Humans Good, Cylons Bad

Changes, they are a comin'.

I've avoided posting anything because I have very little to post…book-wise. I initially intended this to chronicle my journey from blank paper to published book. While that's still the goal, I've learned that publishing moves glacially. Thus, if I'm going to continue to write shit, I'm going to have to branch way out.

So the first thing I'm going to write about is Dollhouse.

I'm a Joss Whedon fan. Have been since Buffy. I remember the first time I saw an episode of Buffy. I was getting ready to go clubbing for the night and I flipped it on. They fought vampires…with a bazooka. I was hooked after that. Whedon has this ability to take you places you never thought you'd go, and Buffy before clubbing became a routine.

I missed out on Firefly when it came out (due to being poor) but I found it on DVD and love it. So I was wicked excited about Dollhouse. Like most other good fanboys, I kept hearing the grumblings from the intermawhozits about Fox meddling - something they promised not to do. And that scared me. It's also why the first episode was pretty blech. But the second episode…well that's a whole 'nother story.

It had all the trademark Whedon wit, the complex morality, and the story that took me somewhere other than where I'd expected. And I expect that it will only get better from here. Joss is a man whose best work revolves around complicated people and their complicated relationships. Those things take time to develop. And develop they will. So it comes as a shock when casual viewer and fanboys alike are deriding this show. And I think I know why.

Morally questionable. That's what the show is all about. No one knows who to root for. There isn't anyone to root for. Every character is dirty somehow. Echo's the active, being sent on missions, some of which involve sex. We could root for her, but not only does she not have a personality, but she has a past, a reason she became a doll, a reason that may not be on the up and up.

The dollhouse is obviously not something we root for since, they obviously work in some shady and downright despicable areas or morality. Places normal people don't want to have a light shined on.

Echo's handler is someone we want to root for but he's an enabler. He protects her, yes, and he's a semi-father figure, yes, but he also takes her to and from the engagements, thus he's complicit in every morally gray thing that she does and is done to her.

And we simply don't know enough about the FBI Agent to root for him yet. He wants to find the dollhouse, but why? Hopefully we'll find out.

So people watch an hour of this show and they feel dirty, they feel complicit. No matter who they relate to, they're forced to question their own morality. Would THEY ever pay for an doll? Who hasn't thought about it? And there's no moral center on the show for them to cling to. No sane voice in the darkness.

Take another morally gray show: Battlestar Galactica. Over its run, every character has done questionable things. Ron D. Moore took us to all those dark places - airlocking Cylons, secret tribunals, insurgency, etc - and we let him because at the end of the show, we can cling to one simple fact: humans are good and Cylons are bad. At the end of the day, the series began with the wholesale extermination of the human race, so no matter how far they've come or how much the fleet realizes they're similar, the Cylons are grayer than the humans. Cylons bad, humans good.

Dollhouse, so far, has no overriding moral anchor. And that's okay. It's okay because life rarely has such an anchor. People will argue that they would do the right thing, but Dollhouse questions that statement. Would you do the right thing? If you were Echo's handler, should you take a moral stand and leave? Possibly leaving her to a worse fate? Are you a sicko for buying a doll? Even though they became dolls of their own free will?

They're all questions I wish I could answer. They're questions I'd like to explore more with Whedon. I hope he gets the chance. Unfortunately the ratings suck and Fox has an itchy cancellation finger AND a terrible track record with Whedon. I guess only time will tell. Until then, I'll keep watching. I just hope it will keep making me squirm.

Kara Thrace and her Special Destiny

It really does sound like the name of a band.

Today was a rough day for writing. I had an office party last night and it kind of blew. I hate my day job because it takes time away from what I want to be doing; I feel like it sucks the creativity right out of me. I also had to have a suit fitting and I've packed on a few pounds the last couple of months (I really want to blame it on the massive amount of time I've spent writing, but the chocolate eclairs certainly did not help), so that was slightly depressing. So today when I finally sat down to do a chapter I was a mixture of hungover/depressed/exhausted, and ended up crashing on my couch for an hour. I banged out another chapter and that makes six.

It's hard to edit because I really examine every single word. I read each line to make sure it makes sense. Then I read it again to make sure it works in context with the rest of the story. Then I read it aloud to make sure it sounds right. I don't know if other writers do that, but I like my work to have a lyrical quality, not sing-songy, but when it's read it aloud I like it to sound pleasing. Then I have to ask myself what it adds to the story, to the characters and to the overall effect I want to achieve. Essentially every word is on the cutting block and I have to weigh each on its merits and get rid of a lot. It's difficult to be so pragmatic about my own work because I was sort of in labor with it for a couple of months, and its my baby, even the ugly parts, but I have to be realistic about it because if I ever get a publisher to look at it they're going to be way harsher than I am.

Anyway, so then I watched the Battlestar Galactica movie Razor. Way kick ass. It got me really thinking about character. Plot is the easy part if you think about it. I mean, the BSG plot is pretty easy, and I think I actually have the whole thing figured out, because plots are formulaic. Rarely do I read a book or write a story and fall in love with the plot. No, it's the characters that make a story great. That's where BSG really excels; they're not afraid to twist their characters into knots. They're not afraid to have them do things that might make us hate them, because everyone does things in their lives that are mean and petty and cruel. We humans are flawed, terribly flawed, and that's awesome. We're also capable of redeeming ourselves. Even the meanest soul can turn in an instant and perform the bravest act, or kindest gesture. And in the same vein, the sweetest people can fall so far and so hard.

As I was thinking about it, I started thinking about my own characters, not the one for the Guardian of the Ways, because Duncan Doogle is a pretty frackked up guy already, but my new characters for my Broken Earth kabob. I've got my plot and I've got most of my characters, but now I want to really turn them inside out and take them in directions not even I was aware they could go. I sort of think the mark of a successful character is when they start writing themselves. When a character is so well fleshed out, he's going to act in whatever way HE thinks is appropriate regardless of what you want to write him into doing. Characters aren't just blank bodies spouting lines; once their drawn, it's kind of hard to undraw them. I've been forced to scrap a few stories because I tried to lock a character into a plot and they just weren't willing to do what I wanted.

So I've been thinking about my character Mattie Grey. She's a feisty young woman with a great brain, and a bad attitude. She's got a great journey to take, but her journey only takes her around the world, and I want to take her into the bowels of it, I want to take her to hell and bring her back. So I've been looking into her past, trying to find that thing that can take her from being just a great hero, to a full fledged human being with great gaping flaws to over come. It's tough work, but worth it.

Word(s) of the day: I'm giving you two, and they're strange. I was trying to find a good word for shy and somehow my search led to these: merkin & pudenda

By the way. My favorite site for words is http://www.etymonline.com/ it's a site on etymology and it's awesome.