Introducing the Fantasy Novelist’s Exam Scoreboard

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If you read fantasy novels, you already know that there are a lot of writers who aren’t able or can’t be bothered to create settings and characters of their own. Perhaps even more annoying are the ones who just take the same old tired characters and put some transparent and irrelevant ‘twist’ on them. It doesn’t take a detective to unmask these efforts. In fact, it only takes a few questions. It’s a bonus if the questions are funny.

In the top section of the sidebar over there you will now find a link called Fantasy Novelist’s Exam Scoreboard. If you’ve been around a while you’ve heard me refer to the exam before; it’s a list of questions all aspiring fantasy novelists should ask before they get too far writing their epic. It’s a tongue-in-cheek list of seventy-five reasons to drop your project and start over. If you answer ‘yes’ to any question, it’s time to scrap the story.

Alas, there are dozens of stories published every year that do not follow this advice, and are riddled with lazy world-building and tired clichés. The creatures that occupy those worlds are defined in Dungeons and Dragons manuals.

Often as I’m reading these stories I’ve wished that I could have a checklist on hand to tally up the score as I read. Orc – check. Mysterious parentage – check. As the party for the quest (check) assembles, a few stock characters appear (check, check, check). There have even been a couple of stories I’ve read to the end only to see how many more recycled ideas drift through.

Now I have the technology! I can add a story to the database and as I encounter each example of literary laziness I can fire up the iPad or any other handy computer and add to the tally.

And you can, too! I’ve got it mostly set up so other people can add novels to the scoreboard as well. If anyone asks nicely, I’ll get them set up to add their experiences to what promises to be an important database in the world of literature. Or something like that.

As I write this, the only novel in the database is my unfinished fantasy parody, which weighs in at a whopping 17 points (so far). I’ll be adding a couple more titles shortly, and I also intend to integrate the code with Amazon, so the covers and other info will display automatically. That’s going to have to wait for a bit, however.

Anyway, take a look! I’ll probably put up a notification here or with a comment when I add a new novel, and you can watch the score increase as I read. What fun! The questions (the actual creative part of this endeavor) are from here; I just added the buttons.

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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I’d heard good things about Steig Larssen’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and when the movie came out my sweetie and I both thought we’d rather read the book before watching the movie. So, as a Christmas gift from us to us, we bought the book and its two sequels, and packed them along with us on the train.

IMPORTANT: If you don’t want to know who wins, STOP READING NOW! But really, you know already.

The books, all three of them, are pretty good. My sweetie and I may differ on which is the best; she hasn’t read them all yet, and so far I get the feeling our opinions diverge.

The first book is a mystery, while the second leans toward thriller. The third… I’ll get to that.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo puts a disgraced journalist in a position to solve a decades-old mystery and at the same time vindicate himself. The only problem is that a lot of talented people have spent a lot of time trying to solve the mystery, and all have failed. However none of those people had a 90-lb. dragon-tattooed social basket case who can hack just about anything helping them. Salander is pretty damn messed up. And with reason. Messed-up enough to carry a trilogy.

The start of the book is devoted to setting up the mystery. There’s tons of backstory about most of the main characters, long expositional dialogs, and then Blomkvist (the disgraced writer) gets a chapters-long exposition about the events of long ago.

I have to admit I got tired of all the exposition, especially since much of the backstory was then covered again in the natural discourse. At last all the setup is done and we can get on with the story. It’s a good story. As Blomkvist closes in on the answer to the original question, a new, larger evil looms, one still alive decades later and ready to kill any who come too close. It gets intense. Gritty, tight, anything-can-happen intense.

Then the book ends with five chapters or maybe more of literary masturbation. Let’s not talk about those.

Book two, The Girl Who Played with Fire was my favorite. It gets going and keeps going all the way through to the end. Funny thing here — it could be argued that this volume doesn’t end, which would put it right into my pet peeve wheelhouse. But the book does end, I say. Without giving too much away, the bad guys are stopped, the good guys are bleeding but probably not going to die, and if there was no third book, you could stop there and fill in the masturbatory chapters yourself.

What carries the story on is Salander’s past. She was not treated well, and it turns out the people responsible have a lot to lose. Book Three starts with a rapid undo of the conclusion of Book Two. Bad guys caught? Whoops! No! The cops were incompetent and for some reason see no problem with letting two people who tried to kill each other hang out in a hospital together without anyone watching them. Anyway, action resumes.

Then we get procedural. While I liked The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, it was my least favorite of the bunch. We see a lot of people doing a lot of things, and then other people doing other things, but for much of the book I didn’t get the feeling that the stakes were rising. Not for the central plot, anyway. I suppose this was supposed to be a chess match between the good guys and the bad guys, but the only source of tension was that the author deliberately withheld key parts of the good guys’ plan. Things got interesting after a while, when the bad guys start living up to their bad guy reputations. There’s also a crime that involves a gun that no one seems interested in tracing. Hm.

On the plus side, some of the character relationships do not follow the usual script. Alas, I can’t tell you about them. Just know that with my writer-cap on, I smiled.

I wonder if Steig Larssen heard the bell tolling and rushed the third book. It feels like a decent draft of a pretty good story. He just needed to go back and put Blomkvist’s balls into a slowly-closing vise, and find a better threat against Salander (top choice, Salander herself).

The end is reasonably satisfying, with a little more literary masturbation on the side. Maybe that’s why I like book two the most: Since Larssen planned to undo the ending anyway, he didn’t spend a lot of time adding public adulation towards the main characters. They fight through, and with talent and sheer will they prevail, and the story ends while they’re still bleeding. Maybe dying. But they won. We don’t have to know who made a bunch of money for a photo of a corrupt official being arrested, or how the television news validated our disgraced journalist. They won against evil, at terrible cost. The worldly rewards cheapen the victory.

A buddy of mine recently said (something like), “I read your reviews, and I like them, but it seems like you don’t like anything.” That’s actually not that close to what he said, but I have to admit I dwell on the negative more than the positive. Understand that the primary purpose of these critiques is to make myself a better writer (or at least a better editor). And honestly I have nothing against masturbation, it’s just that I don’t enjoy watching some Swedish guy do it.

All that said, these are good books. I liked them.

On a barely-related side note, while setting up the Amazon links above, I also found

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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It’s really not that hard.

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I’ve had a bit of a tangle with Adobe recently. When it comes right down to it, their Web site makes it very difficult to find what you’re looking for, or even to figure out what product is best for you. This has led to a few frustrating days of going around in circles, trying to find someone to help me rectify a mistake caused by the “click Mac and get Windows” feature of the site.

This is apparently a pretty common problem for people to have, and there are instructions telling just what to do about it. Much of the time the instructions are not very helpful, however. After a day of futility I decided that I would do whatever it took to get a human on the line.

Easier said than done. For instance, the “Schedule a callback for another time” feature invariably returns with the message “No immediate callback available. Try again later.” I thought maybe the more-secure settings in Safari were causing a problem, so I tried again with Firefox. Same result.

Finally I connected by chat with a nice guy who was not empowered to execute the obvious, simple, and immediate solution to the problem. We had to do it the hard way.

Somewhere during my latest futile rummaging around on the site (“Click here for instructions”, then the instructions saying to go right back where you were, and so forth), a window popped up asking if I wanted to answer some questions about my experience.

You’re damn skippy I wanted to answer some questions. When my latest exercise in circular navigation was complete, the survey came up. “Neutral third party,” I was assured. “No specific identity info recorded.” I took the survey, being sure to give credit in the few places it was due. I answered the essay questions with specifics. In the end, I clicked ‘submit’.

“System not working at this time,” the message said.

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A New Language Low

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Many of you out there have heard me rail against the verb ‘login’. You would never say ‘I loginned to the Interwebs.’

‘Log’ is the verb. In the case of technology the verb is followed by a prepositional phrase starting with ‘in’ or ‘into’ to describe where the logging happened.

Thank you, Adobe Systems, for taking my pet peeve to the new absurdity. In an official communication I have been instructed as follows (copy-paste here, so the capitalization is also theirs): Login into Your Account with the ID listed above

Yeah. Login into. Is anybody reading this before it goes out?

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A Real Vacation

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As my sweetie and I traverse the final leg of our journey to New Mexico and back, I have a moment here in Union Station to reflect on our vacation. It was a good one. We poked around Santa Fe, took in the Black Hole and the Los Alamos Historical Museum, did a bit of shopping and had a big, if belated, Christmas dinner.

But the main thing I did was read. I could have spent the time writing or working on any number of projects, but instead I opened up a book and settled in. When that book was done, I opened another. And another. Perhaps in the next few hours I’ll compose a review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels. I certainly have a few things to say about them.

More likely, however, as we wend our way up the coast on the Pacific Surfliner, is that I’ll open up a book.

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Frankenstein

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We’ve all seen the movies, with the hulking, shambling monster, a sin against nature, moaning and grunting and raising hell until the villagers with torches and pitchforks bring him down. It turns out that those Frankenstein movies have about as much to do with the original work as the movie I, Robot had to do with the original work. Which is to say, it’s pretty much the opposite.

When Mary Shelley wrote her seminal story, she made a monster that is big and powerful, but also swift, dexterous, and above all articulate.

The monster is condemned by one thing only: he is so ugly, so unspeakably hideous, that every human, even his creator, cry out in horror and shun his company. So ugly that at one point he is cast out by people he’s been secretly helping for a year, once they get a look at him.

He’s a little pissed off about that. Does that justify the evil he perpetrates? The monster argues quite eloquently that it does. His is the voice of the outcast: If you will not treat me fairly then I shall wage war upon your kind. Dr. Frankenstein is almost convinced that he should help the creature.

Did I enjoy the read? Really… it was ok, but not great. I finished it, though it hardly gripped me. Shelley loves her some English language, but ultimately I think the language owned her, rather than the other way around. All the characters spoke in long paragraphs of high-falutin’ language that ultimately wore me down. Surely at least one of the people in the story could have had a different voice.

Though I did have to laugh at the biggest “as you know Bob” I have ever read. An “as you know bob” is a part of the story where one character tells another something they both already know, for the benefit of the reader. In this case, there’s a letter from Frankenstein’s sweetie that says, “allow me to spend a few pages telling you about the person who lived in our house for five years that you used to love but may have forgotten.” She even tells Frankenstein how he used to laugh at the girl’s jokes. In case he couldn’t remember. Wow.

Functionally there were parts of the novel I couldn’t swallow as well. People not acting like actual people. An assumption that people born to wealth are inherently more interesting, even after they’ve fallen on hard times. Then there’s the part where a guy lives in close proximity to a family for an extended period without being detected, even while he was actively helping them. If chopped wood appears in your woodpile each morning, might you not watch one night to see who your benefactor is?

The good thing about this story is that, unlike the countless derivatives, it is not a simple “man’s creation turns on him” tale. In this one, the creator turns on his creation first. Because it’s ugly. Culpability for the evil that ensues is shared. The well-spoken monster gives the creator plenty of chances to make things right—in the eyes of the monster. In the end, when the hatred that has sustained him loses its focus, the monster knows that it is time to go.

No villagers with flaming torches and pitchforks here.

The more I think about it, the more I think Hollywood is ripe for this story, the way it was originally written. “the bad guy is really the good guy!” is a staple now. The tragic fallen, the victim of society and all that. Shelley was ahead of her time, and now is her time for a Hollywood resurgence. A good screen adaptation could do Shelley the favor of giving characters distinct voices and trimming the long-winded passages as well.

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A Visit From Steve

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Steve Jobs came to visit me in a dream last night. He was a younger version with badly-bleached hair that turned out on the orange side. He was very animated as we discussed the best way to add advanced table features to Safari. Steve was as intense as people say he was when he was alive, and we got along great.

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My New Favorite Fine Print

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At the bottom of the screen in a TV commercial: “Santa Impersonation”

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Door-to-Door Storage in San Jose: an exercise in incompetence

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First let me say that my experience with Door-to-Door Storage in San Diego was exactly the opposite of the story I’m about to tell. I’m about to tell a story of a business that has proven unable to get even the smallest thing right on the first try. To the best of my knowledge, the absolute incompetence is strictly local — although the corporate HQ hasn’t seen fit to do anything about it.

It started when I moved overseas. I sold my house and disencumbered myself of most of my stuff (so much stuff!) but there was a nucleus of belongings that I thought would be useful when I started my next home in the US. So I paid a monthly charge to have someone else store it. Door-to-Door was awesome because they brought a big box to my house, I packed it, and the they took it away. Because they can store the boxes efficiently in a big warehouse, it costs less than a self-storage place.

Over the next few years I would visit my stuff now and then, and the people in San Diego were friendly, accommodating, and helpful. I never had an issue with them (except the one that was totally my fault, and they were cool about that once we got it worked out). But I don’t live in San Diego, and there’s a Door-to-Door facility up here, less than five miles from my apartment. Eventually my sweetie and I decided it was worth the considerable expense to have the big box of stuff moved up the coast to Silicon Valley.

And then the nightmare began. Before the move I agreed to a new rate based on an annual contract, and made sure that there was nothing else I needed to do. Nope; money was paid, contract was set up, and the box with most of my worldly possessions was loaded on a truck and hauled up to San Jose.

Two months later, I wanted to visit my stuff in its new home. It’s a pretty simple procedure; you call in and make an appointment and they make sure that the box is pulled from the warehouse and waiting for you when you arrive. I called to make an appointment. Confusion ensued.

The system didn’t show my box in the San Jose warehouse. I spent some time on the phone with a very friendly guy in the national office. He determined that the box had been properly recorded leaving San Diego, but had never been checked in in San Jose.

Well, crap.

After a few more days it was discovered that yes, the Big Box of Stuff was indeed in the San Jose warehouse. Hooray! As a way of apologizing the corporate guys gave me two months free, based on my annual rate. After all, my annual contract was in the system. (We actually had an extended discussion about the contract based on a misunderstanding on my part.) At that time there was no doubt at all that I was paying an annual rate.

So, finally, I made an appointment to get into my Big Box of Stuff. The day arrived and my sweetie and I went down to the facility. There wasn’t much in the way of signage, but we found the office and the woman recognized my name. She told us how to get to where the BBoS was waiting.

It wasn’t there. We checked and double-checked, and the BBoS was not there. We spoke to the guy who moves the boxes. He flipped through all his work orders and there was nothing about our BBoS. At the front of the building they knew my name; at the back no knowledge of me had penetrated.

There is obviously a computerized system that manages where all the various BBoS’s are. Just as obviously, the people in the front office of San Jose’s Door-to-Door storage don’t know how to use it.

Anyway, the fetcher of boxes left and some time later returned with our BBoS. The only catch: it was still sealed shut from transit. Usually (according to the very friendly box-fetcher), boxes are sealed with two or three screws. The San Diego Boys had used maybe seven, all clearly marked with spray paint, and Friendly Box Fetcher didn’t have the proper tools to unseal the BBoS.

Our man persevered, and eventually we got to our stuff. The important takeaway here is that Door-to-Door San Jose took more than one try for every single operation.

And then the invoice arrived, charging us at the monthly rate, rather than the annual. Twice as much, even as it showed the initial “incompetence credit” (my phrase) for two months at the annual rate.

It has taken months to get this straightened out (if it truly has been – I got a call the other day that I didn’t pick up). In that time I dealt with friendly and competent people at the national level (email replies in minutes with useful information, with a real feeling for personal attention), but the errors made by the San Jose folks took a long time to erase.

I’m hoping they’re erased, anyway.

Message to Door-to-Door: I like you guys, but your San Jose franchise is awful. Do something about it.

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The Little Comet that Could

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Ah, the Internet, with its almost magical ability to give you what you’re looking for — even if you didn’t know you were looking for it. Through a series of links that started with a Web comic, I learned of a little comet that just played chicken with the sun and lived to tell about it.

The best summary is on this page, which at the top says “it’ll be interesting watching this comet flame out as it passes through the million-degree corona of the sun.” As it gets close the discussion talks about new and interesting things about this comet and what it can show us about the sun, then suddenly the author says (mildly paraphrasing here), “Holy shit! It came round the other side!” A decent video of the comet shooting out the other side is here.

The comet actually left its tail behind as it whipped around the sun, and there’s really cool footage of the comet streaking toward the sun, leaving a trail (probably) whipped around by magnetic storms. It’s all pretty cool.

Part of what’s interesting to me about all this is just how many devices were available to observe the course of comet Lovejoy. In the coming days, as more data comes in from other observers, we stand to learn a lot about our home star. You know I’ll be checking in.

[Edit] Let’s try embedding this youtube video, shall we? It’s a little wider than my format, but I think that will be all right this once.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPJ3Xbl9nZM

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I Just Slid Wikipedia a Couple of Bucks

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I use Wikipedia regularly, and apparently it’s costing them a bundle to keep the servers going. While I have on occasion had issues with the way they run things, overall this is shaping up to be a humanity-changing effort. So I slid them a couple of bucks. If you use Wikipedia a few times a week, you should too. They’re looking for big donations, but if everyone voluntarily pays just a little we get closer to the utopian ideal.

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Maybe not the Right Way to Show Support

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I’m in a bar, and on one silent TV I’ve watched the same helmet-to-helmet tackle over and over. This is a big deal in American Football these days, as folks realize that slamming your hardened plastic shell into someone else’s hardened plastic shell causes both brains to rattle around in their fluid suspension dangerously.

Helmet-to-helmet is not good for brains.

So I’m watching this incident in super slo-mo, and it looks petty bad at that speed. The guy that got hit lay flat on his back for a while, took a breath, and got up. One of his larger teammates came over to encourage him and no doubt express admiration for his toughness. He did this by — wait for it! — slapping his quarterback on the helmet.

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Facts Suck

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I had a get-poor-quick scheme all put together in my head, the result of musing while flossing and thinking “there has to be a better way!” I thought I was just a little bit of genetic engineering away from perfect teeth forever.

Foolishly, I actually went and looked up some facts before I wrote up the post. I’ll not be making that mistake again! Holy crap facts are the last thing I needed, and not really in keeping with the get-poor-quick ethos.

I did learn that the surface of your teeth is host to an amazingly complex and adaptable ecosystem with 1000 different kinds of bacteria, forming a complex structure that changes as time passes. My little genetically modified tooth scrubbers wouldn’t stand a chance; there’s nothing I could invent that’s not already in there and part of the system.

Unless…

Hang on, I’ll get back to you on this after I don’t check some more facts.

*Sigh* Back to flossing.

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Cutie of the Day!

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Last weekend Harlean Carpenter (who is a fiction) and I did a Christmas-themed photo shoot. While I concentrated on even lighting that didn’t flatten the subject and limiting the depth of field, Harlean concentrated on looking good.

After little bit of post production Harlean sent off one of the pics to Bachelor Pad Magazine, where online Harlean is the Christmas Cutie of the Day! (The Chirstmas Cutie pictures are safe for work unless your work is uptight. MSFW, I think the kids call it.)

We definitely got an old-school feel for the picture that I quite like. Go check it out! Quick, before the day is over!

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If Daniel Craig were an Athlete, he’d Play Hockey

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I just saw an ad for a movie that featured Daniel Craig, and it took me back to my time on the set of Casino Royale. Though the action was theoretically in Miami, we were in Prague in February.

Daniel Craig was a total pro. Easygoing, just another member of the cast, doing his best.

There’s a lot of time between shots in a project like this, and during a break Craig was sparring with his coach (or was it his on-screen adversary? facts are skitterish). Maybe he was working to keep warm, maybe to make the fight scene better.

He hurt his wrist. Not a big injury, not the sort of thing that slows down a pro. When he reported the setback he seemed a little embarrassed about the attention his discomfort brought. I wasn’t in his head at that moment, but I think he might have regretted bringing it up at all. But he’s a pro, and a pro tells his director if there might be a weakness in his game.

Which is totally the opposite of soccer, which I presume through national profiling is Craig’s sport of choice. Can you imagine what a soccer (football, according to Craig’s people) player would do with a minor wrist injury? Lie on the field and cry like a baby, that’s what. Aaaaah! how can I kick a ball with this terrible pain in my wrist?

Note to proponents of the game: get up off the grass and play and maybe you’ll convince me.

There are sports where the ability to shrug off a minor tweak is still valued, but when it comes down to being embarrassed about being hurt, about not wanting to make a deal of it at all except how it might affect your team, then we’re talking hockey. That’s where Craig was that day on set. He was a hockey actor.

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