[Starfall/ACRA] Metal Fire #9, False Maria 03
Wil Alambre
METAL FIRE #9
"False Maria 03" by Wil Alambre
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Afternoon passed into twilight, twilight to evening,
evening to a dark, dry night. A light breeze came off
from his left somewhere, and the tickle of a cloth or
curtain caught in it brushed the hairs on his arm ever
few moments. The silence was broken only by the
rhythmic thumping of his own heart and the
mechanical monotony of the tap tap tapping of
keyboard typing.
The night dragged on slowly in the way it does
when you're lying awake in bed waiting for Christmas
morning. He held very still, listening to the typing,
desperate for a change in its regularity. And he tried
hard not to breathe quicker when that change came.
Almost unnoticeable at first, but surely. The tapping
dragged between taps, the space between
keypresses growing longer and longer, until they
stopped altogether.
He was left alone with the crushing sound of his
rapidly beating heart and the whisper rasp of his
breathing.
He didn't move right away. He stayed still, waiting,
to see if the typing would resume, as if the person
responsible would start awake suddenly. Or was testing
him. But he stayed still even more. And he counted
seconds to count minutes and when he lost count trying
to keep track, he waited even longer. Just to be sure.
And only when he was sure, did Ed Babbage open his
eyes. Not exactly open. One eye was amazingly sore,
and kept skipping from blurriness to stark focus. The
other wouldn't open at all, swollen shut.
Nearly two days ago, he had been abducted from his
apartment and beaten to an inch of his life. Or,
more correctly, his limp unconcious body had been
abducted from the remains of his exploding apartment
and he was beaten to an inch of his life while tied
down in a chair. If your going to do something, go
all the way.
He had feigned unconciousness, trying to think of a
way out of this predicament. It wasn't to big stretch
on his acting skills. He had been unconciousness for a
good stretch of time. Fading in and out, not really
sure if he was awake or not, he hadn't felt this way
since high school. On the plus side, less vomiting was
involved.
He noted he was in a different chair than before, this
was one of the crappy plastic metal types you find at
thrift stores as part of an unmatched dining set. His
legs were tied to the chair, and his arms were tied
behind him, causing an annoying ache in his shoulders.
If he twisted his head, he could almost see the ropes
binding his wrists. He felt the knots with his fingers,
and silently thanked his parents for forcing him
through boy scouts as a child.
Gritting his teeth, he yanked at the ropes, feeling
the knot slip. Yanked again, more space appearing
between the ropes and his wrist. The fibres were cutting
hard into his skin, but this time, he had enough
leverage to barely get the end of the rope between two
fingers. A tug here and a pull there, and the ropes fell.
His arms were free.
The first he did was rub his hands and arms. They hurt
like hell. Then he went about getting the ropes off his
legs. He stopped once, listening, but the only sound he
heard was the breeze and himself. Less than a minute
later, he was standing, free.
Less then a minute after that, he was in the bathroom,
taking a long, long piss. His bladder eternally thanked
him.
He deliberately avoided looking into the mirror. He
couldn't imagine how it could possibly look worse than
it felt. If it was true, he didn't know if he could
stomach it. He did take a moment to spit up a tooth,
and wash the sticky dried blood that matted some of his
hair.
Coming out of the bathroom, he let his vision focus to
the darkness of the apartment, focusing on the mountain
of computers and monitors and televisions stacked on and
around the desk arcoss what passed as the living room.
With the only light the flickering colors cast from the
screens, you wouldn't be far off in guessing there was
a teenager slumped in front of the keyboards, possibly
asleep from working much too long.
Not too far off.
Eddy figured his first priority was to get the hell
out of there before his abductor realized he was free.
His stomach had other ideas. He honestly couldn't
remember if he'd eaten in the past couple days. Or
more correctly, been fed. Once in the kitchen, his
appetite was willing to overlook the squalid selection
in the cupboards and fridge, and soon he was enjoying
a peanut butter and mayonaisse sandwich and a
refreshing glass of warm, flat rootbeer. He was
considering helping himself to the half empty box of
sugary cereal, but the smell of the carton of milk
seemed to lean more toward the curdled cheese area
than he was willing to risk.
His hunger sated, he came out of the kitchen slowly,
a bit worried his abductor might have been roused. He
needn't have worried. With a bit of courage, and what
might be growing limp, he walked right over to the
unconsious form. Even his heavy footsteps weren't
enough to get any sort of reaction from the girl.
A girl.
Even now, Eddy wasn't so sure about that. Here, up
close, in better light, it was still hard to wrap his
head around it. A teenage girl, it was fairly obvious,
she wore not a scrap of clothing. She had shoulder
length hair she liked to tied back. She had budding
breasts that didn't need a bra just yet, but obviously
would a couple of months down the road. She even had
the lump of a callous on a finger of her right hand,
the kind someone gets when they write or draw a lot.
Her skin shined silver the way a pop can does. Her
breathing was more like the low whir of an electric
motor. And where her arms met her shoulders, he could
make out the sliver of space where the plates fit
together. Without thinking, he reached out and
touched her shoulder, her skin sterile and smooth,
with just a hint of regular bumps or edges, like
scales maybe.
A robot. A robot that looked like a girl.
This kind of thing was only supposed to happen
in comic books, but there she was. Hunched over, arms
crossed onto one of the keyboards before her, head
tucked to one side, eyes closed. The most amazing
thing he'd ever seen.
And she almost killed him. Twice. Sheesh.
He touched her shoulder again, boggled at the
feel of her skin or shell or whatever it was. She
didn't seem to notice. He put his whole hand on her.
Nothing. Then he gave her a bit of a shake. She
didn't even change the rhythm of her breathing. Was
she sleeping? Do robots sleep? He shook her harder,
this time almost pushing her off the desk. The only
response was the blip and flicker of the computer
monitors as the screensavers were turned off by the
jostling of the mice and keys.
She must have worked herself into exhaustion. Eddy
noticed it the night before too, when his hunger
and thirst had dragged him from the pits of
unconciousness. At first he was worried about waking
the girl for a drink, worried she would smack him
around again, but soon he realized he could probably
conk her on the side of the head with a shovel without
interrupting her beauty sleep.
After a couple hours, she would wake up and go
right back to work, if last time was any yardstick.
But for the meantime, Eddy frowned, his only company
would be his bruises, and with any luck, he would
be soon far, far away from here. Looking at the screen,
he hoped she'd be more interested in whatever it was
she was working on then trying to find...
Eddy looked at the screen. The computer screen in
front of him. Then the one beside it. The others
around, in all sizes.
Oh, he thought.
Oh shit.
- - -
Kimberly Roberts dreamed.
She dreamed she was seven. Or six. On summer vacation,
playing in a park, on a checkered picnic cloth laid out
under a sky filled to brimming with puffy white clouds.
She had new presents. Her favourite toys when she was
young. New legos. The kind with gears and rubber bands
that you could make into moving cars and things.
She dreamed she could hear her mother to one side.
Trying to get her to eat something. Chicken sandwiches
and apple pie in tupperware bowls. Lids that made
farting noises when they opened and made Kimberly
laugh. She ignored her mother's half hearted scolding,
indistinct compared to the building blocks she was
playing with.
She dreamed her father was all smiles. Let her play,
he urged, and gave Kimberly more of the legos. More
blocks and pieces. Kimberly giggled.
She dreamed her mother was getting more desperate.
Calling her name.
Calling her name.
Calling her.
Calling.
"...ake..."
A pop and hiss, the sound speakers make when they
get used for the first time. Kimberly groggily squeezed
her eyes, feeling sleep being dragged away from her.
She felt so tired.
Tired. When was the last time she felt tired. She
didn't even know she could feel tired anymore.
"Up! Up!"
Her mother's voice, already fading into that unreality
dreams become when you wake up. Except for Kimberly,
they drowned in system startups and program resets. Her
mind reorganized itself, blinking on. The voice being
recorded and processed and analyzed.
Male and desperate. Familiar. And closer than it
should be.
"Up! Come on come on! Wake up!"
Her eyes snapped open. Literally.
She noted a few things fairly quickly. That it was
late at night. The exact time appeared at the edge of
her vision subconciously. That she couldn't move. System
settings scrolled half noticed, all operational yet
non responsive. That the man she had tied up was free.
Sitting beside her. That the computer monitors in front
of her were on.
An operating system she'd seen only once before, all
bleeding edges and spiral logic. Micro universes
birthing and dying in imagined binary processes, all
organized into a psychological directory structure.
Only once before, but she recognized it. As she had
then.
It was her. It was her mind.
"You fuck."
"Listen, you have to listen to me..."
"You fuck you fuck you fuck!" she screamed at him.
"I should have killed you! I should have killed you! I
should have flattened your head on the floor I should
never have stopped!"
"This isn't..."
Her vision took a red tint, everything derezzed
into simplified geometrical blocks. Distance were
measured in seconds from anything, objects were
represented by weak points and pounds per square
inch required to deform it.
"You're dead! You're fucking dead!"
- - -
"Greg? I think we have a problem."
Gregory Reeves blink furiously, digging himself out
of the half sleep had fallen into. Already his back was
aching from the uncomfortable position he had almost
dozed off in.
The clock on the wall said it was the wee hours of
the morning, just late enough to start calling it early
the next day. Though you couldn't tell it from the
featureless room and the unflinching flourescents. A
timesheet somewhere would justify this as another long
night of unpaid overtime for a vice president somewhere.
An under the table paycheck from a nearly nameless
party would justify it for Gregory and the two
programmers he regularly supervised.
Getting up, he walked across the room to the desk of
a twenty something whose name he couldn't remember. He
managed to mutter something that sounded like an
appropriate question.
The kid directed his attention to the screen,
specifically to a telnet window with scrolling
variables and status updates. Heavy traffic on
the wire.
"What am I looking at?"
"System memory usage for the upper consiousness."
"What?" Gregory was wide awake, watching the
numbers spike.
"Hey, what's going on?" called the other tech,
across the room. "Emote systems just went over
to red."
The numbers starting reorganizing themselves,
scrolling by at terrifying speeds. Gregory's stomach
started to do flip flops as he realized what they
meant.
"She's awake."
"What?"
"She's awake!" Gregory desperately tapped the kid's
screen. "She's consious. Why did you wake her?"
"I didn't wake her!"
"She's definately awake! Look at those upper
cognitive processes!"
"Oh fuck, is she pissed!" from across the room. "I'm
completely in the red here! Her reflexes just switched
to military mode!"
The kid was frantically typing away at his keyboard,
switching between programming windows and status
updates.
"I don't understand it," he said weakly. "Her
movement is still locked down, her power's still in
standby. She shouldn't be able to move."
"She can still trace us!" Gregory almost yelled.
"Hit her with morphine emulation. Flood the braincase
with oxygen." With any luck, that would effectively
drug the system, giving them enough time to put it
back into heavy REM mode.
- - -
The red tint washed away suddenly, replaced by a
pastel blue. Everything Kimberly saw suddenly shifted
into shades of blue, threatening to mix into each other.
Caught midway through her tirade, she shut her eyes,
and growled.
"Damnit, no! No!" the man's voice spun away from her,
and was followed by speedy tapping on at least two
different keyboards nearby. He was doing it again,
right in front of her. He was raping her mind.
She couldn't think straight. She couldn't move her
arms. They felt like lead weights at her shoulders,
like she would slump over any second. Her head was
filled with cotton, making thoughts thick...
Cotton... Kimberly...
Calling her? Daddy?
A stream of words against the blackness of her shut
eyelids, and she felt letters being dragged back
together again. Her thoughts weren't as muddy anymore,
just quieter. Like whispers.
"Come on, open your eyes. Please."
Doing so, she found the blue splash still on
everything, only the shadowed edges of anything being
visible in a darker hue. Her tormentor sat nearby,
facing her again. She snarled at him, but felt almost
impotent, her rage tucked away somewhere.
"My head..."
"It's not me." said the shadow. "You have to
believe me, its not me."
"Fucking liar."
"Think about it, why would I? Even if it was me the
first time. Look, I'm free, I got out of the ropes. I
could have just left. I should have just left."
She didn't reply. She didn't get angry. She wanted
to get angry. She wanted to kill him, right now. But
the blue seemed to wash over everything. She hadn't
felt this way since she had tried those mushrooms with
Sally Bickham in junior high.
He did make sense. He seemed to, anyway. She almost
killed him last time. She almost killed him when she
blew up his place. No way anyone was stupid enough to
do it again, right?
Then again, he seemed like the stupid type.
Why was she thinking so slow?
She tried to think back. Only remembering wasn't the
same as remembering used to be. Now the flashes and
triggers of memories were filenames for detailed logs.
If she wanted too, she could switch over to a state
of photographic memory.
She thought back to last night. This night? When had
she fallen asleep? There. A couple hours ago. She was
working, typing. Then she fell asleep. She didn't even
know she could sleep anymore. She remembered he was
tied up. Distinctly. Then how did he...?
She skimmed ahead, increasing framerate. There,
there it was, when her mind was opened up to the
outside. Like a door being opened, and a flood of
people wandering around and touching everything.
She could see it all now, now that she was
looking for it.
She could see everything about her they were
trying to change.
Or erase.
And she could see the name of the man responsible.
Hidden in the recesses of her mind, amid logic bombs
of code and binary.
"Hamilton."
She opened her eyes, the haze of blue still there.
The man's shape had turned to look at her. The bottom
of her vision was blurred, the pixel resolution
smudged and undefined.
"Are you okay?" he said.
"I'm crying." Kimberly whispered. Hamilton had done
this to her. Was doing this to her. She could still
feel it, the dirty awful dragging of findernails
against her thoughts. Clumsy changes to her head.
Hamilton was trying to finish her father's job.
Finish making her into a monster.
The bottom of her vision squirmed, shifting colors
like a magnet next to a tv. She could feel the tears
slide down her blue steel cheek.
"I'm crying," she repeated. "I'm not the monster
they want me to be. I won't let them make me the monster
they want me to be." She looked at the blue shape before
her, his face only distiguishable by an image stored
in her short term memory. "I won't let them. I'll need
you to help me."
- - -
"It's not working. Its not working," the kid said. He
rolled around in his chair, knocking away papers off his
desk. "If I can find a base version on CD, I can dual
boot the system and force unconciousness."
Gregory was no longer hovering over the kid's shoulder.
He was at the desk beside him, slamming away at a
keyboard, watching with horror as their latest uploaded
system patch not only wasn't updating the intended
software, but was being disassembled.
"She's taking it apart!" a yell from behind him.
"She's taking it apart, she's decompiling it to source
code." A pause, then, "Oh shit. Oh shit, I commented
that code."
Gregory wasn't listening to the others. He had
already figured out what was actually happening to
their source code. And like the other two programmers,
he had left comments in the code. Like reminders and
notes and cheat sheets to make it easier to understand
the structure of the system. Dates and times and names.
And he was watching it being unravelled and
decrypted.
In a few minutes, the most powerful mobile weapon
on the planet would know who had been fucking with her
brain. And they'd just spent nearly a year making her
a more agressive, violent murder machine.
"Purge it!" Gregory spat throught gritted teeth.
"Purge it all!"
"I can't, my admin access is being assigned to
someone else."
"Then purge the patch. Don't let it be decoded.
Rename the files and then erase it while you're still
the original user."
Gregory's screen blinked and went black.
Disconnected. He heard the telltale winking sound
from two other screens. Disconnected.
"I just got booted," said the kid, surprised.
"The file?"
"I... I got it. I deleted it. I think he might
have copy pasted maybe a couple dozen lines, but I
trashed it before he got anything important."
That remained to be seen.
Gregory held his head in his hands, sweat racing
from his pores. His stomach was worse then ever
before, it knew how much trouble they were in. He
knew it was only going to get worse.
He left some instructions to the two programmers
to go through the offline logs. Find out what went
wrong, find out where they screwed up.
Gregory went into his office.
He had to make a phone call.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Author's Notes
So, this is the third issue of my first four issue
Metal Fire arc. It was written a couple months after
writing issue 8, but never posted. And other than
passing it to a friend for some basic grammar and
spelling checks, is exactly as originally presented.
So, though it doesn't carry the REPOST imprint, this is
an issue I haven't written recently.
Which means, of course, I haven't incorporated any of
the excellent critical advice I've been receiving :) And
that brings us to...
Letters Page. Tom Russel has been kind enough to
review issue eight of Metal Fire. If you haven't read
over it, you can read it here:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.comics.creative/msg/1b8f4572a98f7816?dmode=source
First, yes, I have worked in a cubical environment in
the past, though not as a manager. It is a little
impersonal, but I can't believe that all mamagers are
just trying to pass off more work and terrible deadlines
to their charges just for better stock options and more
golf time.
Tom makes a couple good points concerning issue
eight. The pacing I'm particularly happy with, and glad
it worked well. I worry though because (as you're sure
to notice, most likely having read the above issue
beofre getting to this point) this issue seems to hit
all the same beats.
Worse yet, not only do we have the switching of
point of views, but this time it *does* jump "in and out
of the room". Hopefully it comes across as not too
jarring. :)
Next point: Kimberly. I like where Eddy is, in terms of
character, I'm pretty comfortable with him. I'm trying
to write Kimberly as a character who's not only been
through a lot, but who has had her brain turned into a
computer program, and then had that computer program
messed with to be a robotic weapon of sorts. As if I,
as a man, wouldn't have enough trouble writing a teenage
girl to begin with :)
So, expect her characterization to be all over the
place. Well, truth be told, until I get more experience
in writing in general, expect *everyone's*
characterization to be all over the place :) But for
imberly in particular, I want to make it more all over
the place. Because of what's happened to her, I have
a built in story excuse for her to suddenly shift moods,
ideas, etc. Cheating, yes :P
More Reeves here, and he'll appear again next issue.
Poe will be in next issue in person, as well. Hamilton
will only be mentioned and (sorry Tom), still no Val.
The nanites and Val's subplot is going to be moving,
but at a snails crawl in comparsion... so I'm
experimenting in trying to keep that popping up without
making it's (and Val's) appearences suddenly and
obvious ("oo, remember this, oops, its gone again").
Clumsy attempts for a bit, I apologize in advance :)
I will endevour to have anyone who appears in person
be a little more than one dimensional. It will, in all
lieklyhood, come across as forced next issue, but I'll
figure it out eventually.
And finally, Tom's observation of the dangerous
dichotomies and moral extensions... damn, more good
stuff I didn't intend, but may have to keep in mind
when drafting future issues :)
Tom Russell
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
...
And so, we reach the third part of "Waggish" Wil Alambre's "False
Maria". In his notes section-- and let me thank Wil for responding to
my comments at such length-- Wil has this to say:
> Tom makes a couple good points concerning issue
> eight. The pacing I'm particularly happy with, and glad
> it worked well. I worry though because (as you're sure
> to notice, most likely having read the above issue
> beofre getting to this point) this issue seems to hit
> all the same beats.
Actually, though, I would have to disagree. Now, there's certainly
some structural similarities between the two. As far as the meat of
the story-- Eddy and Kimberly-- are concerned, the story starts with
Eddy regaining consciousness, tied to a chair, and becoming gradually
aware of his surroundings; he and Kimberly get into a very heated
argument that threatens to turn violent. But the substance of the
"beats" are in actuality very different.
In issue eight, Eddy is helpless, completely at Kimberly's mercy. Most
of the scene plays out in his headspace, and I think this is the right
move because the burden of suspense-- the feeling of danger and
jeopardy-- rests squarely on him. We're interested in what's up with
Kimberly, but we're more interested, at least at this point, in whether
or not Eddy's going to make it out of this place alive.
In issue nine, Eddy is more cautious: he bides his time until Kimberly
is unconscious and then quietly frees himself from his chair (very
resourceful). He is rewarded with an opportunity to escape, but he
chooses instead to help the girl, who awakens in time to fly off the
handle again.
And yes, this is somewhat _similiar_ to their argument in issue eight,
but the circumstances are different: Eddy is no longer at her mercy,
but rather playing "hero" (or, at very least, "decent human being");
having learned his lesson from issue eight, he tries a different tact
in convincing her that he's not the one "raping her mind".
What I like about Eddy is that he's very smart, a very fast learner:
like a good A.I. program, he's careful not to repeat his mis-steps. I
like seeing intelligent protagonists, especially in suspense/action
fiction: it forces the villains (and the authors) to come up with
bigger and better and cleverer hoops to leap through.
And I think this approach of Eddy's, at once tactical _and_ somewhat
sentimental (I mean, to be _truly_ intelligent, he shouldn't be waking
up or helping the robot that's tried to kill him) is what makes the
difference between issues eight and nine; furthermore, I think the
slight structural repeat is a solid device to get this point-- that
Eddy's learning-- across.
I grumbled a bit in my comments on the last issue about the sudden
shift in POVs.
>
> Worse yet, not only do we have the switching of
> point of views, but this time it *does* jump "in and out
> of the room". Hopefully it comes across as not too
> jarring. :)
And it wasn't so much that it was jarring, Wil (though it was a bit),
but rather that I have a strongly-held bias against viewpoint shifting
in suspense-driven fiction. It's much, much harder for a writer to
stay with a scene, keeping suspense building, staying in the room; it's
also much more rewarding for the reader.
But in the case of issue nine, the viewpoint-shifts are definitely in
the service of the story because this installment is not
suspense-driven the way its predecessor was: this is using suspense to
refer to danger, to action, to the thriller elements, the nail-biting.
It's more of a mystery story, asking the reader to consider why certain
people take certain actions, and this offers a pleasure that's more
cerebral than visceral.
Certainly issue number nine starts off on the suspense track: stuck in
Eddy's viewpoint, we get no more information than he does. And this is
why, I think, for most brands of suspense, an author should stick with
one viewpoint. An exception, of course, would be Hitchcockian
suspense, or what I would call The Other Shoe Suspense: giving the
reader more information than the character, so that we wait as he
unwittingly steps into a trap-- that is, we wait for the other shoe to
drop.
As Eddy considers his predictament and makes his moves, we get into his
head: the "suspense" portion provides us an opportunity to get nice and
cozy in his headspace. Wil is then canny enough -- whether he knows it
or not :-) -- to switch us from "suspense" mode to "mystery" by way of
a seemingly extraneous episode: Eddy, after escaping but before trying
to wake Kimberly, stops by the kitchen to have a peanut butter & mayo
sandwich. It's such an odd little detail (and yet very realistic), and
it effectively derails the relentlessness of the suspense, centering
our attention not on Eddy's predictament, but Eddy's choices and why he
makes them: this sets us up for his decision to try and wake Kimberly.
(Ah, hell, I'm just going to call her Kim.)
When we switch to Kim, it is at first in the context of a dream. Now,
this is one of my few criticisms of the story thus far: as a dream, it
doesn't really work, for me. Personally, when I dream, it's never
idyllic but rather very wonky. People do things in my dreams for
reasons I cannot comprehend; it's not so much symbolic in the Freudian
or Jungian sense as it is bizarre and trippy. (Even my "Realistic"
dreams are trippy in their own, low-key way.)
Maybe this is just me, my personal experience, intruding on my
enjoyment of what for others would be a perfectly realistic dream
sequence. I dunno; most movies in which dreams are represented fall
short for me, too: either they go way too far into the surrealism,
where it detracts from the rest of the film, or they're just
picnic-postcards from childhood.
There was one movie I saw in which I thought the dream sequences were
really well done. It was a really bad and pretentious local indie film
called DADBOT-- a very muddled satire of
"dead-scientist-trapped-in-robot" 80's sci-fi family comedy. One dream
the scientist's son has, just after the scientist has been murdered,
goes like this:
Billy: "Dad, I'm going to be late for school!"
Father: "How are we going to get there?"
Billy: "In your new car!"
And that's it; it's completely unexplained, but its very very potent,
it speaks on a subconscious level about grief. (If only the rest of
that film could have been that true and painful and deep.)
But I digress from my main point, which is: the viewpoint shifts arouse
our curiousity. When we jump into Kimberly's headspace, the realities
of her existence as a robot are rendered in telling and exciting
details. When the focus shifts to the Reeves subplot, its
juxtaposition makes it perfectly clear what's going on, and, I might
add, it gives the reader information Kimberly and Eddy aren't privy to:
it's very rewarding, then, when she figues it out (a protagonist
catching the shoe in midair is just as exciting as seeing it squash
people).
So, in this issue, I think the viewpoint shifts are nothing to
apologize about, and when Wil left the room, he did so with a visible
purpose. Like fellow Dearbornian George Peppard was fond of saying, I
love it when a plan comes together! (He's buried about a mile away
from my house, in a family plot. People leave cigars there all the
time.)
Wil worries about not living up to the promise of his opening, but so
far, I can say that he's exceeding expectations. He's a very good
plotter, he's very good with mood and character, and he can come up
with some eloquent/surprising/amusing turns of phrase. I think in the
latter case he might need to do some tightening up so that his wordsong
might have more "oomph". A couple of examples:
> refreshing glass of warm, flat rootbeer. He was
> considering helping himself to the half empty box of
> sugary cereal, but the smell of the carton of milk
> seemed to lean more toward the curdled cheese area
> than he was willing to risk.
Especially with a sentence of that length, it might be better to say
"the smell of the milk carton seemed to lean more towards curdled
cheese than he was willing to risk", or, even more concise, "the smell
of the milk leaned (leant?) more towards curdled cheese than he was
willing to risk"; I think the 'seemed' is a bit extraneous here.
I wouldn't render the sentence as "the milk smelled like curdled
cheese" because I think the impact of the sentence is in "lean"; it
conjures up an image of Eddy mentally comparing it on the Scale of
Curdliness, the smell inching towards one end instead of the other. To
cut out "lean" is to cut out the whole point of this great subliminal
image.
> Less then a minute after that, he was in the bathroom,
> taking a long, long piss. His bladder eternally thanked
> him.
>
In this case, it's a bit impercise: "eternally"? I think these two
sentences provide a nice moment of grungy comic relief, but "eternally"
kinda sticks out like a sore thumb.
I think it's really a missed opportunity for the sentence, "his bladder
prostated itself in gratitude." Or, if you want to more subtle and
accurate, "prostrated".
And though the details are scattered about the story nicely, they do
seem to pile up at the beginning; maybe fewer flourishes in the first
couple of paragraphs might increase a feeling of versimilitude, as the
reader wouldn't be distracted by their frequency: might be easier to
get into the story at the start. I dunno.
These are really minor quibbles; it's a pleasure to read sentences like
these in the first place, sentences that are not only clever but
intelligent, sensible, and evocative of both plot and mood. Many
writers can't turn a phrase like Wil can.
Hell, I wish I could. :-)
==Tom
Martin Phipps
the story directly I feel compelled to comment on Tom's comments.
Tom Russell wrote:
> Wil has this to say:
> > Worse yet, not only do we have the switching of
> > point of views, but this time it *does* jump "in and out
> > of the room". Hopefully it comes across as not too
> > jarring. :)
>
> And it wasn't so much that it was jarring, Wil (though it was a bit),
> but rather that I have a strongly-held bias against viewpoint shifting
> in suspense-driven fiction. It's much, much harder for a writer to
> stay with a scene, keeping suspense building, staying in the room; it's
> also much more rewarding for the reader.
It's funny. Tom is younger than me but I feel lately as though Tom's
tastes lend more towards the 60s whereas I seem to be a product of the
MTV generation. It's true that quick cuts make for some awful cinema
(Catwoman and Man on Fire are almost unwatchable) but for TV,
especially TV shows in which there are half a dozen regular characters,
quick cuts allow you the opportunity to either solve two crimes in one
hour or follow an entire case from crime scene investigration to
courtroom verdict. Without quick cuts a scene that takes ten minutes
to read or watch would only advance the plot by ten minutes. To me,
ten minutes feels like an eternity. After four minutes, I'm more than
ready to change scenes. That's the attitude of the MTV generation.
Compare TV crime dramas in the 70s to TV crime dramas today. In the
70s, a Columbo episode would start from the killer's point of view but
after ten to fifteen minutes the victim is dead and then Columbo shows
up and the rest of the episode is told mostly from his point of view.
With other detective dramas there was no POV shift at all: the story
was told from the point of view of the detective who we follow through
the entire story. Police dramas like Starsky and Hutch, Adam 12, CHiPs
(actually the 80s I think) were all similarly told from the point of
view of two cops who were partners. I imagine detective/crime novels
are the same, although I've never read any, prefering science fiction.
(Issac Asimov's Caves of Steel followed a murder investigation
completely from the POV of a cop who was partnered with a robot. Does
that count?) Romance novels are usually told from the woman's POV as
that is the target audience, although the only novels that I've ever
read that qualify would be Tess of the D'Ubervilles and Wuthering
Heights. I imagine all of Dicken's stuff was from a single point of
view because Great Expectations was told from Pip's (was that his
name?) point of view and, although I've never read A Christmas Carol or
Oliver Twist but just seen the movies, they seem to follow the POVs of
Scrooge and Oliver alone, respectively. All the old novels from that
era seem to be like that. It actually seems a bit old fashioned.
Nowadays though, we have CSI in which scenes cut quickly between seven
or eight characters who are often working on more than one case. On
Law and Order, the POV switches after the half hour point from that of
the police to that of the lawyers. In both cases it takes about a half
hour, including commercials, to go from finding the body to making the
arrest. That's so much faster than before! If you watch CSI, CSI:
Miami and CSI: New York back to back you can see six cases solved in
the amount of time it took Columbo typically to solve two. Instead of
"Just one more question!" it's "We found your DNA. You're under
arrest. Next case!"
I actually think Star Trek also had an influence. Back in the day, the
Networks wanted writers to focus on the big three, Kirk, Spock and
McCoy but fans liked the fact that it was an ensemble cast and
subsequent Star Treks (Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager,
Enterprise) ended up focusing on seven main characters at a time. (Any
more than that turned out to be too much.) Sometimes an episode would
be devoted to one character but, more often than not, scenes would
switch back and forth and there'd even be a B plot to keep occupied
those who were not actively involved in the A plot. Mission Impossible
is another example: Phelps would assign five or six team members,
including himself, to a case and since everybody brought their own
skills, each of them had very specific roles to play in the mission and
the story would cut back and forth between each of the characters
relentlessly. It was actually before it's time. Of the Star Wars
movies, The Empire Strikes Back, The Return of the Jedi, the Attack of
the Clones and the Revenge of the Sith all constantly involved POV
shifts between Luke and Han or Obi-Wan and Anakin. And most of the
time, these POV shifts worked extremely well. In tradegies, a POV
shift allows you to see things from more than one perspective, meaning
that you can understand why someone does something and yet still know
that it is wrong. These storytelling techniques have been carried over
into the Star Trek and Star Wars novels I've read.
Getting to comics, obviously we have both solo books and team books.
The fact that team books tend to outsell solo books overall tells me
that people like the POV shifts in their comics too, that most people
get bored reading about a character _after a few pages_ let alone for a
whole issue. The Legion of Superheroes is an example of where this was
taken too far: with twenty five characters on the team, you're lucky if
your favorite character gets a panel to herself (or himself if you
favorite character was a guy). Marvel solves this problem by putting
out X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Astonishing X-Men, New X-Men, Avengers, New
Avengers, Mighty Avengers, Avengers: West Coast, etc etc etc so that
your favorite characters can get some decent panel time. But if you
tried to give each of the X-Men and Avengers their own books you'd find
that there just isn't enough interest.
The bottom line is that it is very, very debatable as to whether
following one character around for an hour without cutting to some
other character is really more rewarding for the reader. Some readers
might want Thor, Cap and Iron Man in the same book but would get bored
reading about these characters individually.
> But in the case of issue nine, the viewpoint-shifts are definitely in
> the service of the story because this installment is not
> suspense-driven the way its predecessor was: this is using suspense to
> refer to danger, to action, to the thriller elements, the nail-biting.
> It's more of a mystery story, asking the reader to consider why certain
> people take certain actions, and this offers a pleasure that's more
> cerebral than visceral.
The difference between suspense and thriller is one of timing: before
something happens, we have suspense but while it is happening, it's a
thriller. Am I wrong?
> Certainly issue number nine starts off on the suspense track: stuck in
> Eddy's viewpoint, we get no more information than he does. And this is
> why, I think, for most brands of suspense, an author should stick with
> one viewpoint. An exception, of course, would be Hitchcockian
> suspense, or what I would call The Other Shoe Suspense: giving the
> reader more information than the character, so that we wait as he
> unwittingly steps into a trap-- that is, we wait for the other shoe to
> drop.
Okay, I didn't want to get into this by e-mail but didn't Hitchcock
come up with the idea of the MacGuffin? Hitchcock would leave certain
story elements vague to the viewer even if the characters knew what it
was. Certain elements just simply weren't that important: you could
understand the plot without knowing all the details. To be fair, I
haven't seen as much Hitchcock as you, obviously: I never saw the end
of The Lady Vanishes so I never found out what happened to the lady.
But the Birds has been on TV that I've seen all of it if not all the
way though and, correct me if I'm wrong, but we *never* find out why
the birds are attacking. And the story shift from crime drama to
slasher flick in Psycho would have come completely out of the blue if
you didn't know in advance about the shower scene: the person who you
thought was the main character who's POV you'd been following up until
that point *gets killed off* and we end up following Bate's POV for the
rest of the film. So I don't see how all of Hitchcock can be
characterized as "the other shoe drops" suspense. All the Hitchcock
movies I've seen have created suspense by confusing and shocking the
viewer and all the movie reviews I've read of Hitchcock movies have
described him as "the master of suspense" and have claimed that he
creates suspense by having the viewer follow the main characters' POV
so that we *don't* know any more than they do. In Rear Window, James
Stewart's character thinks he has witnessed a murder. Does the
audience know it isn't a murder or do we just follow his POV? In North
by Northwest, Cary Grant is chased by fireign spies and he doesn't know
what they want. Do we? Obviously, you can list a whole series of
counterexamples, but this seems to be the general consensus concerning
Hitchcock movies: even Jesse uses Hitchcock as a justification for his
less than transparent storytelling style. Indeed, M Night Shyamalan
has been often compared to Hitchcock and he *always* pulls something
out of the hat at the end of his movies.
> As Eddy considers his predictament and makes his moves, we get into his
> head: the "suspense" portion provides us an opportunity to get nice and
> cozy in his headspace. Wil is then canny enough -- whether he knows it
> or not :-) -- to switch us from "suspense" mode to "mystery" by way of
> a seemingly extraneous episode: Eddy, after escaping but before trying
> to wake Kimberly, stops by the kitchen to have a peanut butter & mayo
> sandwich. It's such an odd little detail (and yet very realistic), and
> it effectively derails the relentlessness of the suspense, centering
> our attention not on Eddy's predictament, but Eddy's choices and why he
> makes them: this sets us up for his decision to try and wake Kimberly.
> (Ah, hell, I'm just going to call her Kim.)
There's nothing that endears me more to a character than seeing them
eat or get tired. Seriously. Robots can go all day without eating or
sleeping. Real people can't.
> When we switch to Kim, it is at first in the context of a dream. Now,
> this is one of my few criticisms of the story thus far: as a dream, it
> doesn't really work, for me. Personally, when I dream, it's never
> idyllic but rather very wonky. People do things in my dreams for
> reasons I cannot comprehend; it's not so much symbolic in the Freudian
> or Jungian sense as it is bizarre and trippy. (Even my "Realistic"
> dreams are trippy in their own, low-key way.)
Wow. Again, I disagree. Freud believed every dream was a wish.
Personally I find it makes sense for dreams to be idyllic because: 1)
the main purpose of a dream is to keep the mind from getting bored (ie
active) when we sleep so the dream has to be interesting, if not
downright appealing 2) dreams also serve the purpose of distracting the
dreamer so they aren't awoken by outside noise: Eddy tells Kim to wake
up and Kim dreams that this is her mother telling her to wake up; this
actually happens, that is people will incorporate outside noises into
their dream and keep the dream going 3) in my own experience, I've had
dreams that were pretty damn idyllic; boys tend to have these dreams at
the start of puberty 4) we often dream about real life experiences and
extrapolate from there: when we have a nightmare it is assumed that
there is something wrong, something that is bothering us; pleasant
dreams are considered the norm, the default. And "wonkiness" is
subjective: things will make sense in the context of the dream but will
no longer make sense when remembered in isolation after you wake up.
I, myself, will often wake up and look around and think momentarily
"What the hell am I doing here?" because I had been dreaming I was
somewhere else, perhaps leading an entirely different life, and it had
seemed natural while I was dreaming it.
Jung spoke of archetypes and you've described the DC characters as
archetypes. Marvel characters are more Freudian: their costumed
identity is their superego, their secret identity is their ego and
their angst and anger come from their id. Modern neuropsychology and
evolutionary psychology tends to favour Freud. Marvel heroes tend to
do better at the box office too nowadays and over the past forty years
their comics have sold better so maybe that's another two points in
favour of Freud.
> Maybe this is just me, my personal experience, intruding on my
> enjoyment of what for others would be a perfectly realistic dream
> sequence. I dunno; most movies in which dreams are represented fall
> short for me, too: either they go way too far into the surrealism,
> where it detracts from the rest of the film, or they're just
> picnic-postcards from childhood.
Which is exactly the sort of dreams I have. To be honest, Tom, from
what you've told me you didn't consider your childhood to be idyllic so
you're hardly going to have a dream about an idyllic childhood but many
of us have fond childhood memories that form the basis of dreams. I
often dream I am back in Canada and back in school and I only wake up
when I realise that I would then have homework or have to attend
English class. :)
> There was one movie I saw in which I thought the dream sequences were
> really well done. It was a really bad and pretentious local indie film
> called DADBOT-- a very muddled satire of
> "dead-scientist-trapped-in-robot" 80's sci-fi family comedy. One dream
> the scientist's son has, just after the scientist has been murdered,
> goes like this:
>
> Billy: "Dad, I'm going to be late for school!"
> Father: "How are we going to get there?"
> Billy: "In your new car!"
>
> And that's it; it's completely unexplained, but its very very potent,
> it speaks on a subconscious level about grief. (If only the rest of
> that film could have been that true and painful and deep.)
I think dream sequences in movies are often better done then the
sequences that are supposed to be real life. Is the dialogue stilted?
Is something a bit "wonky"? It's okay! It's a dream! But when the
characters aren't dreaming we now have to suspend disbelief.
> So, in this issue, I think the viewpoint shifts are nothing to
> apologize about, and when Wil left the room, he did so with a visible
> purpose. Like fellow Dearbornian George Peppard was fond of saying, I
> love it when a plan comes together! (He's buried about a mile away
> from my house, in a family plot. People leave cigars there all the
> time.)
Don't expect me to apologize for "leaving the room" either. :)
Lately I've been telling stories by putting a time at the beginning of
each scene. But cutting back and forth between different characters is
another way to establish the passing of time without showing every
moment: we assume when we cut away to the B plot that the A plot has
advanced in our absense and we aren't surprised when we come back and
find that the protagonists have moved on to anothe scene. It's a
useful technique which shouldn't be abandoned simply because you think
that following one character for the whole story 1) is more difficult
and hence more of a challenge for the writer and 2) what the reader
secretly wants and finds more "rewarding". Again, I feel that the
latter is more a question of personal taste and that, for most people,
it simply isn't true.
> Wil worries about not living up to the promise of his opening, but so
> far, I can say that he's exceeding expectations. He's a very good
> plotter, he's very good with mood and character, and he can come up
> with some eloquent/surprising/amusing turns of phrase. I think in the
> latter case he might need to do some tightening up so that his wordsong
> might have more "oomph". A couple of examples:
Oh it is exceeding the promise of the opening. I was dreadfully
afraid, halfway though #7, that the Manila envelope was going to turn
out to be a MacGuffin in this story and that we would *never* find out
what was inside of it because Val and Eddy talked about it vaguely and
then the story looked like it was going to go on to other things. I
was so incredibly relieved when the Manila envelope was opened, the set
up was complete and the storyline actually began. Personally, if I had
been writing #7, I would have cut directly to the opening of the
envelope because that was when things got interesting. In #8, when
Eddy woke up in "an unfamiliar room" I cringed because I knew Wil was
then going to describe the room: luckily it was dark and the only
details we got were ones that were essential to the plot. Again, it
was a big relief.
In every subsequent issue, there has been less set up and, personally,
I think that is a *good* thing. Tom points out that my stories start
out "in media res" and, indeed, in Superfreaks, *every single scene*
starts out in media res with no set up. But, personally, I think (to
use Tom's argument) it is more difficult for the author and more
rewarding for the reader to have everything made clear through the
dialogue and "stage directions" than to lay out every scene in detail
before anything happens. Even adding a caption "homocide scene" is a
cheat because now the story is being told from the point of view of the
narrator and not from the point of view of the characters as they
experience it. That makes a *huge* difference in my opinion. In
Superfreaks, I laid out *one* scene in the entire series and then made
a joke about it being too much information (which it was). Having a
summary of previous issues at the beginning of a new issue is less of a
cheat IMO because some things have obviously happened before and it
would seem odd if everything was recapped using dialogue (although in
Superfreaks #5 I have characters do exactly that, talking about things
that they should already know and providing exposition for the reader.
It was a cheat, but a subtle one.)
> > refreshing glass of warm, flat rootbeer. He was
> > considering helping himself to the half empty box of
> > sugary cereal, but the smell of the carton of milk
> > seemed to lean more toward the curdled cheese area
> > than he was willing to risk.
>
> Especially with a sentence of that length, it might be better to say
> "the smell of the milk carton seemed to lean more towards curdled
> cheese than he was willing to risk", or, even more concise, "the smell
> of the milk leaned (leant?) more towards curdled cheese than he was
> willing to risk"; I think the 'seemed' is a bit extraneous here.
Tom, I'm not disagreeing with you just to be difficult. I swear.
"Seemed" makes a big difference here. This is being told from Eddy's
point of view and not from the objective point of view of the narrator.
It is very important to focus on Eddy's perceptions and create a more
visceral feel.
> I wouldn't render the sentence as "the milk smelled like curdled
> cheese" because I think the impact of the sentence is in "lean"; it
> conjures up an image of Eddy mentally comparing it on the Scale of
> Curdliness, the smell inching towards one end instead of the other. To
> cut out "lean" is to cut out the whole point of this great subliminal
> image.
I feel the same way about "seemed". The word puts focus on how
subjective our perceptions are.
> > Less then a minute after that, he was in the bathroom,
> > taking a long, long piss. His bladder eternally thanked
> > him.
> >
>
> In this case, it's a bit impercise: "eternally"? I think these two
> sentences provide a nice moment of grungy comic relief, but "eternally"
> kinda sticks out like a sore thumb.
>
> I think it's really a missed opportunity for the sentence, "his bladder
> prostated itself in gratitude." Or, if you want to more subtle and
> accurate, "prostrated".
True but "You have my eternal gratitude" is an existing expression in
English: it doesn't mean we will live forever and spend all that time
giving thanks. It's hyperbole.
> And though the details are scattered about the story nicely, they do
> seem to pile up at the beginning; maybe fewer flourishes in the first
> couple of paragraphs might increase a feeling of versimilitude, as the
> reader wouldn't be distracted by their frequency: might be easier to
> get into the story at the start. I dunno.
I'm glad you said that. Can we all agree that there is a happy medium
between setting a scene and describing the furniture? That's not so
much a criticism of Wil as much as me pleading with you not to insist
on having me do that. :)
> These are really minor quibbles; it's a pleasure to read sentences like
> these in the first place, sentences that are not only clever but
> intelligent, sensible, and evocative of both plot and mood. Many
> writers can't turn a phrase like Wil can.
>
> Hell, I wish I could. :-)
I'm just happy to deliver a solid punch line. :)
Martin
Martin Phipps
> It's much, much harder for a writer to
> stay with a scene, keeping suspense building, staying in the room; it's
> also much more rewarding for the reader.
Soap operas. I forgot soap operas. Many characters. Constant
cutting. Different POVs. Very popular.
Martin
Tom Russell
Not only do we get commentary on commentary, but we get Epic Commentary
that puts even my longest reviews and essays to shame. :-)
But I am up to the challenge, and shall reply probably later tonight,
and at considerable (though probably not comparable) length.
Which means, of course, that the promised review of SUPERFREAKS will be
post-poned--- but you can wait a couple more days, can'tcha, Martin?
:-)
==Tom just returned from the AAUW Book Sale, having garnered four
volumes of Winston Churchill's history of World War II. Anyone know
off-hand how many volumes there are total?