Now, I’ll say, I typically believe Karma to be a real thing.  Not that I think there is a mystical force out there, keeping a check to see the universe weighs the same as a duck, but I do full well believe that the way you act dictates what opportunities come your way.  Buy someone a beer, good chance they will buy you one back.  Let someone shelter under your umbrella, and they’ll offer you a coffee.  Etc, and so forth.  But what about all the random, nasty stuff?

Well, I think that is really just unbalanced.  Example.  Let’s say you made a mistake in associating with someone for a time.  They cause you all sorts of pain as you associate with them, and even after you break the association and do everything you can to not let them affect your life, this person still manages to cause drama and heartache.  Not that I’m talking from personal, recent experience.  Nope, not me.  Nuh-uh.

See, it always seems that we get far more crap for bad than we get gold for good.  And, oh crap, I’m going to start talking about writing.  Yeah, it needs to be like that in stories too.  I have read far too many stories (or fragments of stories cause I couldn’t make myself finish), where the author tried to change the balance of Karma.  That is to say, tried to make the universe less of a cold, unfeeling, uncaring, prick.  Either by giving less crap for bad or more gold for good.  And yeah, that is one fantasy that belongs in your head while you shower or sluff off at work and not on a page.  And I’ll just end it there, cause right now Karma has thrown me a boulder to deal with, and boy does my back hurt holding it.  I guess I’ll just go watch some more Lost or something. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

So, what is it that makes so many people hate having their backs to the door.  Most animals don’t seem to mind it.  Every dog and cat I’ve ever owned always eats their food in such a way as to present their butt to as many people as possible, and a goodly number I know seem to prefer to face away from doors (although they still like their backs to walls).

Well, I think the answer is two-fold.  One, it’s nice to be able to just glance up and see who is looking at you.  That is rather mundane.  The other, I think, is a desire to see that path of escape.

And, perhaps, just perhaps, that applied to books too.  Kind of links into that element of mystery thing.  See, not only to we love not knowing exactly how it happened and then getting the big reveal, we also like to think we can see the way out, perhaps even, proverbially, be able to glance up and see the author looking at us from the door.  Or maybe I’m just going out on a massive stretch cause I’ve been watching too much Lost lately.  Expect a post or twenty on that eventually, too.  Until then, keep that back to the wall.

And no, I’m not obsessed with it.  Well, maybe a little.  But it serves better as a metaphor for me obsessive nature.  Now, I’m not really OCD, but I do go through phases.  When I first get keen to something, it eats me whole.  It may on some days eat sunrise to sunset, but on other days I just think about it a lot while I do other things.  I go fully overboard on things, getting materials as needed, researching, building if applicable, and I tend to forget everything else.  This is kind of what happened to me last week.  First I was just being a little lazy and otherwise social, but then I got a task that ate my life until Saturday morning.

Which gets to the Phoenix metaphor (eventually).  All things are cyclic with me.  I go gung-ho, then something burns me out.  Either I injure myself, or politics go south, or I just get truly burned out and tired of what I was doing.  When this happens, I actually get fairly depressed.  Not clinical style, but I have a general lethargy that makes me a Gloomy Gus to be around.

That is, until I rise from the ashes.  Cause, sure enough, something else shiny is going to come along and pull me in, and then I’ll go full bore, almost forgetting my last obsession except as a reference point in life.  Examples of such things:

1) My Academics, probably my truest, longest obsession, but only cause it stayed fresh for so long by constantly changing what I was doing.
2) Fencing.  Yes, sword-play style.  Was huge on this in High School, but in college I let it slip away.
3) Improv Comedy.  This was a shared obsession with 4).  It only lasted about a semester and a half, though, and is part of why I left fencing.
4) Dagorhir/Belegarth Foam Fighting.  Medieval combat stuff. Faster and slightly more fun, if less artist than fencing.  I stayed strong on this for 3-4 years.

5) Final Fantasy 11.  My god this game sucked my very soul out.  I still feel twinges and longings to be able to log on and play, and I’ve been on the wagon for two years now.  The disaster of a game that was Age of Conan helped.
6) Karate.  I only did this for about three months and loved every eff’in moment of it.  Finances and my family-life situation made me stop going though, and I, well, don’t regret it, but miss it.

So, I have some current obsessions, too.
1) Hanging out downtown, in particular at the most awesome of Viking-themed bars.
2) Writing (duh).
3) And newly rediscovered: Belegarth.

So, I’m kind of worried.  I know my pattern.  I try and think of the good side of associating to the Phoenix, the “never going to keep me down” part, but I also can’t help but see the “I can’t stay up” either.  I know some will call me a pessimist, and I like to say I’m a realist, but perhaps I’m just an opposite-ist.  If things are up, I’m waiting for the fall, if things are down, I know the up is coming.  I am hoping that things are changing, though.  I don’t want to burn out on my new friends, and writing has actually been a passion of mine since before college, even if it comes and goes in its strength.  I wonder if, between downtown, writing, and my kids if I can truly have enough time to do Belegarth, too, especially since it is my intent to be a unit/realm leader.  Maybe I can learn to make the Phoenix rise from the ashes in the same place instead of always moving on.  Here’s to hope.  And, for some odd reason, I want to watch Chocolat right now.  Crazy.

So, I’ll start high.  In many fairly popular sci-fi stories, it takes an alien invasion for the world to set aside its bickering and unify as a single force.  Granted, there are still cultures and other issues within, but a single government entity emerges to confront the new alien terror.  Which, as I will say many times in this post, is a Them for our Us.  And honestly, I think that is about the short of it.  Sentient life seems to have such a hard time getting along that it comes down needing something bigger and scarier to pull us together.  Heck, John Locke noticed this, although he believed that it would take a Behemoth, a massive military force that was able to hold the world at gunpoint, to actually make it behave most of the time.  Which, funny enough, has been the case in some Sci-Fi too.

But, let’s even look back at the beginnings of government.  Nomad tribes learned to farm and settle, then when other nomads came to take the crops, the settlers banded together for protection.  Of course, the biggest, meanest settler became the king, and bingo, government, us, and them.  Pack behavior from the get-go has probably been survival based, with Nature being the Them, but don’t quote me on that.  I’m hardly an anthropologist; I just play one on TV (I wish).

So, cliques.  And an aside, I hate that word, cause I use it quite often in speech, but it took me a full five minutes of going DUR to remember how to spell it and have it mean what I wanted it to mean.  Anyway, cliques, and in particular, kids on a playground.  I don’t know how well anyone here remembers elementary school, but there were two givens. Thursday was spaghetti day, and there was a group of kids who hated with your group of friends with the boiling intensity of a thousand suns.  They might not have been able to do anything about it, especially if your group was way larger or more popular, but they still did.  And more than likely your group had an animosity with some other group (or, sadly, occasionally just a single outcast type kid).  Why? Well, it isn’t just that kids are mean, which they are.

No, it is because an enemy draws us closer.  Hatred is, sadly, a very strong and universal emotion, perhaps moreso than love.  A mutual love of something can create some bonds, but a mutual hatred is like the duct tape and super glue of young friendships.  Perhaps the nature of hate is a good reason.  After all, to quote (shudder) Billy Shakespear, “In time, we come to hate what we often fear.”  And, to quote many people (although Carmine Falcone from Batman Begins is stuck in my head saying it) “You always fear what you don’t understand.”  And what is more universally true of any human than a lack of understanding?

Oh, and an aside of historical proof, both the unification of modern Italy and the unification of the German State required a vilification of an outsider to make it stick.

So, hatred bonds people together, even when they have great differences.  Get enough people together, and there will be great differences.  So, perhaps, there will always have to a “Them.”  To my psychology-savvy friends, please, give me proof otherwise (or anyone for that matter). Cause, honestly, that is a kind of depressing thought.

Oh, and writing.  All I really take from this is that you need to think long and hard if a single-government without external threat really makes sense at all, whether in a future-earth or a fantasy universe.  I, personally, find them odd (which is funny since I do want to write about one in a novel.  Least I have more to think about.)

I think a large part of it is truly antagonism.  The man had a special hatred in his heart of the secessionist states, not that he really liked much of anyone.  On the same note, he did not really or honestly hold a grudge, even against South Carolina, which he did the most harm to during his campaigns.  In his writing, he even would say that he would gladly fight and die for the South, so long as it was in the name of the unified United States.  This was a man who saw no incongruence with yesterday’s vile enemy being tomorrow’s dear ally.

Not that a generational resident of Atlanta would say that, let alone Georgia or South Carolina.  While honestly, a good part of Northerner’s would be hit or miss on who Sherman was (and perhaps even lucky to recognize Grant), these names are immortalized in the South.  The antagonism of Sherman has survived generations, and in honest truth, his actions probably helped to ferment the Southern-Northern hatred (even though the carpetbagging and other “reconstructionist” doctrines decidedly helped as well.)  Never mind that Sherman actually did what he did to try and end the war quickly, much like when Truman dropped the bombs in Japan.  Never mind that he then offered very generous conditions of surrender to enemy forces that were only later refuted by Andrew Johnson (perhaps for good reason, perhaps not).  Never mind that the most gregarious of his “war crimes”, namely the burning of Atlanta and Columbia, were likely accidents or caused by the general confusion of war.  Some primary sources even note that Sherman himself was helping to fight the fires that burned in Columbia (although in another source one of Sherman’s officers more or less admitted that Union forces started the fires).

So, what the heck am I getting at?  Honestly, it isn’t a defense of Sherman, although I think he gets a wee bit of a bad wrap (not that he doesn’t deserve some of it).  No, it is writing, always.  Antagonism.  It is an awesome motivator.  I used to think that the hatred caused by a societal memory could not actually be good motivator, but since moving to the South, I can see how it could be.  Maybe not in a “level-headed” person, but added to some other traits such as upbringing and a strong sense of society, well, yeah.  A general hatred of a person just because of where they are from and what that represents is indeed a very strong motivation.  But, my former ignorance is also an enlightenment.

Many people don’t actually suffer this preconception, or if they do, it isn’t in a fashion that they can understand and relate to the page.  If you wish to use this as a motivator for a main character, you had best be sure to explain it in understandable terms.  Although, can I truly feel and understand the ire the South has for Sherman, even with it being a real thing that I can live in?  No, not really.  I have a historical bias that I am from the Midwest, and we don’t really have any inbred animosity like that.  What will tomorrow’s animosity be, though?  I am worried that my children will grow up to despise all Arabs simply because what one radical sect of Jihadists did, but I do have hope for them on the racism and sexism front, at least.  But, I wonder, do a people always have to have an enemy?  Must there always be a them for there to be an us?  Hmm . . . .  I’ll write on that later.

So, short of the skivvy.  Don’t assume your readers can understand a bone-deep non-personal antagonism easily.  Play it up too much, and it honestly comes off as being one-dimensional.  But, small mannerisms, offhand comments, and even straws that break camels’ backs are a perfect use for it.  And as long as there is something else to a character besides that, perhaps a small bit of depth where they can see humanity in their blood-enemy, but are still distrustful, well, it helps.

But . . . the need for enemies.  I think that will be Friday.

So, two parts, meta-writing, then some personal musing.  The natural disaster by itself is one of the great “villains” that isn’t really evil.  An entire sci-fi story can be told about the trials and pains of surviving a disaster, either immediately or even from that past that has just had lingering effects.  One does not even really need a sentient villain, although adding one in for spice never hurt.  Just be sure the villain has a reason for being, you know, villainous.  Depending on the disaster, this might be harder than it sounds.

I have noticed that writing about these kinds of things is becoming far more popular.  I don’t know if it’s the growing presence of climate change in the global discourse (holy crap, I got to use that phrase non-ironically!) or just a “vampire” phenomenon, but I’m not the only one to notice this.  Anthologist John Joseph Adams said in his collection of post-apocalyptic stories Wastelands that there seems to be a reemerging fascination with the end of the world.  In olden days, the Cold War was on everyone’s mind, and the prospect of nuclear holocaust.  The stories Mr. Adams selected for his anthology were actually quite different, from bio-terrorism to climate-change disasters, it showed plenty enough in the way of how a disaster can be responded to on both sides, the observing and the experiencing.

Which gets to my personal side.  See, I have observed a goodly number of disasters.  I am natively from the Midwest, where tornados are taken in an easier stride than Florida does hurricanes, but oddly enough, I have never been directly in one.  I’ve had some near misses, but never even a hit on my community.

Likewise, since moving to the east coast, I only have experienced one hurricane and one tropical storm, neither of which did much of anything to the area around me.  Honestly, my town spazzed out more over the threat of snow flurries than they did for either of those summer-storms.  So I have a very uninformed outlook on natural disasters.  Yeah, I can look at the pictures of flooded streets and crumbled buildings, of despairing citizens and brave rescue workers, but I am still just that, an observer.  Our society, while in the most recent incident seems to be doing well, tends to commercialize and go for rating and entertainment in even the most dire of situations.  And by entertainment, I do mean that “can’t look away from the train wreck” mentality we all have.  There are those admirable souls that would run up and pull the conductor out, but honestly, I think that most of us would just stand there and stare like deer in headlights.  Myself, I don’t know.  I’d like to think that I would not be a victim (mentality wise, not fact-of-life wise), but, as the song says “I’m not a coward, I’ve just never been tested.  I’d like to think that if I was I would pass.”

So, I hope the best of those who are caught in natural disaster.  I hope they are having the most uneventful, non-story worthy time of getting out of it they can, because stories are fun to read, not to live.  I know that probably isn’t the case, but when one is a starving artist, there is only so much one can do.  If you aren’t, though, please, give what you can to help.  Keep the stories in the fiction section as much as we can.

1) Drink less.  Not because I think I drink too much, but because it tends to be pricy.  Perhaps I’ll settle for drink cheaper, though.

2) Lose 20 lbs.  I’ve done it before and in only two months, but I was also even heavier than I am now.  Still these would be the last 20 before I’d actually feel like I’m not a belarded jellyroll.  Resolution one will probably help with this goal, as well resolution three.

3) Get back into medieval re-enactment.  I really miss it, and it was a great stress relief, as well as physical activity.  Hard to deny it as exercise when I’m running around for threeish hours with an extra 40lbs on me in armor.  And I am hardly a slow or sedentary fighter.

4) Spend more time with my kids. The goal is actually to get 50% custody of the children.  I’m working towards it, but we will see.  This also goes hand in hand with number five.

5) Get the dang divorce finalized.  The custody is the larger hold up on this, as I am trying to avoid lawyers and courts if I can.  The slightly lesser is the expense of getting said divorce.  Funny how marriage is so cheap, yet divorce is a pricy pain in the rump.  Almost as funny as how much more paperwork a husband has to go through to take his wife’s last name than vice versa.  Not that I did that, but I have heard stories.  Combined names are even more a pain, I’m sure.

6) Finally, write more.  I’ve been true to my desire to be creative on a semi-regular basis, but my actual prose writing has gone to the wayside lately.  I have a few short stories started that I want to finish, and a few novels to pick from to start a new on of those too.  Really need to get on that.

So it has been the big thing lately for movies to be reboots or re-imaginings of already existing properties.  Either there are more books-to-movies being made or comics-to-movies or just redoing old movies new, the old phrase “originality is dead” has never seemed more true than at the theater these past couple years.  Why, and is this a good thing?

Well, the why is kind of easy.  As in easy money.  Cheaper and easier to just write a new script and story in an existing world and then spend your budget on actors and fancy SFX than to having something wholly original.  Also, you get the nostalgia crowd, those people who see the movie just because it is Ironman or Batman or Narnia.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this is even residual effects of the Writer’s Strike.  Well, better than feature length reality TV, right?

Now, I’m not going to say money is the sole driver, although in Hollywood, as I understand the dirty backside, it is a majority shareholder.  Some of it can also be the SFX themselves.  Could anyone really see the Ironman movie, or Where the Wild Things Are, or the new Batmans, or . . . or . . . or . . . without all of the nifty computer things we can do nowadays?  Heck, for the longest time, they said Lord of the Rings was unfilmable ever, but I think Peter Jackson did a spiffy job.  Also, I will admit, the new Star Trek was visually appealing, even if the Enterprise looked a little like an over-inflated balloon toy.

There can also be nostalgia on the other end too.  Directors and producers and writers wanting to see things from their youth redone in a fantastic new way.  Not like Sherlock Holmes hasn’t been “redone” on television and the silver screen plenty of times.  So yeah, lots of reasons why.

Now, the bigger question, is this good?  I am going to straight up say that I was not happy with the new Star Trek movie.  It was visually appealing, I admit, and a wonderful action romp.  Star Trek was always the first, not so much the second though.  Yes, there were fights and starship battles, but long extended scenes of combat?  Nope, at least not in bullet time with telescoping katana (that he fences with?  Nah).  The core of what Star Trek was, an optimistic future with altruistic heroes, that was gone.  As someone who watched reruns of the original series as a wee child, got to see the sixth movie in the theater (Undiscovered Country), and watched all of TNG as it aired, yeah, not a fan.

Then I saw the Sherlock Holmes movie.  I am not exactly a big S.H. fan.  I know who he is, I love the concept of the character, but I had never actually read any of the original material.  I adored the new movie.  Both for the action scenes which I fully accept were most likely not part of a Conan Doyle story, and for the plot and portrayal of the characters.  Now, as I understand it, the characters were not all that far off in portrayal as the Star Trek ones were, but there were still substantial changes to the concept of Holmes, and I heard some of the “purist” (much as I am a Trek Purist) declaiming the problems with the movie.  And, as I left, even before I read reviews by people I respect that are fans of the source, I knew that I had just seen “the other side”.  I just got to enjoy Holmes in the way that someone who was not all that familiar with Star Trek was able to enjoy the J.J. Abrams movie.

Yeah, things change, but a reboot is not really a reboot.  You are not trying to tell the exact same story in the exact same universe.  That story has already been told.  Could they have done the S.H. movie without even calling it that?  Just make it a fresh, un-attached to anything following the established S.H. tropes?  Yeah, but then it would have just been called a S.H. knockoff.  Now it is a retelling, a new way to look at characters.  Perhaps, just maybe, these fictional beings of authors’ minds are alive and breathing too.  And, just like people, they both age and change, sometimes look different to different people, and above all else, have their own destiny to fulfill.  I think I’ll enjoy watching reboots a little more from now on.  At least, so long as they don’t just have hideous faux-science about black holes in the middle of planets.  Come on, you can only ask so much of me, right?

And yet, you really sit down and think about it, and the sheer realization of how the stress of situations should affect a person are never directly expressed in a lot of writing.  Yes, people crack under pressure, or show anger, but it is always in a second-hand sort of way.  You don’t hear about the random panic attack that blind sides them out of nowhere.  You don’t hear about strange shortnesses of breath and exhaustions out of nothing.  No, the direct effects of stress are glossed over, and we get the next layer.

Why?  Well, I’d imagine part of it is the author not wanting to feel that his or herself.  I can’t speak for every author, but I can tell you, whatever my characters go through, I feel.  When I write it, it is real for me too.  I write about my character thinking his wife has betrayed him and left him for dead, my heart feels stabbed.  I write about an addict who is jonsing for a fix, my hands get the shakes.  So, why on this green Earth would I want to give myself the effects of hideous high stress?

Still, it seems like authors, myself included, could actually bring up the direct effects of stress more.  You don’t face world-threatening situations with only a slightly ill temper and maybe some heartburn. Alas, not ever hero is (or should be) Jack Bauer.

And to the real life part of stress, yes, I hate it. Who doesn’t?  It never helps you solve a problem, and in the end only feeds itself because the problem is all that harder to solve.  And yet, we still feel it, even certain bartender friends of mine who deny it.  So, what can I say? Have a beer and find some friends to help you laugh.  It doesn’t fix the problem, but it helps in an indirect way by giving a break from that back-muscle-killing, stomach-upsetting, sleep-depriving stress.

Now, granted, a work of fiction is, in and of itself, just one big fib.  But sometimes it works to have the characters lie to each other, or even themselves.  But, just as in real life, where lies add extra levels of complexity to what is almost always already a complex situation, so is it in writing.  Before you know it, you will have the plot depending on internal lies more than anything else, and then it is going to be a painful, tangled mess when, at the end, you have to explain “whodunit” without being boring and more or less retelling the entire story again.

There is also the issue of plot simplicity.  Yes, a lie here or a lie there can add a nice twist, but in real life, people have a habit of lying through their teeth once they get started, and if you do that in a story, well, see the first point I made above.  It can also be annoying to the reader, depending on how much the character lives the lie, without an adequate amount of foreshadowing and subtle hints in actions and words to indicate the lie.

The last thing with lies is to make sure they aren’t really far out there, or immediately contradicted, and have the person being lied to completely miss it.  While maybe this can work for a character who is just that dumb, but seriously, if it is more than a spear carrier, don’t do it.  It just makes me want to tear my hair out.

Oh, and on the real life lying thing: yes I know how, but I despise myself when I even lie by staying quite or omission, let alone full up falsehoods.  What grinds my gears the most, though, is when I’m lied to, especially for no reason at all.

And no, I haven’t been lied to (that I can confirm) recently, just had a random twitch make me want to write this.  So nyah.  Happy Holidays and all that.