The Shining vs. Doctor Sleep (WARNING: Vague Spoilers For The Hypersensitive)

The weird thing about Doctor Sleep is that it doesn’t feel like a sequel to The Shining, but rather a rebuttal of it.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a follow-up whose themes have been exactly so opposite of its parent book; it’s almost as if Stephen King regrets having written The Shining, and wanted to write something to reflect his new-found philosophies.
Which is not to say that Doctor Sleep is a bad book.  It’s an okay Stephen King book (and how weird is it that there are so many of them that we can rank them to each other?) – maybe a C or C+ in the King repertoire.  But there’s absolutely no reason why this book had to star Danny Torrance and not some other generic alcoholic with a shady past – the Overlook barely features in Doctor Sleep at all.  What really drives Danny Torrence is not seeing his father turned into a monster and devoured by the Overlook Hotel, but rather the seventy bucks he stole from a mother when he was deep in an alcoholic bender.
Realistic?  Maybe.  Danny was five when all of the Bad Things happened.  Maybe what would haunt him would be what he did when he was twenty.  But aside from a (very) brief trip back to the Overlook and a little action that feels uncomfortably too close to Ghostbusters territory, this lead character could have been just about any alcoholic with a psychic twinge.  (And it’s not like both “alcoholics” and “people with psychic twinges” haven’t featured prominently in the King mythos.)
But even more than that, I read the first hundred and fifty pages of The Shining to Gini on the way back from Connecticut, and it’s striking just how dissimilar the stories are.  In The Shining, Danny Torrence’s “gift” is erratic, not a thing that works consistently or well, full of vague dead-ends and ugliness that he can’t control.  In Doctor Sleep, the shine is treated literally like a superpower, where two people with the Shining communicate cross-country with it like they’re having a conversation.
In The Shining, the family is on the verge of breaking, like a barely-healed fracture to a three-year-old’s arm, but recovering; their history is always close at-hand, always throbbing like a cancer, always waiting to resurface.  In Doctor Sleep, Danny has some bad times – very bad times – but fixes them quickly, and that history becomes nearly background material once the new threat emerges.
In The Shining, everything is very claustrophobic; they’re swallowed by in the Overlook and its harsh winter, and cannot get out.  In Doctor Sleep, wild travelling is just a part of the deal, and it’s mentioned explicitly that maybe they could escape by running but dangit, they have to end this.
And in The Shining, the threat brings up inner demons that destroy the family, and secrets devour them wholesale.  In Doctor Sleep, the threat brings them together as a family, and the secrets revealed are ones that really needed to be brought out into the light.
There’s a few similarities – both The Shining and Doctor Sleep revolve around issues that literally would resolve themselves if the protagonists weren’t fuelling it with their shining – but mostly, they’re at odds.  And to restate, it’s not that Doctor Sleep is terrible – like pizza and sex, substandard King is usually decent – but it’s that I had difficulty relating the one book to the other.  Because it really did feel to me that Unca Steven looked back at The Shining and regretted his alcoholic days, then set out (unconsciously, as is his way) to write a book where he told the story of how it would be if he’d handled alcoholism the right way and listened to people and got into the Twelve-Step program, and still try to make it scary.
And make it scary he does, at times.  The True Knot are pretty terrifying villains, even if they turn out to be a bit Warren Ellis-esque in the end.  Yet still, why did this have to be a sequel to The Shining, one of his greatest books?  Why did this have to be Danny Torrance?  Why is the last three-quarters of the book – the one with the crazy psychic fireworks – not nearly as compelling as watching mundane old alcoholic Danny struggle towards the light?
For the third time: it’s not bad.  But as a sequel, it’s bad.  And I don’t think this’ll be one of the stanchions of the King canon.

So I've Loved Doctor Who For Almost Thirty Years Now

I just purchased tickets to see Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary Special in 3D, at my local theater.  This proves the future is wilder than I can imagine, for as a teenaged boy I never could have envisioned Doctor Who being popular.
When I was fifteen, as a young American boy, almost nobody knew who Doctor Who was.  You couldn’t download the episodes, or even buy them, for nobody thought Doctor Who was big enough to be worth selling.  No, the only way you could actually watch Doctor Who was to pray that your local PBS affiliate would give you a handful of Tom Bakers during their semiannual fund drive, and even then they made you pay for it – you’d be barraged with reminders that the only reason they put Doctor Who on was because you, the fans, said you wanted it, and oh, we argued with our bosses to slot this in between operas and wholesome kids’ shows, and I guess if we don’t make this next hour’s pledge target you may never see Doctor Who again.
You had to wrap your life around being a fan, then.  You scheduled days off to catch the few marathons.  And if you were lucky – very lucky – you had a friend like Mark Goldstein, who was obsessive and had taped every episode individually on a VHS tape, with neatly-marked pen letters, and he would lend them to you if you promised to treat them well.  Watching him open that drawer full of tapes underneath his parents’ TV was like seeing the Ark of the Covenant yawning wide – that realization that you could watch all the Who you wanted.
Yet even then, Doctor Who was dwarfed by Star Trek and other wonders.  You could dress as the Doctor and most people wouldn’t even know who you were.  Those who did clasped you to their breasts, but in America?  There were no toys.  If you wanted a Sonic Screwdriver, you either ordered it from England and paid hideous shipping prices, or you built your own.
There was no Internet, or even BBSes.  I remember signing up for Xeroxed newsletters, mailed to me monthly for a small fee by crazy fans trying to cover costs, these typewritten sheets with blurred photographs taped to them – the Gallifrey One, the TARDIS Timesheet – each with little 300-word essays and blurbs on what companion Jamie was doing now, and rumors of the next Doctor.
I remember the wait.  It was almost two years after Colin Baker became Doctor before I got to see an episode.  I had the synopses of what the episodes were like, filtered through some English back-channel, but to see it with my own eyes?  A marvel.  And the whole time, PBS reminded me that they didn’t have to do this, this was very special, it’s a favor.  Send money.
And now Doctor Who is as mainstream as any fandom gets.  You can buy Doctor Who toys in any comics shop, buy the DVDs at Best Buy, and now the anniversary is something so big that we’re all going to go the theater to celebrate.
It feels strange.  I’m not upset.  Even though I don’t particularly like Matt Smith’s Doctor, it’s just so strange to see something that was once so small and huddled and flickering that it was a near-shameful fandom, something so rare that when you met another Whovian you immediately clasped hands and bore a deep friendship, because this fandom cost you.  You couldn’t stumble over it.  You had to go digging deep, to hunt for your love, to track it like a wild deer across thickets of static-filled broadcasts and poorly-spelled newsletters.
Now it’s everywhere.  Which is glorious.  But to me, I’m forever amazed that Doctor Who is common.  One of the big fandoms, maybe even eclipsing Star Trek.  And I look around and wonder what happened, because in my heart I truly feel that it is only me and one or two Companions, travelling in this tiny thing that’s much bigger on the inside, on adventures that no one else manages to notice.
God bless.

When Should I Have Sex With Him?

My friend Bart was talking about some women friends of his who were very confused about when to have sex with the guys they liked.  They want a relationship, but if they have sex too soon, then the guy doesn’t call, and if they waited to have sex too long, then the guy stopped calling after a couple of dates.  So what’s the sweet spot?  When should you move to the boudoir?
So to help you women, and men, I will now tell you when you should have sex with someone.  Or how soon you should call after the first date.  Or when you should ask to move in with them:
When you feel like it.
Note here that these women aren’t asking, “When do I want to do this?” but rather, “When should I do this in order to best emotionally manipulate them into staying with me?”  And as with most things that attempt to manipulate people into falling in love with you, that usually doesn’t work out that well.  If you’re not actually doing what you like when you’re with a partner, then you’re going out of your way to court someone who actually doesn’t like the things you do.
Which means, essentially, that they’re falling in love with a lie, and you’re falling in love with someone who’s unsuited to you.
This isn’t a woman thing, by the way: you see it all the time with needy guys trying to figure out how to get the hot blonde to fall in love with them.  I say, abandon the idea of entrancing them into love with you, and be who you are.  If you really want to call someone the day after the first date, and they find this so needy that they would never speak to you again, well… I hate to tell you, but they’d probably be shit at supporting you emotionally.  The best relationships occur where you naturally sync up, discovering to your delight that hey, I really wanted to hear from you now, two days in, and here we are!
Treating your potential lover like they’re a puzzle to be cracked doesn’t work out well for anyone.  The good news about gaming your partners is that you do, in fact, get more dates, as you’re suppressing all your desires to try to match theirs.  The bad news is that when you win, your prize is someone who doesn’t actually like you.  They like this imaginary construct that you actually hated being.  And as Christina Lavin so wisely sung, “It’s a good thing he can’t read my mind.”
Now, doing what you want to do often means you get dumped a lot.  That sucks.  It’s painful when you like people and they don’t like you back.  But you know what’s more painful?  Waking up one morning four years from now and realizing you’ve wasted several years of your life dating someone who you actually never liked all that much.
I’m not saying not to spruce up a little for your first date.  I’m not saying not to try new things.  But if you don’t want to have sex yet, and they leaves, then you’ve got a jerk who only cared about sex… and if you’re looking for a long-term relationship, then trying to retrain them using some Pavlovian sex-reconditioning usually gets you two unhappy people.
Do what makes you happy.  Eventually, you’ll find someone who likes doing that, too.  And you’ll be able to be happy together without some heavy compromise spackling your mess of a relationship together.
My two cents.

What Have I Found Myself Writing Now? Numenera Roleplaying Modules?

I started a perfectly nice little time-travel story last week: Ambitious, funny, well-characterized.  Yet when I sat down to write last night, what did I wind up doing?
Writing 1,000 words of a Numenera roleplaying module.
Looks like my brain wants to drag me into The Ninth World, kicking and screaming, and I suppose it’s a form of fiction so I’ll keep writing.  The question is, what the hell do I do with a Numenera module when I’m done writing it?  Shanna Germain generously informed me that I could sell my own module if I paid the $50 licensing fee, which seems about right, and it turns out that you can upload a PDF to DriveThruRPG.com and rake in 70% of the profit.  (At least until you make $2,000 at it, at which point you have to get a full Numenera license.)
The problem is, that I feel a good PDF should involve art, so I’d want to pay an artist to do at least some spot illustrations, and then I’d have to lay it out in a PDF in some sort of semi-professional way.  And while Numenera is hot right now – RPG’s Top 10 list is mostly Numenera at this point – I don’t know what “hot” means.  The Devil’s Spine (a Numenera adventure) is the #1 seller at DriveThru right now, and Vortex is #7, but what’s that mean in terms of sales?
So my mind is all like, “If I pay an artist a couple of hundred bucks to do some black-and-white illustrations, maybe offer them 20% of whatever profits gleaned, I can make it look passable.  And then… do I break even?  Can I sell this?  How quickly can I get this to market, while people are still hungry for Numenera?  Can I be, you know, the Activision of Numenera modules?”
Because I’d want to get this out within the next month, tops, and maybe within the next two to three weeks.  And then, I dunno what kind of sales one could expect to get on these.  Might be a net loss.  Might be impossible to find an artist.
The problem is, I’m writing it.  I can’t not write it.  Like the way my short stories bubble to the surface of my psyche, it’s arriving whether I monetize it or not, and Numenera isn’t accepting outside submissions.  So come a week or two from now I’m gonna have like 7,000 words of roleplaying adventure sitting on my hard drive, and I feel like I should be trying to make a profit off of it… but I want it to look nice and be clean as well.  I don’t want to sell dreck with my name on it – no, goddammit, I want this to be like The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, a damned fine module that’s fun to read even if you never play it.
What’s the short, spoiler-free pitch (for I’m running my players through this starting next Monday, and don’t dare let them know what they’re in for)?  It’s this:

Nothing truly dies in the Ninth World; the technology of old civilizations was so advanced that mere time cannot stop them from carrying out their purpose.  The great wonders of the past may crumble, may degrade and function erratically, but the massive networks that held together star-spanning empires keep working long after people have long forgotten their purpose.
Unfortunately, the past’s more trivial works are just as enduring.

Anyway, I don’t know.  If you’re a good, quick artist and feel like drawing some crazy-ass roleplaying things for a mild amount of money – for I’d never ask anyone to work for the exposure, just for “not enough cash as you’re worth” – then contact me.  If not, well, eventually I’m gonna finish this damn Numenera module, and then if anyone has any advice or thoughts on it, I’m willin’ to listen.

A Grand Adventure: Dining At Michelin-Starred Restaurants?

Because we’re addicted to MasterChef, Gini and I have always wanted to taste the judges’ food: yes, we’ve heard Gordon Ramsey, Graham Elliott, and Joe Bastianich critique foods, and we’ve been told they’re awesome at it, but how do we know?
So I’m pondering whether one of my 2014 goals shoud be taking some trips out to visit their restaurants.  Graham Elliott is in Chicago, a pretty easy weekend trip; Joe Bastianich’s Babbo is in New York, a little trickier, but that also gives us a taste of what Mario Batali can do.  Both are Michelin-starred – Graham got his rating last year, whereas it looks like Joe’s dropped a star or two but that’s still pretty good.
(And it’d be nice to plan weekends alone with Gini.  We love spending time with friends and family, but here it is six weeks after our anniversary and we still haven’t managed to get away for it, and I doubt we will.)
The problem is that Michelin’s snooty.  They only seem to cover New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.  (There’s idle rumors of Cleveland getting its own Michelin Guide, but never having dined at a Michelin-starred restaurant, I literally can’t say how we’d stack up.)  And if Gini and I want to drive out to eat at snooty restaurants, we’d like to hit some of the best within driving distance.
The question is, how do we determine the absolute finest dining experiences within an eight-hour driving range?  Michelin stars are a nice, easy thing to shoot for.  And Yelp reviews or friends’ recommendations seem a little low-scale for a meal we’d be basically treating as a mini-vacation.  Is there a better guide than Michelin that top-tier cooks treat as, essentially, a little Oscar, or is Michelin it?