Perfect Awful Moment

I can't plot. As a writer, that sucks for me. Now when I say I can't plot, let me clarify. I can write a story and so, obviously, I can plot. What I can't seem to do is plot a gripping story. An emotive story. A freakin' cool story. I must be an okay plotter, because I've gotten some very nice rejections from editors (see "It's What I Do"). But I KNOW I haven't figured it out yet. That plotting thing. I haven't figured out how to mislead and hide the truth in plain sight. How to play with the readers' emotions. Get them to grin like a fool when they read the final words of the story. I know I'm OH SO CLOSE, but my brain just can't (or won't) make that final connection so that I GET IT!

Connie Willis, obviously, figured it out:

I could not wait to become a writer and learn to do that - trick and mislead and hold back information and make one thing look like another and hide the clues and leave the red herrings out in plain sight and feed out the line little by little till the reader's hooked, and then land him!

Or even better (again, from Connie):

Of all the joys of reading, the best is the surprise. The awful moment when you realize who really killed Gatsby....

What I wouldn't give to write a story that contains a moment so awful that it floors the reader and leaves her gasping (at least figuratively). But my plotting is too simplistic for that. I have these "awful moments" in my head, but they don't materialize on the page. When I'm writing, the plot gets smoothed out and homogenized and left for dead by the side of the road (can it really do all three of those things?).

So outline it, you moron! Know where you're going before you ever put fingers to keyboard. Don't you think I've tried that? My brain, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to think that way (the plotting way). Sure, I can throw in some twists and turns, but they're never strong enough. In my mind I know I've just thrown some twists and turns onto the paper because that's what you're supposed to do. My brain still hasn't grasped the nuance and the meaning of those twists and turns and how to use them to "feed out the line little by little till the reader's hooked, and then land him!"

And create that perfect awful moment.

Just Listen to the Rhythm of a Gentle Bossa Nova

You'll be dancing with 'em too before the night is over, happy again...
[lyrics to "Downtown," by Tony Hatch, performed by Petula Clark]

Okay, I've never danced to a Bossa Nova rhythm, gentle or not, but I'm all about being downtown. I love the ambiance of it. The sensory impressions. When I'm walking along the 16th Street Mall (in Denver) ...

16th Street Mall (between Glenarm and Welton)

... I'm happy. Serene. Even with a gazillion people around me [When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry seems to help, I know. Downtown].

It dawned on me awhile back that this same feeling must be what nature nuts (uh, sorry) what people who like to go hiking up the sides of mountains must feel when they're, you know, hiking up the sides of mountains.

Joyful.

Outside The Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA)

If they don't get this same sensation then I gotta wonder why they're out there. When I'm walking around without concrete beneath me and bricks and steel surrounding me ...

17th and Tremont

... (i.e., out in nature) I don't get any kind of feeling like that. I can appreciate the beauty of it, but it's pretty much like Clark Griswold at the Grand Canyon. A few nods of the head and time to get back in the car. It really just doesn't do anything for me. Sure, it's pretty but, you know, one tree looks an awful lot like another.

The Market on Larimer Square

I worked downtown for over two years and even at the end of that tenure I could still walk outside and feel the city around me and feel rejuvenated.

Trinity United Methodist Church - 18th and Broadway

Who knows, maybe I'm agoraphobic and I need enclosed space.

"Inside" the DCPA

I would tell Oliver Wendell Douglas (Green Acres, 'natch) to take a hike (pun and/or irony intended) [Dah-ling I love you but give me Park Avenue] or the Denver Pavilions.

Denver Pavilions - 16th Street Mall between Tremont and Welton

Besides, where else are you going to find a bear - I mean a really big blue bear?

Colorado Convention Center - 700 14th Street

Exactly.

Hey, the majority of these pictures (perhaps all of them) are courtesy of my beautiful wife, Shannon. Thanks, sweetie!!

MST3PO

Here's a tribute to two of my favorite things. If you've never seen MST3K (or Star Wars, for that matter) then this just won't make much sense to you. But for everyone else, enjoy.

Update: Click here for the Redux and Re-Redux (different versions of this cartoon)

For the curious, or bi-curious, this is a recent creation (tonight, actually). So, yes, it's a new cartoon. Go figure. I couldn't decide if it needed a caption or not. I seem to remember that when I first came up with this idea (literally years ago) I had a caption in mind. But my brain is trying to tell me that it was Tom Servo saying it, so I have no idea what it might have been. Was Tom up on the screen? Maybe they were riffing on MST3K: The Movie, but that's a bit too meta for me right now. I'll have to look back through my notes (yes, I have notes). Um, any thoughts on where I put those?

I found this hi-larious, especially the last thing he says (stolen from the Satellite News website):

A Fine Line

You might not think a line would mean so much. But man would you be wrong. Though I suspect the real answer is: man would you be right and I just get hung up on the weirdest details.

Okay, so what line am I freakin' talking about? Drawing lines. Cartoon lines. I'm doing my cartoons with the computer these days, but I haven't found a line (or, in the parlance of the computer software, the "brush" that I really like).

I've drawn a lot of lines, let me tell you. A lot. It seems like I've tried every brush that Corel Painter X has to offer, yet every time I experiment with my drawing I find more brushes I hadn't noticed before.

I use a knock-off 9x12 USB drawing tablet. When I say "knock-off" I mean it's not an industry darling Wacom Intuos3 drawing tablet with 6D Pen. Those suckers are expensive! So I bought a cheap ($100) knock-off on eBay. Works great, though I'd love to try a Wacom and see if I'm missing anything. I assume I'm missing a subtlety of line that the knock-off just isn't capable of).

But it's the lines, man. The lines! I'm looking for something that looks like it's been done with pencil or pen and paper.

And every time I think I've found the perfect line/brush I find I don't like it after a few days and I draw more lines. There's a lot of scribbling going on. The pics I'm showing are for display purposes. I have scribbled hundreds of lines to find the line I really like.

Part of the problem is that I'll find a line that looks cool at 100% "zoom" but when it's shrunk down to cartoon size, it loses it's character. It's cool.

So I draw more lines. Right now I'm using a canvas of 3000 x 3000 pixels with a dpi of 300. So at full size, the lines might work. But then I have to shrink them down so that I can print them on paper. At that size, the lines can go awry.

And so I draw more lines. The worst part? I haven't even gotten to the characters yet. What will my people and animals look like?

Ack.

When My Wife Reads

I love it when my wife reads to me.

It's What I Do

A shrink (sorry, a psychologist) once asked: Why do you write? I was literally and figuratively dumbfounded. It was so obvious in my head but I had no words for it. None. I stammered out some nonesense (some 20 years ago, now). I don't remember what I said. But thinking about it now and because I am so easily discouraged, why do I keep writing? Do I get any encouragement? Why, yes. Yes, I do. I get encouragement from "lay persons" (non-writers), real (published) writers, and I even get encouragement from editors in the form of nice rejections. What's a nice rejection? When the editor provides a personal note. Tells you:

I've also gotten my share of form rejections. These are the "you suck" rejections. The story was so bad that the editor couldn't think of anything nice to say. Okay, okay, that's not entirely true. Sometimes a form rejection is simply because the editor has no time to write anything personal. Right? Come on, if they really liked your writing, don't you think they'd have time for a couple-word scribble? Yeah, I thought so.

Now you might be thinking that having an editor tell you "oh so close" is pretty cool. You'd be wrong. It's the worst rejection imaginable. It means you're OH SO CLOSE but you have no idea whatsoever how to bridge that gap. How the hell do you (do I) adapt my writing so that I'm no longer OH SO CLOSE but that I'm accepted and published? Ya got me. If I knew I wouldn't be writing this, would I?

The smirky answer (the smirk is on the person giving the answer) is: you keep writing. But that's a misleading answer. Of course you keep writing (you certainly can't publish if you don't write). But if your writing isn't improving then to "keep writing" is kinda fruitless ain't it? Or worse, in vain attempts to bridge that infinite gap from OH SO CLOSE to published (which is no more than a heartbeat across), you might be exacerbating your weaknesses and eliminating your strengths. My strengths. I could be heading in the wrong direction. How the hell would I know? Other than I start getting form rejections again instead of painful and encouraging hand-written rejections.

But, yes, I do keep trying. I do keep writing. Do I get discouraged? What the hell do you think? But writing fiction is the one avenue in my life that I've never stopped doing. I can't imagine not writing. Like James Earl Jones matter-of-factly (watch out for those adverbs, godammit!) says in Field of Dreams: It's what I do. I wish I had that quote with me 20 years ago when the shrink asked why I write. I'd have looked him in the eye and said:

It's what I do.

Scrapper

My first cartoon character was called Scrapper. He was named after a friend of mine whose nickname was, oddly enough, Scrapper. I forget why we called him that (the human, not the cartoon). The cartoon character I created was a chicken ... thing. Here's a quick sketch. I first created him back in high school, and yet I can whip out a sketch today (some 25+ years later).

He was my Opus (Bloom County being the strip of choice at the time). I can still draw a passable Opus to this day, as well. The itch to create a cartoon was strong and so I created one. I drew and wrote a couple dozen strips of Scrapper, very crudely drawn and written. My mom even took them to the local small-town newspaper where it was rejected, of course. If I remember correctly they told me to work on my backgrounds. I think my response was just to be pissed. After awhile I became bored, ran out of ideas, whatever, and stopped producing the strip.

I still have all of the strips around somewhere. If I find them I'll scan in one and show you. But trust me, they were not good.

A Son Turns 21

It's a weird feeling having your son turn 21. Wasn't it just yesterday he was small enough to fit on my lap wrapped in his blankie?

Now he's a full-fledged adult. Ready to take on the world ... right? Cripes. Did I teach him enough? Did I instill the right morals and values?

He's a good kid. No. That's not right anymore.

He's a good man.

I guess the most I can hope for is that he felt loved and that he knows I will always love him.

Happy birthday, Ben.

Best. Batmobile. Ever.

Mattel is coming out with a 1/18-scale Hot Wheels 1966 TV Batmobile that George Barris created. This is without a doubt the best Batmobile ever designed and presented to the world. It'll kick the ass of any other Batmobile out there. I kid you not. For the Hot Wheels version, there'll be three editions:

• Standard (~$35, due out in March 2008). As you can guess, this won't come with a lot of bells and/or whistles. You can probably find this edition at retailers (Toys R Us, Target, Wal-mart, etc.).
• Elite (~$90, due out in May 2008). As seen in the photos below, you can open doors, hood, and trunk. Better detailing than the standard. Limited number and probably will have to get through a website reseller or eBay.
• Super Elite (~$300, due out in June 2008). Same as below but I guess with, you know, super-elite details. Heck, for $300 Adam West should hand-deliver it. Very limited (1,966 being made ... get it?? Want me to explain it?) and only through online resellers and eBay.

Here are some pictures of, I believe, the Elite edition:

Several months ago, they came out with the 1/64-scale version. It took me a couple of weeks, but I finally found one at Wal-mart. They're still not that easy to find. Here's a pic of the small car in action:

Cartoons

I've wanted to be a cartoonist for almost as long as I've wanted to be a writer. The two go together at some level. Obviously, with cartooning you have to write. But you also have to draw. This is the weird thing. I can draw. But when it comes to drawing cartoons, I haven't hit upon a style that I like. I keep dabbling, but unlike writing, my cartooning stints are far and inbetween. It could literally be years between a cartoon. And then I might reel off five or six in a row. Here's my favorite cartoon of mine:

If my records are correct (and I have doubts about that due to some hard disk crashes throughout the years), I drew this in 2002. There's a chance I did this cartoon earlier than that. I put together a batch (as it's called in the business, or so I've heard) and sent them into the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Gordon Van Gelder wrote me a nice rejection (he seems to be a really nice guy). I haven't sent them out since. Who else would be interested in science fiction-themed cartoons? Seriously, that was my thought-process, even though there are probably lots of places that take single-panel cartoons regardless of genre. This is a prime example of how easily discouraged I can get. I ended up publishing them on my other site (http://www.sf-colorado.com/) though that was years ago and you can't find them there anymore.

My First Novel

I've always wanted to be a writer. A fiction writer (I've been a technical writer for over 20 years, it ain't the same thing, trust me, though it does pay quite a bit better on average). Sure, saying "always" is a bit hyperbolic and overused, but it's pretty close as I first dabbled in fiction writing when I was in first or second grade when I plagiarized The Five Chinese Brothers. I loved the book so much that I started writing it out word-for-word. My brother came along and told me dutifully that what I was doing was plagiarism (did he use that word? Probably not, but he still had a pretty good handle on copyright law for only being five years older than me). I was mystified. I wasn't copying the book, I was writing it! Couldn't he see the pencil and the paper? He continued to explain and I continued to have no idea what the hell he was talking about.

Did I finish copying ... uh, writing the book? I doubt it. I'm sure I became discouraged after that and just let it go.