but ironically, there are things about the way teenagers talk that grate after a while and should be avoided.  Like, talking this way is so totally annoying when you do it for page after page and stuff.  One of the examples I remember best is Huckleberry Finn; Twain starts with his accent very heavily shown, but by the end of the book, it's toned down considerably, and I don't think the suggestion was that Huck's speech had improved.  Rather, Twain dials it down after you get the point.  It's intentional, and by being intentional, he can control it finely.

The second aspect of this phenomenon is the present tense.  Often times I see the present used ubiquitously when there's a lot more power to the tense used in scarcity.  Present can be used for a sense of immediacy, for example.  Writing a whole story in present tense just comes off as overly conversant and amateurish.  I personally like to see present used to give a contrast between what the character thought at the time and what they might think now, in hindsight, but that's if you subscribe to the notion of a character actually writing it, I suppose.

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