Short Pier Productions

My Yuletide story ended up being a bit shorter than I intended, but it's still up to code and on time. Hopefully my recipient will enjoy it.

Writing it crystallized something about my particular writing process. The skeletons on which my stories are based are almost always the conversations between the characters rather than the events of the plot. I write the dialogue first and fill in the action and description later, which is probably utterly bizarre to some writers.

I'd probably be a great script writer; I think in conversations.

The successor to this note which in turn followed from this one.

1) I'm watching more television now than at any previous point in my adult life: Castle, Venture Brothers, Doctor Who, Sarah Jane Adventures, Fringe, Smallville, Burn Notice, White Collar, Leverage, Human Target... and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. If you ran all my shows together in one sitting it'd be like Saturday morning when I was a kid.

2) There are only two game shows I will ever love: Whose Line Is It Anyway (the British version) and QI. In other words, game shows that aren't really game shows but excuses to get neat people together to do neat things. I love the fact that they both embrace failure and that both crews are always willing to embarrass themselves for the greater laugh.

3) The Kids in the Hall were my Monty Python growing up. I loved the Pythons then and I love them even more now, but the Kids were the ones that me and my friends would rush back from classes to eat in front of.

4) I try only to keep books that I want other people to read, and that goes double for graphic novels. About a third of my comic library is floating around to different people at any given time. Right now I have one friend reading 100 Bullets and another reading Fables, and I'm waiting gleefully to start passing around Ex Machina and Astro City.

5) Every year I set myself a media consumption goal. For three years the goal was to watch 100 movies in 12 months, and I made it every time. Since then I've mostly fallen off the movie wagon--the last couple of years I've seen maybe a dozen new movies per annum if I was lucky. Recently, however, I got Netflix... and built a collected queue of about 200 in under two weeks. It still grows every time I look at it. I haven't even touched it for television series.

6) In the car earlier today I was reflecting that I really need to get a copy of Brick, LA Confidential, and Wag the Dog now that I have a real job and can afford it. Wag the Dog has a special place in my heart, and anyone who loves it is always welcome in my house.

7) A couple of weeks ago I found someone else who was introduced to The Prisoner by watching Harlan Ellison do an all-day marathon on the SciFi Channel in his bathrobe. It made me so happy.

8) I never got around to watching Buffy even though I always intended to. It was one of those series that everyone hyped up so much that I didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole. I'll probably start cranking through it some time next year, safely insulated from the show's attached phenomenon.

9) There's a local comic shop that I love dearly and have been supporting for ten years now. I started off there because I wanted to get in on J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars from the ground floor, being a big fan of superheroes and Babylon 5. I ended up hating it by the end (and his current run on Wonder Woman makes me want to shake him really hard), but I do owe him a little gratitude for the hundreds of comics by other writers that I now have in my house.

10) I love bad movies. My dad used to watch MST3K with me (my mom and my sister didn't think it was funny at all), and eventually I branched out with my friends to start heckling movies ourselves. Old favorites include Zardoz ("Starring Sean Connery's chest hair."), Sinbad of the Seven Seas ("Oh no, not the nipple trick again."), Beastmaster 2 ("Some guy masters some beasts. He's done this before, apparently."), Dungeons and Dragons ("I attempt to disbelieve!"), and many others.

Thought of the inevitable fandom I should have made sure was offered. Ah well, I'll make a note for next year.

Well, at least over the nomination process. I found not one but four fandoms that really, really should have been on the list and weren't. One of them has never been on the list.

I'm contributing!

On Doctor Who canon.

Just neat.

So, I just watched the Burton Batman again (for the first time in ten years, but I still remember the exact intonation of 90% of the lines), and I'm pondering the difference between Nicholson's Joker and Ledger's.

Nicholson's Joker is neurotic both in performance and in writing. He gets his references wrong, he's a ham because he wants the attention, and he seems to want people to respond to him. He's the class clown, if you'll pardon the pun. There are moments of brilliance in the performance, but they're almost always the pauses between his film-long song-and-dance routine. The show he puts on is neither funny nor scary, but the moments beneath it are still frequently compelling.

In a lot of ways that Joker is truer to the comics than Ledger's, but then most Joker stories in the comics are written badly. It's easy to have the Joker be a sideshow attraction, to focus on his aesthetic as opposed to his psychology. But when the Joker is done right, he is never, ever goofy no matter how ridiculous his surroundings or methods. Goofy implies that the character is in some way wrong, but the Joker isn't a villain because he sees the world incorrectly-- he's a villain because he sees the world with crystal clarity and doesn't care. He needs to be a sociopath first and a psychopath second, or he doesn't work.

Which is why Ledger's Joker is better. He cross-dresses, he does magic tricks, he over-elaborates and grandstands; but you never forget that there's something cold and hard inside him that could kill everyone in the room. If he's performing it's because he wants to show contempt for his audience, to make his actions that much worse by dressing them up as fun and games. When he laughs, he's laughing at you, not at himself.

Which is as it should be.

Awesome.

Samurai Star Wars.

Yuletide posted with an hour to spare. I ended up around 6000 words, with around 3000 words on the cutting room floor.

And I have to say, I'm pretty damn happy with it. Hopefully my recipient will be too. :-)

I'd forgotten, sadly, that while writing is something I can sit down and do in chunks, editing is something that I sit down and it sucks me in for indeterminate time periods. I think I still have enough time, but the schedule today's going to have to be a wee bit different than yesterday.

Editing status
Scene 1: First pass complete, moderate revisions. Close to right.
Scene 2: First pass complete, heavy revision done. Close to right.
Scene 3: Needs a pass. Tone's wrong, although some of the dialogue can stay.
Scene 4: Basically fine.
Scene 5: First pass complete, moderate revisions. Could be longer, but the heart is there.
Scene 6: Basically fine.
Scene 7: First pass complete, really heavy revision done. May be right, need to check later.
Scene 8: First pass complete, added a bit to the end. Beginning and ending are aggravatingly close to being tuned properly.
Scene 9: First pass complete, heavy revision done. Very close to right, except possibly the last line.

The lesser of the two emotional dialogue scenes to fix and expand, then the first real whole-story go-over.

As yesterday, this post updated as progress occurs.