A Personal Announcement, And How It Affects My Clarion Blog-A-Thon
I don’t mind discussing my personal life in this journal, but I do dislike discussing the lives of others. I write on a big stage, and not everyone deserves to be dragged onto that stage without consent. So if there’s upheaval going on around me, even if that’s affecting me, I usually try to leave that out to ensure the privacy of others.
However, if you’ve been in contact with me lately – I’m usually pretty texty – you’ll note that I’ve been responding to almost no one’s texts or emails. That’s because I’m going through two rather large personal stresses in worry about others right now:
1) I’ll be flying out to California this week to see if a dear relative may have a fatal form of cancer. I’ll be there to hold her hand while she gets the diagnosis this Thursday, which I hope will be negative, but the stress of worrying about her has demolished much of my productivity. And if it is a positive diagnosis, I have vowed to be her caretaker, which means that at some point I’d be temporarily moving to California to tend to her needs during the final stages of her illness. (Gini would remain here, in Cleveland.)
2) My eldest daughter has moved in with us while she sorts through some aspects of her life, and shepherding her through some tough times has made me distracted about other people.
Between those two peeks into uncertain futures, it’s been a series of emotional overload in looking after those I love, which has made me withdraw socially. So I apologize for not getting back to you, if I haven’t. If you think it’s been a rough month for me, imagine how it is for them.
That said, though, this uproar strikes at a reasonably terrible time, since now is when I usually do the Clarion Blog-a-Thon – which, you may note, I haven’t made an announcement about in a week. And the Clarion Echo, the online writing workshop where I usually blog my heart out in order to support the workshop that helped me reach the next level in writing, is gappy and erratic. I don’t feel like I’ve done a good job supporting my alma mater.
So. Here’s what’s going to happen with that. This week’s going to be destroyed anyway as the Day of Diagnosis approaches, so I’m taking it off. There will be no posts in the Clarion Echo, no prizes announced (we still have many to go!), no real writing.
However, because I’ve been so lax as of late, the six-week Clarion Blog-a-Thon will be an eight-week Blog-a-thon for me. I’ll go two weeks beyond the usual time to make up for the lost time here, at which point I’ll return with a vengeance. Prizes will be dispensed two weeks later than usual except for Cat Valente’s advance reader copy of the sequel to Fairyland, which I think is a prize that should be given away early.
If you’d like to help me out, well wishes are welcome, as are prayers and whatever other incantations you feel like directing towards a negative diagnosis. Also, donations to the Blog-A-Thon (we have cool prizes!) wouldn’t hurt either, as it’d make me feel like not a total slacker. And love to all of you, and thanks for your understanding.
The Dark Knight Rises: A Very Brief Review
I went into The Dark Knight Rises as spoiler-free as it is possible to be these days. I saw the trailers, so I knew the main antagonists were Bane and Catwoman… But that was about it. I had zero idea what was to actually happen in the film.
And I think it was far better watched that way, so my review will be vague and oblique: Go see it.
I’d say it’s the best superhero film of 2012, except this is the year of The Avengers, which is neither better nor worse. The Avengers was a perfect execution of old, fun-style Marvel comics that didn’t worry too much about reality as long as you had some exciting fights and good quips. The Dark Knight rises is about people who happen to do superheroic things, a big-ass action movie wrapped in costumes, and there’s a lot of time spent on character growth.
I never felt like any of the Avengers were in serious danger. I felt like any one person in The Dark Knight Rises could be taken out by a lucky gunshot. Which puts the accent severely on “hero.” When Bruce Wayne puts on the armor, he’s putting himself in harm’s way.
As for the movie itself, Christopher Nolan understands the cinema. He does exciting things in film that haven’t been done on screen before, ever – big, splashy setpieces you have to see on the big screen to appreciate. The Avengers will fit well on a home-screen TV, as it’s comfort watching, but The Dark Knight Rises will feel a little constrained by not being forty feet high. He takes huge risks, putting the stakes incredibly high in a way that’s breathtaking to see, and breaks the mold of what we expect from a superhero film. Bane’s plot is audacious and breathtaking, and he’s a worthy villain.
And lastly, Nolan pulls off the hat trick of unifying his series. I know, because unlike Lucas he is man enough to admit that he made the Batman series up on the fly, that the ending wasn’t planned well in advance. But all three movies do have an arc, and the ending neatly answers some plot threads and hanging questions that were started back in Batman Begins – hanging questions that, even having watched Batman Begins the day before the movie, I missed.
Christopher Nolan said the first Batman film’s theme was “Fear,” the second was “Chaos,” and this one is “Pain.” It was two and a half hours, but it flew by so quickly that despite me drinking a huge-ass iced tea before entering the theater, my bladder never tickled. I finished feeling wrung-out and satisfied, because this is a tense film and a worthy achievement.
Neil Gaiman thinks it’s Oscar-worthy. I disagree. This is the kind of action film so good that the Oscars will snub it, and I say good. Some films are too good for the Oscars.
The Real Horror
So there’s been a big shooting in a theater, and nobody knows anything yet. You’re a cable news reporter. You have an ugly choice.
If you just run the news as normal, then you miss out on ratings. Because if you bring it up at the top of every twenty minutes, like normal news cycles, then you look out of touch. This is the biggest news! People are shocked by it, hungry for information! If you don’t have it up every five minutes, then people risk turning away as you go to the usual political stories.
So you have to keep rolling it, infinitely. The same news. Over and over, because your new viewers haven’t heard about it yet and they need to – because with a story this big, they’ll stay tuned to find the details.
Except you don’t have details. You don’t know shit, it’s hardly been eight hours since this happened. So you keep repeating the same details over and over again, a mantra of terror, in an attempt to fill air space. Repetition isn’t going to keep people tuned in, so what do you need to fill these gaps? Speculation! So to keep people hooked on the line, you bring in talking heads to discuss what might have happened, people to debate what this means, folks who will tell you what this means for the upcoming election. It’s not news, but your goal here is not news. It’s ratings.
After a while, some of the speculations start to take root, because it sounds good and people are responding to it and hell, let’s just say it again, that seems reasonable. So the speculations furrow in. And you still don’t know more than a handful of facts, but you’re tapdancing to keep the viewers engaged, and because lots of people can’t draw a distinction between “Someone on television is reporting facts” and “Someone on television is killing time,” that shapes the narrative as we start to know things we don’t actually know.
A month later, it turns out much of what was said was wrong, and maybe foolish, but hey. That’s not going to matter the next time. Because you want to hear something, anything, on those cable news stations, and they’re there to keep you tuned in. Nothing more, nothing less.
Lose Until You Get Better: Life Lessons From Gaming
“Because I know this game far better than you do,” Nick told me, “I’m probably going to beat you at it all night. Don’t expect to win.”
Why the hell was he telling me this? Weren’t we both gamers? Yes, this was a new game I didn’t know. Yes, I would lose repeatedly until I figured out what the hell I was doing. Yes, knowing I was probably doomed regardless, I would still play with all my meager skill until I gleaned enough strategy to eke out a win or two. That’s the way it works.
Then I realized: normal people need to hear that shit. For most folks, “losing” is such a negative experience that they get angry and stop playing, or stop thinking about strategy because hey, it’s just a game.
I’m too immersed in Magic: the Gathering culture to feel bad about losing.
It still weirds me out to realize there’s a “pro” circuit for Magic, where people do nothing but play full-time in an attempt to snag this week’s $10,000 prize. It’s a pretty rough life, as Magic’s a very luck-based game – unlike Chess, where the pieces are always in the same position at the beginning of the game and no moves are randomly determined, you can be the best player in the world and still get mana-screwed.
So Magic players expect to lose. A lot. When they’re creating a new deck, they play-test it against the best decks around… And most of the decks they make aren’t very good. So they lose. Then, when they find a deck that seems promising, they swap in new cards to see if that improves their odds – and then they lose too, but this time they lose less because they know how to play this deck, and they have a handle on the weak points in their opponent’s deck. Then they keep refining the deck until they know it’s a winner.
The real pros do not like losing, but they recognize that even the best players will still lose three out of ten games. To quote Tomi Walamies, a former pro:
“The games you lose are a way better learning experience than the ones you win. Positive results in life in general tend to make you blind to improvement. Not only does the winner of a match think they played it great, but they tend to dismiss the loser’s strategy. Needless to say, this kind of shortsightedness is deadly.”
So everyone in professional Magic comes from the same background: when they started playing, they lost. A lot. Rather than getting upset by this, they asked, “Hey, what mistakes did I make that contributed to my loss?” And they analyzed their game, losing until they got better.
Which, I think, is a useful approach to life. I see my daughter, and she hates new things because she’s so frustrated at being bad. She’s embarrassed and flustered because other people are doing things better than she is, and she feels foolish for not knowing this stuff already, and often she quits because the emotional overload of feeling lost is too much for her.
I counsel her with the gaming strategy: When you start out at anything, you’ll be terrible at it. That’s no reflection on you – it’s just that when you try something new, you’re the worst you will ever be at it. And what you need to do is accept that you’re going to lose a lot before you get better – and that you’ll get better a lot quicker if instead of getting angry at each mistake, you instead analyze it to figure out what you could have done better.
I’m not a great writer. Yet. I mean, Neil Gaiman wrote Sandman at the age of 26. I’m 43, and still struggling to get my first novel published. And if I was easily frustrated by losing, I’d probably get discouraged by all the wonderful writers who were more talented than I was, and how hard I have to work just to get one story published when others can pen award-winning novels on first drafts, and then I’d give up.
Instead, I go downstairs, and I write some more. This draft will probably not be very good. That’s fine. I’m not playing to win, I’m playing to get better, and if I lose then I’ll learn from it.
Everything I do is either a win or a learning experience. It’s a nice thought that keeps me going.
Watching Batman, With Special Guest Star Neil Gaiman
I had a Batman movie to watch, and Neil Gaiman was coming.
Our Clarion class had yet to meet Neil, but we’d been warned about his arrival. “Don’t take photos of him near your dorm,” we had been warned, “And if you do, don’t post them on the Internet. If you do, his fans will figure out which dorm he’s staying in and harangue him in his sleep.” Which was my first indication that Neil’s popularity put him more in the category of “rock star” than “popular author.”
We weren’t sure what that meant. At Clarion, the six-week boot camp for sci-fi writers, we had a new author every week. Each teacher brought their own culture with them, as each person had their own teaching methods and ways of hanging out. Kelly Link had been warm and motherly, Jim Kelly had brought raucous watergun fights and stand-on-the-couch energy, Mary Anne Moharanj had brought a scholarly air with her list of assignments and duties.
What would Neil Gaiman bring? We had been told that Week Four was often the boiling point for Clarion, as it’s when everyone was stressed out from a solid month of brain-wringing writing lessons, and psychodrama often occurred. Would Neil be able to steer us through that? He’d never taught before, let alone taught a group of eighteen very different personalities.
So I was a little concerned. Would he step out of a Cadillac, a groupie on each arm, wearing sunglasses and only allowing us to talk to him through intermediaries? It seemed unlikely, but then again it seemed unlikely that someone would track him down by triangulating the background in a picture of him posted on Facebook.
That wasn’t my priority, though. The Dark Knight was. Yes, we were at Clarion, which was the most work-intensive thing I’ve ever done (twelve-hour days of writing and critiquing were common), but goddammit I was mad to see Heath Ledger’s performance. I was a full-on Christopher Nolan fanboy, had been ever since Memento – and even though hacking three hours out of the tangled Clarion schedule was like chopping kudzu, I was hell-bent to see it with friends.
So I asked, “Who wants to go with me?” I expected Dana, maybe Keffy, and a few others – our class had comic nerds, but wasn’t composed of them. I asked on Tuesday, because I knew the logistics of getting eighteen students to a movie theater would be hell (most of us had no cars), and at first there were a few enthusiastic “yea!”s followed by “maybes.” But then people started getting sticky in that sense of “Oh, Kat’s going? Well, maybe I’ll go too,” and by Thursday, it looked like all eighteen of us were probably going to head on down.
Which would be hell. As an inveterate Box Office nerd, I knew this would be a blockbuster movie, and we had to get the tickets in advance. People were all like, “Oh, we’ll just get the tickets when we get there,” and I grabbed them by the lapels, my eyes crazed and bloodshot, yelling, “NO YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS IS A TSUNAMI OF TICKET SALES, IT WILL BE SOLD OUT, SOLD OUT, SOLD OUT.”
They thought I was crazy. I probably was, a little. Because orchestrating tickets for the same show for eighteen people, figuring out what show and then buying them online and then managing payments and then “Oh, Monica wants to go too” kept me busy at Fandango.com for way longer than I would have liked. But they humored me, even if I’m pretty sure several of them thought, “What a nutter.”
Then someone asked, “Should we invite Neil?”
Oh Lord.
I suppose I should have been thrilled that I would see Batman with Neil Gaiman, but at the time I was like, “GAH ONE MORE TICKET.” And Neil would be arriving, as it turned out, perilously close to the theater time. And he did, in fact, want to go!
More logistics!
On the day of the movie, I insisted that we all go an hour early. Many didn’t, mainly because frankly, going and waiting for an hour at a movie theater seemed like a rather boring thing to do. But I corralled three of my Clarion friends, who I think went mainly just to shut me up, and we arrived at the box office to stake out our spots.
The theater was already sold out. The next showing, three hours later, was already sold out too. And the theater was swarming with people.
As it turns out, The Dark Knight was an even bigger box office smash than I’d envisioned, being the fastest movie in history to cross the $200 million mark, racking up six other box office records along the way. And it was crazed there.
I went into damage mode, knowing that I was the only one who held all the tickets, so I had to stand outside to hand them to the other students as they arrived. “Quick!” I said. “Get inside the moment the theater’s ready, and mark off our rows of seats! Get nineteen of them!” My friends sprung into action, three of them running into the theater and scurrying about like ants – I’m told it was quite the challenge, with three people fending off a theater full of eager moviegoers trying to steal their overly-large block of seats. I kind of envision it like a weird videogame, actually.
Meanwhile, I was calling people like crazy, telling them to get down here now, we need people to hold the line. Eventually, more folks showed up, and with seven Clarion students in the theater, I’m told it got easier to mark off our block. But a few folks were running late, which was a problem because with so few cars one person behind schedule caused pileups for everyone, and I had become this sort of insane sargent in a World War I movie where I was blazingly, fanatically, determined to get everyone into the theater. I think at one point I may have stood on a ficus plant and shouted, “NO MAN LEFT BEHIND, GODDAMMIT!”
Small children quailed from the funny, yelling fat man.
Eventually, the only person left to arrive was Neil, and the group picking him up at the airport. I had to stand out front and dispense the remaining tickets – well, okay, I didn’t, as my Clarion friends were kind enough to offer to swap places with me and let me go and have a rest. But as I said, I was crazed. This job would not be complete until I gave away the final ticket! But Neil was running slightly late, and would he arrive in time? The previews were starting! I scanned the crowd, looking for my buddies.
And there was Neil! He’s much taller than you’d think he is. His mop-headed black hair stood out gloriously in the crowd. And I believe the first words I ever spoke to Neil Gaiman were, “Here’s your tickets, GET INSIDE GET INSIDE NOW!” as I thrust the last of my payload into my friends’ hands and broke into a run towards the theater.
I did not sit next to Neil, which was fine. I sat next to Dana, who squeezed my hand during the intense bits and we shared soda. And when we got out of the movie, I did track down Neil – who I didn’t think had ever written Batman, but as a comics writer I was curious to get his feedback nonetheless – and asked him what he thought. And he pursed his lips thoughtfully and said, “I think I saw a brilliant performance, housed in an ordinary action film… But I’m going to have to think on that.”
Fortunately, Neil was a very nice man, and a very good teacher, and while the fourth week had its share of challenges as eighteen writers were pushed to the breaking point – to this day, it’s a mark of pride that Neil Gaiman called my story “boring” – he navigated it through with grace and charm. Having seen Neil at a handful of conventions since then, I’ve come to realize how remarkable it is to spend a week in his presence – at cons, he’s beset by so many people that you’re lucky to eke out ten minutes even if he wants to see you. We had some long, nice conversations, which I treasure.
But really, my main memory of Neil is me, waiting in a busy theater lobby, hoping he’ll arrive soon with my friends.
And so as the new Batman movie opens, I find myself wishing I was with my Clarion buddies all over again. Neil was there for a week, and wonderful, but in truth I spent six of the craziest weeks of my life with Dana, Keffy, Monica, Steffi, Kat, Gra, Paul, E.J., Emily, Megan, Durand, Dan, Mary, Lauren, Damien, Sarah, and Crystal. And I would stand for ten hours in a theater lobby if it meant I could be back with you guys again.