Everything is Amazing, and Nobody's Happy

If You Watch The Super Bowl, Do Me A Favor

Okay, so pretty much everybody in North America is going to be watching the Super Bowl tomorrow. And of course, it's the one show where, in 2009, nobody is going to fast forward through the commercials.

So I want everybody's opinion on one spot: the G.I.Joe ad.

The new G.I.Joe movie is coming out this year, and this weekend is the first time they've released any moving pictures from the movie. It's just a 30 second spot, but if you watch the Super Bowl, and you see it, let me know what you think.

Even if you don't know anything about G.I.Joe--in fact, that's even better. I'm curious what everybody, fan or not, thinks about this one.

If you're not going to watch the Super Bowl, it's already online here. But I'm figuring by this time tomorrow most of America will have seen it, so I'm just asking you to say what you thought of what already flashed before your eyes.

Is Ancient Art Like Special Effects?

Last night, my oldest daughter and I did a Daddy/Daughter date and went to the art museum at Cal State San Bernardino. They had a great display called Excavating Egypt, which I guess isn't their normal Egypt display, but was a lot of fun.

Among the things we saw was this mummy mask:



And it made me wonder.

See, this thing is even more cross-eyed in real life. And one eye bulges out farther than the other.

So it makes me wonder--do you think they noticed it? Do you think they thought this thing was beautiful, or do you think they were going, "Thanks, man. You gave my Mom's mummy mask a lazy bug eye?"

I think about special effects from the early 80's. Now, they seem really bad. But at the time, you didn't get so worked up about it. They were special effects, and that's what we all understood special effects looked like at the time.

Was it that way for these things? Did people just know that the eyes came out a little wonky sometimes, and they didn't really think it was that big a deal, or did this guy just get jipped?

Either way, Daddy/Daughter dates are still a good time.

Saying Thanks

This Thanksgiving, Snopes.com reminds us that it's easy and free to send a thank you card to a soldier.

Dave Barry's Annual Gift Guide: 2008

Dave Barry helps you find that gift you'd have never thought of on your own.

Disney's New Design for California Adventure

Okay, full disclosure. I've never been to California Adventure.

But I haven't heard wonderful things about it. Some of the rides are apparently really good, but the park itself--well, people felt it was missing something. Roy Disney seemed really down on it, and that's enough for me.

So now, Disney has unveiled its plan for how to fix the park.

Here's their diagnosis and their treatment of the problem:

Basically, they feel the problem is that, when they go into the park, visitors don't feel "transported." It just kind of feels like any other theme park.

I can dig that. There really is a cool feeling you get when you walk through those little arcs under the train between the ticket takers and Main Street. You know the ones--they've got that plaque over them.

So their solution:

The sweeping overhaul will transport visitors to the California of the 1920s, when Walt Disney first arrived in Hollywood. In the same way that Disneyland's Main Street evokes Disney's hometown of Marceline, Mo., a refocused California Adventure will follow the young animator's journey to Los Angeles.

Makes sense to me. It has built in nostalgia and timelessness and a stronger Disney connection.

The price tag? $1 billion--the same price they paid to build the park in the first place.

New Weird Al Song "Whatever You Like" on iTunes

Pretty much what the title said.

The new Weird Al Yankovic single is out on iTunes.

It's called "Whatever You Like," and it's a parody of a song called "Whatever You Like." by T.I.

Yeah, I've never heard of it either. Man, I'm getting old.

Anyways, the new song is on iTunes here:

And if you're interested, the song he's doing the parody of is on iTunes here:

(Like I said, haven't heard the song, but fair warning: The T.I. album's got an explicit lyrics warning on it.)

Food From The Hood: Salad Dressing that Does Something

Back when I was going to school at Cal Poly Pomona for my degree in Business Management, one of my instructors introduced me to a little company he served as an advisor to.

Food From the Hood.

Food From the Hood was started back in 1992 when some teachers and students at Crenshaw High School ripped out some of the weeds on the campus and started planting a garden. The business and science teachers thought it would be a good educational project, and the students started selling their harvest at the farmer's market. Half the net was to go to scholarships for the participating students.

Soon, they expanded their business to salad dressing. They started with just the "Straight Out' the Garden" Creamy Italian Dressing, but have since expanded to several other varieties, including Ranch and Honey Mustard.

Even though they've expanded, they haven't lost their essence--a student-run company that provides business experience and scholarships for students.

From their website:

To date, Food From the 'Hood has awarded over $140,000 in college scholarships to the student-managers. 77 program graduates have attended two-year or four-year colleges or technical schools. Student Managers have been accepted to colleges and universities throughout the nation including Cal State L.A, University of the Pacific, Pitzer College, Concordia University, Babson College, Howard University, San Diego State, Tuskegee Institute, Morehouse, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, Cal Poly Pomona, Clark-Atlanta, University of North California, USC, Chapman University, and much more. 20 program graduates receives their college degree in 2000, with 5 of them entering postgraduate programs.

You can get Food From the Hood at most major grocery stores, or order it in three packs, six packs, or twelve packs from amazon by clicking on the dohickey up there.

And incidentally, don't let the low ratings on Amazon fool you into thinking this stuff tastes bad. If you click over and read the reviews that led to those ratings, you'll see they range from service issues (one guy didn't get his order from Amazon, so he rated the product low) to political issues (one guy thinks it's racist that this product helps black kids).

Happy Birthday Ray Bradbury

Just a couple short weeks after 08-08-08, science fiction writer Ray Bradbury is turning 88. SF signal is celebrating by posting an old commercial featuring Bradbury.

Oh, to have lived in a world where TV would feature commercials with science fiction writers.

I can see it now. James Patrick Kelley for PetCo! Robin Hobb for Carnival Cruises! William Gibson for Ray-Bans!

Happy birthday, Ray.

Here are the other posts where I've mentioned him (including the story about the time I met him).

Orson Scott Card's Bootcamp -- The Rest Of The Week and Beyond.

I've had a couple people ask about the rest of Orson Scott Card's Boot Camp, as well as for my overall impressions of the experience.

We ended up doing my story the next morning, as I said in that last post. I now have blurbs for the cover of my next book. Stuff like this:

"I don't know if you know how to develop a character."
-- Orson Scott Card

Or maybe

"I'm not really sure if you know how to write a scene."
-- Orson Scott Card

Bestseller list, here I come!

No, seriously, it wasn't as bad as that makes it sound.

Let me kind of lay the scene out for you:

The way the workshop worked was this: We all sat around one big table. Once we knew whose story was next, the person sitting next to them would start, and we would go around the table, one person at a time. We weren't supposed to repeat anything anybody before us said, and Card didn't say anything until everybody was done.

Well, on mine, the young lady sitting next to me started, and this time, Card did interrupt her. (To the best of my recollection, he hadn't done that with anybody before. At least, not to the length that he did it with my story.)

And basically what he said was this: "Just to be clear, and so we don't have to dance around this, let me just say what all of you probably have written, in one form or another, in your own comments, but didn't quite nail down. What Erik wrote isn't a short story, it's the outline of a novel. And not just a regular novel--it's a big, sprawling, epic fantasy novel. That's the first book in a series."

So I ended up getting 16 wonderful critiques of how to turn my little hurried short story into a wonderful epic fantasy novel.

And one that I think would be a whole lot of fun to write.

So the above comments from Card were in that context--my story was rushed and hyper-condensed. But, as he correctly pointed out, at the time when I wrote the thing, I thought I was writing a short story, and the story as it stood showed little understanding of scene structure or character development. It felt more like a "told" story.

I did actually get a few compliments on the whole thing, my favorite being OSC's comment that I wrote smart people's dialogue pretty well. I believe his comment was that I was pretty good at "faking smart."

At the end, everybody gave me their marked-up copies of my story. So I now have a ton of working notes and an outline for a novel that could be really, really good.

Now let me tell you--that story was a huge source of stress for me for weeks before that camp began.

After I wrote my post about whether or not to go to boot camp, I started trying to write a story, just so that I could say I finished one before boot camp. Not having finished a story in a year and a half was like a huge anchor around my neck, and finishing a story before I went would have taken the added stress of that anchor away.

But I couldn't do it. The story sat unfinished, nothing but one scene and one flashback written before I left.

So I started writing that story on Wednesday with the anchor still firmly around my neck.

Add to that some personal issues that meant that I spent the whole of Wednesday morning on the phone with my wife and my work's corporate office trying to get some things taken care of--it was crazy.

But I did it. I finished the story and I got it in. I dug my way out from under the anchor.

Aside from getting the anchor off my back, boot camp did two other things for me.

The first was to stop putting so much faith in the text. As Card said in one way or another over and over throughout the week, the text is not the story. The text is completely expendable. If a draft isn't working, figure out why and then toss it. Write the first 10 pages ten times until you've found the way in that's working for you. Stop thinking that there's anything sacrosanct about the words you've written so far--if you toss them out and start over, your new words will be better. Both because you're a better writer now, as well as because writing that last draft helped you understand the story better.

So after I got home, I tried it. I thought of an old story of mine, and I wrote a half dozen openings for it, just for fun. And sure enough, I loved about half of them.

Seriously, I've learned for myself that it's true: The text doesn't matter. Don't be afraid to write, because if it doesn't work, you can just start over.

As for the second thing: By reading a bazillion short stories written by people who had been both as passionate and as rushed in writing their stories as I was, I learned a ton about how to read a short story looking for how to make it better. And I feel secure I can do the same thing with my own stories far more easily than I used to be able to.

The mistake I used to make was that I thought I could fix my story, make it more saleable, by grabbing my copy of Self Editing For Fiction Writers, and judiciously hacking away at adverbs and passive sentences.

But the truth is, the real facts about what makes us love stories aren't about any of that. They're about getting to know characters we care about, and about fine stories plainly told. The depth of a tale, the seriousness with which the reader takes your story, is not be created in fiddling around with the minutia of a draft. It's in fully mining the depth of a character, the depth of an idea, in the creation phase of the story. Of finding the interesting and exciting and fun and fascinating possibilities of who the person is and what is happening to them. And in science fiction and fantasy, where it's happening.

And it's so obvious, in retrospect. Seriously, I never ran to my friends and said, "You've got to read this latest James Patrick Kelly story. He is so good at not using adverbs." Loving a story came from somewhere else.

It's in the people, it's in the places, it's in the story.

I'm really glad I went to this. I'm glad for the perspective I got. I'm glad for the friends I made. I'm glad for the stories I got to read. I'm glad for the insights I got.

And seriously, I'm really glad for the group I was with. They were a really fine bunch of people, and I wouldn't have given up a one of them. I fully expect to see a bunch these people making it to the next level, and I look forward to struggling to keep up with them.

So the next step--the surprising next step--is that from here it's not so much about writing as it's about story creation. Really spending enough time coming up with the people, places, and conflicts, that when I get to the story, I'm ready, able, and excited to write it. And then, in the writing of it, finding even more exciting things along the way.

Gonna be a fun ride.