The Avengers: A Spoiler-Free Review

Joss Whedon understands what we want out of the Avengers, which is not to see Thor and Iron Man teaming up.
No, what we want is to see Thor kicking Iron Man’s ass.
Thankfully, this is what the Avengers delivers: lots of hot hero-on-hero action. Who cares about the villains? We’re not nearly as invested. What we need to see is our favorite hero battling our other favorite hero to a standstill.
And ho, there is lots of that. Delivered for competent reasons – the Avengers have very good reason to be hostile to each other. And the fight scenes are pants-wettingly cool, in that sort of musky good-fluid kind of way.
The Avengers is stuffed with so many characters that character development practically has to happen via pithy quotes, which is why it’s a good thing that the King of One-Liners, Joss Whedon, wrote it. The plot generally keeps moving, and the Big Bad is helpfully played by Loki, who is played so wonderfully that you barely notice he has practically no character development or motivation at all.
Frankly, the least interesting character on the team is The Hulk, and Whedon seems to have made up for that by giving the Hulk all the best… well, you can’t really say “lines,” but let’s go “moments.”
There are a couple of minor issues I have: Captain America becomes a tactical genius at the end not by dint of anything he did in either of the two movies, but because he’s a military guy. And the final battle consists of just a shade too many generic mooks getting pounded, leading to a hair of tedium.
But overall? What you’re looking for, it delivers. Big, splashy superhero battles done with coolness. Jaw-dropping fight scenes. Laughs. As far as a tentpole movie to kick off the summer season (sort of…) it works, and as such I can tell you that if you had the urge to see this movie you’re almost guaranteed to be correct in your assessment.
Not that this was going to stop you from seeing it this weekend anyway. But let me reassure you that the money you spent on the ticket already is certainly worth it.

Busy Busy Bees

Here, I show you my bald spot and my comfort with bees. I’m not sure which is more terrifying.

Why I Don't Self-Publish. Me. May Not Apply To Anyone Else.

My friend Kat Howard had an excellent post yesterday on why she doesn’t self-publish, in which I had to admire the way that she avoided the usual self-publishing nuttery.  Usually, most self-publishing arguments boil down to “ZOMG I DO IT AND SO EVERYONE SHOULD” or “ZOMG I HATE IT AND SO EVERYONE SHOULD,” and Kat – as she is wont to do – admitted that self-publishing works very well for some authors, but not for her.
Part of it is that she doesn’t want to burn her writer-energy on things like formatting manuscripts and copy editing and finding good cover art.  But the other part is notable:

“…Which leads me to the other reason that, right now, I’m not looking into self-publishing as an option: audience. The problem with the fact that it’s so easy to self-publish means that a lot of people do so, and it’s very hard to find the signal in the noise. Books get lost. And again, I understand that this doesn’t always happen, and that traditionally published books can get lost in the crowd, too.”

Now, I do have an audience, and I’m pretty sure I could use my blogging as a platform to sell my stories profitably.  I’ve had my publishers note that when I point people at my stories, there’s a notable uptick in traffic.  So why don’t I skip the middleman?  And there’s a very good answer:
I write better for publishers.
I’m inherently lazy, and I’m pretty sure if I was just writing for people who already liked me, I’d do two or three drafts and call it a day.  I’m not in competition with anyone but myself, and revising is a real pain in the ass, so without that pressure I’m pretty sure I’d slack off.
When I’m submitting a story to Asimov’s or Lightspeed, however, I know my story has to compete with, quite literally, the best authors in the business.  These are people with quantifiably more talent, bigger audiences, better storytelling.  And so before I send it on there, I sweat every line, revising five or six times, getting more crits, getting more feedback…
…and what emerges is a better story.  Some people don’t revise well, but I’m not one of them.  I get stronger with each draft (as you’ll see from my notes on the first draft of my Nebul-nominated story “Sauerkraut Station”).  And I hate revising so much that unless I’m really driven to it, I won’t.
My novel that I’m flogging around now?  Was exhausting.  I’m pretty sure if there wasn’t a big ol’ toll-taker sitting at the gate, demanding my very best work, I would have said, “That’s good” after three drafts and called it a day.  As it was, I did six drafts, and I’ll probably do two more before I can call it a day.  And revising 105,000 words takes weeks, man.
Now, this is a highly personal opinion, because I’m sure there are self-publishers who can treat it like a job and do the seventy necessary revisions, and there are of course writers who polish off two drafts and it’s as good as it’s gonna be.
But me?  I have a reasonably large audience which I could sell my stuff to… And what I give to them can’t be substandard.  That’s the contract I have with them.  My blog posts are as good as I can make them, and my stories – which are far harder to write – need to be even better.  Because I’m a blogger who’s becoming a writer, and I’d say my audience at this point is now roughly 65% “I like what Ferrett says in his blog” and 35% “He’s a good fiction writer.”
To get those percentages to keep tilting to the fiction end, I need to be driven.  The idea of the gatekeeper may be old and inefficient, but damn if it doesn’t light a fire under my ass.
And that’s why I don’t self-publish.

A Project I Think You Can Fund

It’s been a pleasure to be friended to Stacey Tappan for several years now, and the main benefit of being friended to her is that occasionally she’ll post videos of her singing.  For she is a professional singer!  Of opera!  And a damned good one.
Now, she is involved in a labor of love.  She adores composer Ricky Ian Gordon, and so she created a concert of his songs, to rave reviews – like this one!

“The collaboration of Stacey Tappan and Ricky Ian Gordon in Once I Was produced one of the most outstanding musical events of the Chicago season. Technically masterful and exquisitely expressive, the duo’s artistry memorably illuminated some of the finest American art songs of recent years. This program eminently deserves to be heard in major venues nationwide and to be preserved on disc.”
Roger Pines, Dramaturg, Lyric Opera of Chicago

She found this experience to be so moving that she wanted to commit it to CD.  Her voice is amazing.  If you don’t believe me, watch this movie of a take of her recording session:

But she still needs more – to pay the musicians to record their parts, the mixdown, the distribution.  As such, she’s funding a small project on IndieGoGo – you can get the CD when it’s done and a bunch of special extras.  It’s worth it.  She’s good.  And she puts good into the world.  So if you can, throw it out there.  She’s nearly complete, but she needs your help to make this happen!

Being Herded By Sheepdogs: Overly-Elaborate Musings On Convention Space

Convention hotels are a lot like Hungarian sheep dogs; they’re both subtle and profound.
Now, that’s a hell of a metaphor to process on a Monday morning, so let me tell you about the time Gini went and played Frisbee with a bunch of friends and their Hungarian sheep dogs.  They’d spread out in a big grassy field, as you do for a good athletic game of Frisbee, the dogs bounding and bounding around them… and ten minutes later, they’d realize they were accidentally flinging Frisbees directly into their friends’ face.
The sheepdogs were herding them, you realize.  Not overtly; just a clip to the heels here, a dog underfoot there, and next thing you know everyone’s standing in a ten-foot circle.
Gini always laughs nervously when she tells that story, as if the sheepdogs had hypnotized her.  It’s funny… But it’s also an example of how subliminal stimuli cause drastic changes.  And if you’d told me how critical hotel layouts would be to shaping a convention experience, I would have laughed.  But it’s crazy how a hotel will change the experience you have.
Ideally, what a good hotel will have is a flytrap – i.e., some large and central hangout space where all the traffic is naturally funnelled through.  If you’re in search of company, you can just go to the flytrap and have the world flow by, because your buddies pretty much have to pass you if they’re going anywhere else.
Such conventions are merrily convivial.  You meet more people, because you accumulate.  You start talking to someone in the flytrap, he sees his friend passing by and calls him over, and wham!  Suddenly, you have a new friend.  Then that new friend calls his buddy over.  Next thing you know, you’re making con-pals by the score.
If you want to remove yourself from the flow, simply exit the flytrap.  It’s that simple.
A mediocre convention hotel will have a few gathering places – sometimes it’s the con suite, sometimes a bar off to the side, but you have to find and then hunt three or four spots if you’re looking for someone.  It feels uncomfortably like you’re prowling sometimes, going to the coffee shop to see if there’s anyone interesting, then headed up to the con suite, hunting for a group of people you know to pal around with.
These cons tend to be less mix-y.  You still meet people, but the groups are a little more segregrated – like calls to like, and if more often than not the writers are hanging in the bar and the cosplay people are down in the lobby.  You’ll meet other writers if you hang with the writers, but your chances of cross-pollination are lower.
The terrible convention?  Has lots of eddies and secret spaces – back-room bar areas that can’t be easily seen from the outside, lobbies with five chairs (and nobody wants to stand, it feels like lurking), narrow hallways.  You can’t find a space where masses of people can gather, only fours and fives.  You may not even know where people are unless you text them, text them constantly.
In circumstances like this, people default to the consuite.  But at that point, the suite becomes overloaded because everyone is going there, and it usually overflows, becoming claustrophobic and hot.  So people stay in their rooms behind locked doors, gathering with old buddies.  It’s incredibly hard to meet new people at cons like this, unless you luck into the right room.
And it’s weird, because from a “normal” perspective, this breaking up of spaces is a good thing.  When I’m staying solo at a hotel, if I gather in the lobby with a few buddies, I don’t want strangers walking up to me.  So a little solace is actually clever design.  But in con-mode, I’m usually looking to circulate, and when the people could be in one of twelve different microspaces, that makes the con experience more difficult.
(And while I’m at it, why does it always seem like at every con, there’s that one friend who you run into every twelve seconds, and the person you’re dying to hang out with but never actually see?)
It’s just odd, how much space can reshape our interactions and experiences. Con-time is an odd rush of emotions and friendships, created in a pressure chamber, and as humans we’re usually not wanting to acknowledge what herd animals we are.  But the hotel space is one big puli sheepdog, quietly affecting us in ways we don’t fully fathom.