The End of a Saga

During ’12 Balticon, I participated in a panelin where the panelists discussed how to effectively write a trilogy. I wish I’d had the frame of mind to ask them how they would proceed to end their sagas, as I find the subject to be a potentially fascinating, yet polarizing topic…at least between the writers and their readers. This is especially true when the story’s ending turns out to be a disappointment.

Imagine being engaged in a story and its characters, a story that spanned numerous books, only to have it conclude with a horrible ending. That after countless hours of reading, you’re rewarded with an ending that discarded or disrespected all that you had come to know of the story. I’m not talking about an unhappy ending, but an incomplete or bizarre one.

One of us recently wrote a post of how distraught she was of Katniss’ actions at the end of The Hunger Games trilogy. I suffered a similar experience with another book series that ended in such a ludicrous manner that it made me ask myself if the series’ existence had a point. This is not how authors should reward their loyal readers.

Examples are not just with written fiction. St. Elsewhere, an eighties sitcom, is notorious for its absurd ending of having the whole show be only the product of an autistic boy. Try imagining that as the ending of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. For a recent example, Bioware, the creator of the videogame series Mass Effect, received so much negative backlash for the ending in Mass Effect 3 that they had to re-script the ending through a DLC (down-loadable-content) patch.

There’s a reason why I’m focusing on a series ending instead of a single novel. It’s one thing for you to be disappointed by a stand-alone novel ending, but when you involve yourself in a series, the hurt is ten times more, because you invest so much time with the story and characters. The flip side of this is that the authors and creators also have invested as much time in their work, if not longer. Their emotions are probably just as charged as the reader is and the authors saw the ending as the only way to end their series. Our dilemma is this: should we as writers and creators follow our creativity and vision to its foregone conclusion or should we instead adhere to our readers’ or fans’ expectations?

As a writer, I feel that my work should follow its own path. But I also believe that if my readers are willing to take the time to read my stories, then I have a responsibility to make sure my ending is complete and respectable. It won’t satisfy everybody, but there’s less of a chance of hearing a huge outcry from the readers.

If any reader or writers want to share their opinions on the subject, please comment below. Thank you for reading.

Rodney

YOU WANT ME TO GO WHERE?

The Baltimore Washington area learned a new word recently. Derecho: a fast moving severe thunderstorm with hurricane force winds. Ours hit like a category one, with little warning. Our lights flicked out at 10:30pm. For an intense and frightening half hour we huddle together with our flashlights watching the trees do backbends in the wind while listening to reports on my battery operated radio. There was no mention of tornados so we wandered off to bed expecting the power to come back on during the night. Wrong.

Not only was the power out, but our cell phones weren’t getting a signal. We were able to get a few calls out on our land line before it went out as well. The entire area was in the dark. A quest for coffee led me five miles away into the next county. It took over a half an hour to make my way through the line which snaked through the store.

At least the kids (teens) got to sleep in. With little else to do, we dug out our lanterns, made sure the grill had propane and listened for updates on the radio. Nearly a million people had no power and the damage to the power grid was worse than after Hurricane Irene. Oh, and a heat wave was hovering over the entire area.

Throughout the day the radio continued to report the outages and destruction. We listened closely as temperatures rose into the 100’s. Would they give out dry ice? Regular ice? Who had power? Air-conditioning? Sure, all we had to do was check a website for the list of locations. Say what? No power, no phone, no cell phone, no internet. Did we miss something? We listened for the next report and sure enough, we could find more info on-line.

Ok, maybe the newspaper would have more information on Sunday. The next day I checked every article in both the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun. You guessed it. All we had to do to find a cooling center was go to a website. So why do I pay for a newspaper?

Is our society so reliant on instant internet that we’ve forgotten to use simple forms of communication? Not every American owns a smart phone. We were hot, tired, and found this lack of information extremely frustrating. Luckily our car had gas and a friend across town had power, saving most of our food and giving us a respite from the heat. Many others weren’t so fortunate.

Late Sunday I just happened to be listening to WTOP, the major radio news station in Washington, when a woman called in to complain about the lack of information. She also had no power, no internet and, no smart phone. Apparently no one, I mean NO ONE, in the entire radio studio considered that people didn’t have access to the internet during a power outage. Within the hour they began announcing the location of cooling centers. Sadly, the newspapers never did. I only hope that in future emergencies all our news sources consider those of us not permanently connected to electronics.

Sydney vs. Katniss

Reblogged from Cindy Young-Turner:

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Warning: Potential for mild spoilers ahead

I enjoyed The Hunger Games and recently flew through the next two books. I'd heard from other people that they didn't like the second and third books as much as the first, and the more I read, the more I found myself agreeing with them. Whereas my first impression of Katniss was that she was a great role model, a strong female character who faced suffering and still managed to survive with her spirit intact, I began to grow weary of her indecisiveness and passivity.

Read more… 1,026 more words

For those of you who have read The Hunger Games trilogy, I posted about my thoughts and frustrations after finishing the last book and just had to compare Katniss to the heroine of my book.

Should you take your nine year old to see the Hunger Games?

Should a 9 year old see The Hunger Games movie? This question came up on Facebook recently. A friend had read the book and described it to her daughter. The parent was concerned about nightmares and posted the question.

Have we become so desensitized to violence that it is nothing to show our children murder for entertainment? There is a reason The Hunger Games was published as a young adult novel (literature written for ages 10-20 or 12-18 depending on who’s definition you look at.) and not a children’s book. It is a story about children being forced to murder other children for sport, for the pleasure of others. It is reality TV gone wrong. The movie was rated pg-13 for this reason, something parents should take note of. If the movie got its rating from sexual content and situations would we even be having this discussion?

How we present media to our children does make a difference. Visual images can have a lasting effect on an individual. (I’m still not sure what my parents were thinking when they sent me at age 8 to see The Poseidon Adventure with my older brother and sister.) As parents it is our duty and responsibility to think about what we want our children exposed to. It is imperative to understand each individual and what they are ready for. If you have questions about the appropriateness of something, then there is probably a good reason. Listen to your instincts. Don’t just go with the hype. If it’s a good movie today, it will be a good movie a year or two from now when your child is older.

Reading a book that a movie is based on before seeing the movie is not just about instilling a love of literature, it allows time for the child to process the content in a more controlled environment. An overwhelming or frightening book can be put down and discussed with an adult. Not so in a movie theatre. There you are bombarded by striking images and sound amidst crowds of strangers. My children grew up during the Harry Potter craze, but they were not permitted to see the movies until they had read the books. Not only did it make the movies less frightening, but it helped cement their love of reading.

Even the most innocuous of classics like The Wizard of OZ can frighten someone not prepared. I have fond memories of the movie, but the tornado gave me nightmares for years and my brother and sister unanimously poked out the witch image on our view finder. My husband didn’t like the flying monkeys. When it came time to share this classic with our children we talked about the story with the kids and took them to see an ice show performance first. No nightmares. No problems.

With today’s world of unrestricted media, it is even more important to know what your children are watching and reading. This means the internet as well! Don’t forget those computers. Talk to your kids and don’t stop just because they enter High School.

Just as a note, HBO entered my childhood home in the late 70’s bringing with it R rated movies like Death Wish. I was definitely too young to watch that kind of movie.

Technology in fiction (part 2)

One of the major differences between science and technology is that new scientific discoveries can completely invalidate previous theories but any device that worked in the past will continue to work in the future. Even if anti-gravity were to be discovered tomorrow, wheels would continue to exist for as long as humans do. The circumstances in which a given engineering concept or technology applies may be reduced by new concepts or technologies but very few things disappear entirely.

In Hit List, the latest volume of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels, Anita Blake comments on a piece of mandatory equipment – her bullet proof vest:

When we got to the SUV we put on the full gear for monster hunting, including the vest, which I hated the most. It hampered movement and it wouldn’t stop either a vampire or a wereanimal.

The problem with bullet proof vests being that they are useless against sharp weapons such as blades and claws. Now, there is a something that offers some protection against sharp weapons, but it’s been around for hundreds of years and is consequently dismissed by many as obsolete. Yes, I’m talking about chain mail. Of course, if you’re going to arm a modern character with something like that, you’ll want to update it. Take this description from Changes, the twelfth volume of Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels.

Molly was dressed in her battle coat, which consisted of a shirt of tightly woven metal links, fashioned by her mother out of titanium wire. The mail was then sandwiched between two long Kevlar vests. All of that was, in turn, fixed to one of several outer garments, and in this case she was wearing a medium-brown fireman’s coat.

I’m sure that the U.S. Marshal’s Service could come up with something a little more polished, but you get the idea. As with fashion, any good engineering concept or technology is likely to be reused sooner or later.

Another area where authors can run into trouble I’ll call “technological inertia” – the assumption that some things work adequately and so there’s no reason to believe that they will be substantially different in the future.

In the Honor Harrington stories by David Weber, shipboard systems (such as weapons) are managed from the bridge by way of “control runs” – dedicated communication lines. The problem with control runs is that they are vulnerable in combat. Such as in chapter 33 of The Honor of The Queen:

“We’ve lost the control runs to the after ring, Skipper!” Commander Higgins reported from Damage Central. “We’re down to two-sixty gees!”

A full half of the ships propulsion system is inoperative because the dedicated lines have been severed by combat damage! Very bad design for a ship that is hundreds of years in advance of anything that we could currently build. Ordinary twenty-first century technology could put together control systems that would be invulnerable to such damage for the simple reason that they would be massively redundant.

All you need is a network of fiber-optic cables and routers. Fiber-optic cables are cheap enough and small enough that every bulkhead could have several small fiber clusters running through it. The routers are small enough that they could be placed at every intersection between two corridors on every level of the ship. As long as some fiber pathway existed between two systems, they would be able to talk, but with that much fiber, the number of available pathways would be huge. An enemy would just about have to cut the ship in two before controls on one end of the ship would be isolated from systems on the other. If you were really serious about redundancy, you could add wireless connections between routers as well.

From later in the Harrington series, in Honor Among Enemies there is this conversation – from a post exercise debriefing.

“I, uh, I rerouted the data, Ma’am—I mean, Milady,” Aubrey said, flushing darker than ever as he corrected himself, but she only shook her head gently.

“‘Ma’am’ is fine. Where’d you reroute to?”

“Uh, well, the array itself was still up, Ma’am. It was only the coupling. But the data from all the arrays runs through Junction Three-Sixty One. It’s a preprocessing node, and the blown sector was downstream.” He swallowed. “So I, uh, I overrode the main computers to reprogram the data buses and dumped it through Radar Six.”

“So that’s what happened,” Lieutenant Jansen said. “You know you cut half my starboard point defense radar out of the circuit when you did it?”

We’ll leave the enumeration of the many problems with this section as an exercise for the reader.

I don’t want folks to think that I dislike these books or that the technical shortcomings above have marred my enjoyment of them (much). For the most part, both authors do a very good with making the technical aspects of their works feel “real” and I can only hope that I will be able to do that well.

This opens up an interesting question, one that, as an aspiring writer, I can’t really pretend to know the answer to. What can we do during the research, writing or editing phases of creating a novel to insure that we don’t overlook technical details that will annoy our readers?

Technology in fiction (part 1)

In a science-fiction related mailing list, a friend of mine posted a link to a news story about the possibility of hacking into insulin pumps that have wireless capabilities. In her email, she lamented “It’s going to get harder & harder to write science FICTION when things like this are real!”

So the question is then: how can science fiction authors predict this kind of thing so that their fiction can be more realistic? And the answer of course is that they can’t. Nor should they try. There’s a reason for the saying “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Furthermore, however much personal satisfaction an author might get out of successfully predicting some future advancement, that’s not what science fiction is about.

Sure, there are SF stories that focus on a particular idea or invention – how it was discovered, developed or explored and its eventual fate. Most stories, though, focus on the consequences of the idea, either for some select group or for society at large. Science fiction can thus present hope that an idea will help make life better or a warning as to how things could go horribly awry – or both.

I contend that the job of authors who deal with technology (science fiction or otherwise) is not to try to predict what technologies will be invented, but rather to create convincing pictures of what could happen in a society with a given set of technologies. It is considered polite, among science fiction readers to accept the scientific and technological assumptions that the author makes but the author must then make a convincing case for the effects of those assumptions on society in general and the story’s characters in particular. Before he can make his case convincing, he must carefully consider what those effects will be and fans tend to be righteously annoyed with authors who overlook details they believe to be obvious.

Tips to keep Writing

Sometimes I think writers are their own worst obstacle when writing. We’re either too busy, too tired, or too preoccupied to write. These can be valid reasons, but I learned that if you resort to them enough times, they turn into excuses and fallbacks to a pattern of non-writing. If left unchecked, these excuses have potential to become writer’s block.

This post shares my different methods in being proactive with writing. Feel free to share your own suggestions as well.

1. Keep the ball moving.

At times when I come home from a day’s work, my energy just drains away. Being in the comfort of my home makes feel safe and at ease…but it also makes me lazy if I let the feeling dominate my mental state. It’s worse when you have a bad day; you are more prone to relax and make excuses as to why not to bother writing that day.

What I do to help combat this is to first be aware of the work adrenaline that’s running through me. Once I’m mindful of the energy, I try to keep it alive when I arrive home. I imagine having a ball of moving energy that reflects my adrenaline and to keep it running as long as possible. I even utilize mind tricks, thinking that I’m still working and can’t afford to stop. Resist the urge to sit down even for a second (stay away from that TV!), until you’re ready to write. Hopefully this technique should push you into the writing seat, though this technique can also help with other areas of procrastination.

2. Just jump in… just write it… just do it.

Another method that helps me to my keyboard is to develop the habit to simply “jump in” without thinking and just write. Clear your mind of any second guessing, doubts and fears and just write. It sounds cliché, but there’s a reason why this works. At times, a writer’s inner critic and a desire for perfection makes you hesitant to write a scene you are unsure about. My method of beating this is plowing through my doubt and gagging the critic. Write whatever comes into your head, even if you think the sentence you’re writing bothers you, or that you’re writing nonsense. The trick is to jump start your brain into thinking ideas. You might be surprised by what you produce and besides, you can always edit your work later. If you have problems, think of past accomplishments you once considered impossible; your current dilemma is no different.

3. Rewards system

This method I utilize the most. Sometimes, I gravitate to other activities, like browsing the internet, watching TV, or playing my 360, when I could be writing. To balance this out, whenever I write, I use my stopwatch. It stays on as long as I write, only stopping whenever I’m taking a break. The time I accumulate by writing goes toward my free time, which I use a timer to rundown. One twist I do is that the free time I gain from a day’s writing doesn’t transfer over to free time until the next day. That way, I find myself less tempted in going back and forth within the day. Check your cell phones, iPods, and other handheld devices to see if they have both a stopwatch and a timer.

4. Positive Energy & Atmosphere music

Probably the most important element in keeping yourself writing (and all aspects in life) is having the right attitude. Depression, frustration, and stress that lingers can quickly deplete anyone’s writing energy. You can combat this by keeping positive and having positive people around you. For example, writer groups (the right ones) are a great source of inspiration and positive encouragement for writing. Always keep reminding yourself of why you wanted to write and what inspires you to continue. Try to retain the wonder and excitement of it. Reading over some of your previous works might also help.

Lastly, I love listening to atmosphere and relaxing music while I write. It might prove useful when writing in an area with distracting noises. I personally prefer listening to music without lyrics when I write (other words usually distract me), but everyone has different preferences.

Final Thoughts

I’m aware that sometimes just having the motivation to write isn’t enough to get people to write. There are writers struggling with time restraints, families, schools, and other obligations or even all of the above, which make it near impossible to write. Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for those situations. Perhaps someone can comment on that, but the only thing I suggest is that if you find some time and the will to do it, the way will open. I hope my suggestions help you on your writing endeavors.

Rodney Weekes

Story Review: Final Fantasy 4

I decided on an unorthodox choice and medium in picking a story that helped inspire me as a writer. Final Fantasy 4 is a story that I enjoyed since I was 14 and have come back to on numerous occasions. A tale of good versus evil, the plot is filled with fantasy lore, magic, love, redemption, and revenge.  Oh yeah, it’s also a video game.

I’ll refrain from talking about the gameplay and only discuss the game’s story and characters. However, I should briefly mention that all Final Fantasy games are self-contained stories, with storylines that barely connect (in fact all of the games take place in different universes).

Final Fantasy 4’s story follows Cecil, a knight from the kingdom of Baron, who, after committing atrocious crimes under his liege’s orders, starts to question his King. Aware of Cecil’s wavering loyalty, the king strips him of his rank as captain and sends him on a seemingly meager task of delivering a simple package to the village of Mist. However, after unwittingly causing massive destruction and death to the inhabitants of Mist because of the package, Cecil decides to oppose Baron and its mighty military.

While the adventure itself is a fun and intriguing tale, it’s the characters themselves that make the story memorable. On the surface their motives may appear simple or single-minded, but there’s depth, charm and character development underneath their actions. For example, the protagonist Cecil initially looks more like a villain and has in fact killed innocents for Baron’s gain. But we can see that guilt wracks at him for performing those deeds. Cecil’s conscience gets in the way of his loyalty, making him unsure of himself. This inner conflict and shame prevents the knight from achieving his full potential.

Rydia, a young girl and the sole survivor of Mist, is forced to overcome her fear and grief in order to become a powerful sorcerer. Palom and Porom, twins who are also wizard apprentices, complement each other’s personalities and skills and prove to be a good example that kids can work side by side with adults and not be aggravating. Edward the Bard and his unique singing have inspired me in weaving some interesting concepts for one of my novels. Goblez, a dark warlock, plays the villain role well, with his mischievous machinations and his eerily organ theme song that plays whenever he crosses our hero’s path. But my favorite character is Kain, a warrior from Baron and Cecil’s best friend and rival. What makes Kain stand out (besides his awesome ability to jump great heights) is that he was hypnotized into turning against Cecil because Goblez twisted his hidden desire for Cecil’s love Rosa. I sympathized with Kain and how sad it was for him to harbor those feelings, but refuse to express them until they were released by Goblez.

Another reason why these characters are so memorable is because the plot is very connected to the gameplay. Different people with varying skills come and go throughout Cecil’s quest. These events are usually heightened by exciting plot points. Suffering a betrayal by Kain, coming to the aid of a besieged warrior, or finding help in my darkest hour from an unlikely person; these events drew me deeper into the game’s story.

While Final Fantasy 4 isn’t my favorite video game story, it’s one of the most influential one as for being the writer I am today. The story has it flaws, but also possesses a certain kind of charm. It’s a fun adventure, but still covers serious issues and doesn’t come away being too goofy or morbid. A game made for the Super Nintendo, Final Fantasy 4 is an old game by today’s standards, but is still considered fondly as a classic by many gamers and myself included. It really shouldn’t matter what medium of stories one enjoys; if they tell great tales, then that method of storytelling should be encouraged. I suppose that’s the point of this post, that a video game can tell an engrossing tale and help inspire your imagination just as much as any novel or movie.

Rodney Weekes