The Uncapped Pen, at last!

 

Over a decade ago, I had the idea of putting together a collection of stories dealing with writing: authors arguing with their muse, or struggling with having too many ideas, or too few, or whatever.  But for reasons, I set it aside, until a few years ago when I figured I’d finish it.  Well, it took longer than expected, and just as I was about to put the final polish on, there was a writer’s strike.  While I’m not a member of the Writers Guild of America, it felt wrong to publish a book about writing during their strike.  But since the strike is over, I’ve now published The Uncapped Pen.  You can find it on Kindle for $3.99, or equivalent.

Let’s talk about fan service

The idea behind fan service is to put something into a work – say a movie – that would please the fans.  However, lately it seems the term “fan service” is applied to any stupid shit that clueless, corporate stooges cram into a movie even though nobody wants it.  My opinion, is that – broadly speaking – there is good fan service and bad fan service.  The problem is that good fan service requires thought to be put into it, whereas any clueless, corporate stooge can cram in bad fan service.  This is something that’s been in the back of my mind for some time now, but it really came to the head recently with The Rise of Skywalker, so I’ll use examples from Star Wars. 

An example of good fan service – again, in my opinion – is the crumpled AT-AT where Rey lives in The Force Awakens.  There’s the nostalgic “I remember those” which seems to be the foundation of modern fan service, but it’s also an element of world building.  We had already seen a crashed Star Destroyer, but Rey’s AT-AT drives home that the galaxy is littered with the wreckage from the fall of the Empire.  If they had better scripts – and a plan – that might have built to something, other than a McGuffin in the wreck of Death Star II.

While I could use the wreckage of the Death Star II as an example of bad fan service – “I remember that” – I’ll go to the Prequels instead.  My example is Anakin building C-3PO.  Why?  To be perfectly honest, R2-D2 could have just shown up in Episode III in a cameo and that would have been fine, and would have fit in with that one line in A New Hope.  There is no reason for C-3PO to be in the Prequels, let alone having been built by Anakin.  Oh, it could have been fun to see how the two droids met if the giant shoehorn cramming them into the plot wasn’t so distracting.  And that is the problem with bad fan service: the eye-rolling distraction of them outweigh any benefit to the story of having them there.  Now, I remember at the time a friend going on about how R2-D2 and C-3PO were the only characters in all the movies, but there doesn’t seem to be a point to that.  Especially with the latest trilogy.  But the Prequels needed some nostalgia, since that’s easier to do than compelling stories.

I used to be a Star Wars fan.  I gave it up in the Prequel days, but this latest trilogy didn’t do anything to change that.  As a former Star Wars fan, I wanted good movies.  That might have brought me back.  But that requires actually writing good movies.  I didn’t want just any random shit to remind me of the good movies thrown on screen as “fan service.” But what can we expect from clueless, corporate stooges who are more interested in making a quick buck than lasting art.

Introducing Possible Futures

I primarily write science fiction.  Sometimes my stories are of starships warping off to meet aliens, but often my stories are set closer to home: maybe a few decades or a century from now.  I’m always thinking about how current technology will change in the next few decades.  This can lead to story ideas, or it can just be a fun way to pass the time.  So I have a bunch of random ideas of what we may have in the future.  Few of these can be the foundation of a story, although a few can fit in as part of “world building.”

Well, a couple of years ago I decided to write up some of these ideas on a website I wrote on.  Part of it was because I earned points for views which – if the site had lasted – I could have turned into actual money.  So you needed to have interesting articles that people would take an interest in reading.  But the main reason is that I feel we don’t spend enough time thinking of the future.  Regardless of how we feel about the matter, The Future is Coming. (That’s the title of my Kindle book of essays about science fiction elements that – I feel – will soon be science facts.)

I wrote a few articles on that site, then it died.  Some months went by and then I looked over these articles I had saved, and I wondered if I could get an ebook out of them.  What I figured I’d do was have short articles on these ideas, mixed in with short stories, and maybe just some random thoughts.  The title I came up with was “Possible Futures: short stories, essays, and random thoughts on life in the coming centuries.” So I had a title, I had the handful of posts I had written along with ideas for several more and … that folder just sat on my computer for months and I didn’t do anything with it. 

Because of life and other projects, my blogging pretty much fizzled out in 2016.  As the year is ending, I’ve been thinking of what I should be doing, and I figured since I already have a few articles, I could just revise them and post them here.  Hopefully, that will get me to finish more posts and maybe someday I will get around to publishing an ebook of possible futures.  I’m setting a goal of trying for at least one post a month, but we’ll see how that goes.