Category: complaining (Page 1 of 2)

Fantasy Lit Is Basically Prestige TV

November 12, 2023 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake, but when I read Jared Shurin’s observation about the influence prestige TV dramas have had on fantasy novels over the last decade, I knew immediately that he’d put into words that overwhelming but unnameable feeling I’ve been having since forever about fantasy fiction and why I feel so out of step with what’s going on in the current literary landscape.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy prestige TV shows. I watched Game of Thrones. I used to write weekly recaps/reviews of Mad Men for a film website. I will go to the grave saying The Americans is the best fucking show ever made. I like all these programs and others too. I’m in favor of well-made serialized dramas on my TV screen.

But what I’m not so in favor of, I guess (thought I’m stilling working this out within my own brain), is the transformation of books into text-based TV shows, and particularly fantasy fiction, which AS FANTASY, has the capacity to go beyond what can be perceived with our eyes and into the realms of dreaming and language and, well, the fantastic, i.e.: that which cannot be understood with our senses but goes beyond those limits, and that if we surrender the literary landscape to the grammar of cinematic storytelling (of which, I must note, I’m a huge fan), we’re on our way to losing something special in our written stories, something that we might not even remember existed if we keep aping the structure and conventions of TV and movies.

What I’m really getting at, I think, is that while I’ve certainly loved books like Black Sun and She Who Became the Sun and The City We Became and This Is How You Lose the Time War, I can also TOTALLY see them as TV shows, and that’s not just because at this point in our history we can pretty much see any book as a TV show eventually. It’s because these books (yes, even Time War) follow the structure and storytelling conventions of prestige television almost perfectly. Multiple viewpoints (aka the A story, B story, and C story of a TV show), sequences and chapters that could very easily translate into a single episode of a show, and the kind of complex characterization that makes for juicy roles top-notch actors want to play.

None of this is a criticism by the way. Again, I LIKE this stuff.

But it’s only one way to tell a story. And for fantasy — a genre in which the only thing limiting the author are the made-up rules of her own made-up secondary world — it feels like we’ve traded something expansive for something rather more… limited.

Look, I get it. Conventions change. Reader expectations change. Prestige TV is dope as shit, so why wouldn’t we want our books to do the same thing?

But then I read something like Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales (or, like, “Smith of Wooten Major”), or John Bellairs’s The Face in the Frost, or a Clark Ashton Smith short story, and I’m like, “This could be a TV show, but in doing so, a lot would have to change.” The translation from written word to cinematic image would be just that: a translation. And something would be lost in the process.

Talented filmmakers could certainly make something of these stories, and they might even be genius things, but they would be fundamentally different things from the written literature.

Think about the previous Narnia movie adaptations, and consider what might come of Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming attempts, and then go back and reread the Chronicles of Narnia. It’s not that they are “unfilmable” or some such nonsense. They are perfectly adaptable to cinema.

But the cinematic versions would need to alter the literary ones. Choices would need to be made that go beyond just, “What should we cut for time?”

This was the particular talent of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillippa Boyens when they adapted The Lord of the Rings to the screen. They made a lot of changes, and whether you think those changes were necessary or not, they resulted in three movies that are pretty fucking great, both as adaptations of the source material and as movies in their own right.

And then think about how sloggy and stilted something like Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is. Rowling was still writing in the age before all our base are belong to prestige TV.

Not that anyone writing in the 20th or 21st century can escape the influence of cinema entirely, but the prestige TV template hadn’t quite solidified yet in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was starting to (I’m looking at you George R.R. Martin, former TV writer… I mean, is it any wonder Game of Thrones became one of the most successful prestige shows of the last twenty years? It’s like the guy knew how to write things that would play well on TV!), but the influence of television on our literary landscape wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as it is now.

Movies? Yes.

But HBO-style TV, with its multiple viewpoints and intersecting story lines and character-focused narratives, not so much.

That’s why it was so important to get it right when taking a book and making it into a movie. So much could go wrong in that translation.

But now, book to (small) screen feels almost effortless. Sure, we may have to cut here and condense there, but in the main, it’s all right there on the page. A show bible ready-made.

I know I sound grumpy about it, and maybe I am, but I also know that I love these books-that-could-be-TV-shows-because-TV-shows-are-how-we-tell-stories-now. I really, really like a lot of these fantasy series! And yes, I would totally watch the TV adaptation if/when it comes out.

But I also kind of like the omniscient narrator? And stories with just one viewpoint character? And fantastical elements that defy visualization? And maybe stories with characters that are maybe a little “flat” (hello, Conan!) but are still awesome anyway because fantasy is a genre that delivers on maybe more than just deep characterization.

Like, maybe, drama and snappy dialogue aren’t the things I always need from my fantasy. Maybe I need weirdness. And wonder. And a strangeness that cannot be translated to the TV screen. And something older, like a fairy tale. And not the new kind where everyone is a fully-realized, three-dimensional person with motivations and psychological depth, but the old kind, where everyone is an archetype and acts weird AF sometimes, and we just accept it because we don’t need psychological realism in our Grimm.

I don’t know. I’m just thinking through some stuff, I guess.

But man, when I read Shurin’s point about prestige TV, it was like the scales fell from my eyes. It’s why I’m a bit out of step both as a writer and a reader. I like prestige TV, and I like the way modern fantasy novels are written, but I also like the old stuff too, the less prestige-y stuff. The weird stuff and the ancient. I kinda wish we could have more of it. Maybe we do, and I’m not reading it (highly possible). If it is, I want to know. I want to read something that can only be read, that lives in words best of all and isn’t a word-version of something practically cinematic.

Fantasy is expansive. I don’t want it narrowed down to a set of storytelling conventions that emerged from only one form of media.

However, as Shurin points out, it IS “slightly reductive” to reduce all currently-popular fantasy literature to this one thing, and it’s not as if This Is How You Lose the Time War (or insert other popular novel) is merely a film treatment. That IS too reductive, and something like Time War is also an epistolary novel, which has a long and venerable tradition that predates TV by a long shot. So maybe my griping is taking things too far. Maybe I need to chill.

Nevertheless, our society is a cinematic one. The moving image dominates our thoughts and dreams and our entertainment, and as Shurin predicts, the next great influence on fantasy literature will be (video) gaming, so yeah, we can’t escape the image makers. I’m intrigued by the ways gaming can influence our literary storytelling, so again, it’s not that I’m opposed to this sort of cross-pollinating. I’m just wondering: Is it possible to have a successful (i.e.: widely read) fantasy novel these days that doesn’t get its storytelling paradigm from prestige TV (or video games or INSERT NEW VISUAL MEDIUM HERE)? We still read classic fantasy, yes, but those books have the backing of time and reputation. We read them because we’ve been told we should read them, or because age bestows a kind of authority.

Like with so many things, a throwback — a new piece of art that hearkens to an earlier form — can be seen either as a delightfully retro oddity or as simply “out of step.” But these throwbacks are catering to a niche crowd, to those who intentionally seek out the strange and “arty.” The popular stuff, the stuff that garners widespread attention, fits itself (most often) within the current paradigm. It might do things a little differently, but not too different. There’s a sweet-spot that such things often hit — the spot between familiar and new — that is precisely what makes them both popular and critically acclaimed. This is the way of things. There’s no sense yelling at the clouds about it. It always has been and always will be.

What I wonder is if we can ever again escape the velocity of cinematic storytelling when it comes to literature. Or does the moving image (in whatever form, even gaming) simply have too much allure. Has our collective imagination been too thoroughly colonized by cinema to ever go back (or forward) to something else? Do we even want to try something else? Maybe it’s just me, the weird freak who wants more flat characters and overt “telling” in my fantasy novels, and is kind of sick of snappy dialogue, and pines for the omniscient narrator. Not all the time, but sometimes. The dictates of the market are one thing; what fantasy literature has the potential to be is something else.

Early Morning Writer

April 21, 2023 / JennyDetroit / 2 Comments

I’ve been trying to start this habit for AGES. Everyone who works and has kids seems to swear by waking up in the wee hours of the morning and getting their writing done before anyone else is up. They make the sacrifice to go to bed earlier, or simply give up some of their sleep, so they can devote time to their writing.

It sounds like a good solution, right? If life is busy and there’s no time for pursuing one’s creative work during the day or evening, then get up before dawn and do the work then. Simple. Effective. Before you know it, you’ve written a novel in your little early morning productivity hour.

Except, I have always struggled with this strategy. I can train myself to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier (or, as often happens, sacrifice my sleep), but what I cannot do is form coherent, interesting, or evocative sentences in the pre-dawn hours. I just can’t. My brain doesn’t have any thoughts or ideas that early in the morning. 6:00 a.m. is for shaking the fuzz out of my head, not for making up stories.

And if I wasn’t going to be an early morning writer, then I’d have to be a night time writer, slinking down to the computer after putting the kids to bed and trying to plunk out a few plot points before exhaustion claimed me. But that’s just it: by the time night rolls around I’m EXHAUSTED and cannot form many coherent thoughts either.

I know this sounds like a lot of whining, but there’s a somewhat happy ending here. You see, today, I tried again with the morning writing thing. I woke up at 6:00 a.m. and headed down to the writing computer, and I told myself I wasn’t going to do anything else but write fiction. No writer’s notebook. No reading. No nothing. Just plunk those keys to make some sentences and write the next line in the story. I was going to force myself to write, and by some kind of miracle, I did! I wrote about 800 words in a little less than an hour.

Now, this was just one day, and one day doesn’t make a pattern or a habit. But I figure if I keep doing this every day, if I keep forcing myself to write (even if the writing is crap-ay), then over time, my mind and body will be trained to associate early morning wake ups with heading down to the computer to write.

This kind of pattern/habit building happened to me recently with my back injuring in late December. I was in so much pain (mostly down my leg due to my nerve being pinched) that the only relief I could get was to walk slowly around the house. I had to do — I mean I HAD to do it or I would be in excruciating pain — and because I did it every day without fail when I woke up in the morning, I started doing it automatically. Alarm goes off, do some stretches, roll out of bed, start walking. I used that walking time to listen the the Liturgy of the Hour, so that became part of my daily ritual as well.

And after fourteen weeks of waking up and walking around the house every dang morning, I find that I simply cannot start the day without doing it. My brain doesn’t even make the conscious decision anymore. I get out of bed and start walking. That’s just what I do.

I’m hoping to develop the same pattern/habit with my writing in the morning. Just like my walking, I don’t have to do it perfectly. Most of my morning walks are me hobbling along at a snail’s pace just to get my back and legs feeling normal again. It’s not pretty. But it doesn’t have to be pretty. The walking is what’s important, and the repetition that builds the habit.

So tomorrow, after I wake up and walk, I’ll head downstairs to the computer and start typing. I’ll write anything — a new short story, the continuation of an old one, the prologue to a novel, a random sentence in the middle of my work-in-progress — and I won’t think too hard or too much about it. I’ll just force myself to write, just like I had to force myself to walk despite the agonizing pain.

Knowing that I have to be a little hard on myself to keep the pattern going, it will be worth it if I can change this aspect of my writing process and work habits.

Today’s only the first day. Maybe after I’ve been at it for a week or two, I’ll revisit how this experiment is shaping up. I hope I can make it stick this time.

Substack, Notes, Time, and Attention

April 14, 2023 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

Substack — the platform I use to publish my monthly newsletter — has been introducing a range of different services lately, including a Chat option and now something called “Notes,” which is a bit like Twitter, minus the hellscape stuff.

(They also have an app which you can use to read newsletters, participate in chats, and now follow and read Notes. I guess an app was inevitable, but the whole “app” thing is just annoying to me. It’s another way to keep people in constrained ecosystems instead of allowing them the freedom of the entire internet. Whatever, I’m just old, I guess.)

I haven’t used Chat yet, and I’m not sure how I feel about Notes either, though I do welcome healthier alternatives to places like Twitter.

But that’s just the thing. Is Substack’s Notes going to be healthier for society, and for people individually? I suppose if Notes stays committed to Substack’s goal of being a place for quality writing, meaning they’ll avoid adding all the features that have made Twitter and Facebook and the rest of the major social media sites so damaging to our psyches, it’ll be fine. I guess. Maybe. Like I said, a healthier alternative to Twitter is generally a good thing.

But does being healthier than Twitter mean actually healthy and good? Twitter (and other social media sites) have business models that incentivize bad behaviors and content. No doubt about that. But even if they reformed their ways to be less toxic, does it really benefit society overall to have everybody jawing away on the internet, scrolling through feeds and threads and all the rest of it, commenting on other people’s posts, and generally spending huge chunks of time online consuming media?

I say this as someone who has spent a huge chunk of her life since her early twenties scrolling through feeds and threads and consuming media. I know the allure. I have found much worthwhile and beneficial content by scrolling through threads. I used to love the old Twitter when it was mostly me following a bunch of old movie fans and critics who wrote about arts and culture, and I learned a lot and met cool people.

But I can’t help feeling like we’re still trading away our attention and our time to activities that are not as enriching or as sustaining as other things. I’ve long been a fan of blogs, and I’m a fan of newsletters now, because these are usually longer and more sustained forms of communication. They’re more like reading the newspaper or a magazine. There might be a conversation in the comments section, and that’s great. But the comments are always there, at the bottom of the post, waiting to be discovered by any reader at any time now or in the future, and I can choose to engage with those comments or not based on my own time and attention. Both the blog post and the comments are in a fixed place within the internet ecosystem. They are there for me to discover weeks, months, or even years from now.

But social media sites — even better ones like Substack’s Notes — are still social media sites. They still operate on a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) basis. The conversation is on-going, and if you don’t keep up with it everyday, and devote lots of time to scrolling and commenting (or maybe just lurking), then you will miss out on… well, on something. We all celebrate the “conversations” that happen on these sites, but a conversation happens in real-time; it’s a temporal experience.

(Yes, okay, I can always go back and read an old Twitter thread or whatever. I understand that. But to really optimize what Twitter, and now Notes, is all about, you need to join the conversation as it’s happening, not months from now. A comments section on a blog or newsletter is similar, but a good comments section becomes a text unto itself, and I can read through one without feeling a need to comment or participate. And also, due to the more permanent nature of newsletters and blogs, we understand that the conversation that might stretch for days, and even if I write a comment months later, someone might still read it because those posts are waiting in the archives for anyone to read at anytime. Social media sites, on the other hand, move too quickly, and they are meant to be interacted with on the daily, so going back to an old Twitter thread and leaving a reply is pretty pointless. No one’s going to see it. You might say no one’s going to see a comment on a year-old blog post, and perhaps in most cases that’s true, but I can tell you that many, MANY times I have stumbled upon someone’s blog from years ago, and I’ve read those comments, and many of them have been helpful. That really never happens with a social media site unless I already know the post and the thread I’m looking for.)

Anyway, I don’t want to be too Debbie Downer about Substack’s Notes platform, but I’m not ready to race over and give it my time and attention. It’s the new, flashy thing on the block and everyone appreciates Substack’s subscription-based business model, so we’re all eager to support this Notes thing too.

(And for the record, I think the subscription model is great, though I’m not sure how sustainable Substack’s version of it is in the long run, because there are many newsletters I read for free only because I can’t afford to pay $35 to $50 per year for twenty different newsletters. If Substack would let us lower the subscription fee to $5 per year for our newsletters, I’d probably become a paid subscriber to nearly all the free newsletters I get now. But with a yearly subscription being at minimum $30, it’s just impossible for me to give money to all the writers whose work I enjoy.)

But I avoid social media sites precisely because they are time-sucks for me. They’re the reading equivalent of sugar — tasty and fun, but not very filling — and when time and attention are limited, I don’t want to consume these empty calories. I want something substantial. There are times when a post and thread on Reddit are really great reading with useful information (these are usually the RPG/OSR posts, because people are there to share ideas), and there are times when someone on Twitter (and now Notes) will post a link to a great article. But you know what? I can post links to articles here on my blog too. And so can everyone else. We don’t need a social media app to share links to cool articles. So if Notes is just about sharing links, then why don’t we share links in our newsletters? I mean, many of us already do this!

I don’t see the benefit to Notes (for me personally), other than it’s a “nicer,” “safer” social media space. Again, that’s good, as far as it goes, but it’s not something I really need in my life. I know as a writer and indie publisher, I’m shooting myself in the foot AGAIN by not jumping on the discoverability/marketing bandwagon of social media, but I just can’t bring myself to spend my time doing something that leaves me so unsatisfied. I don’t begrudge anyone using Notes or Substack’s Chat or anything else, but it’s just not for me. I like my blogs and my newsletter and my early 2000s iteration of the internet. And yeah, okay, I like my RPG/OSR subreddits.

But I gotta be picky when it comes to my time and attention. The older I get, the more precious these things become. And Substack’s new features don’t interest me. I’m cool with writing and reading newsletters, and I don’t feel much need to join in the latest “thing.” Especially when that thing takes my attention away from the other things I already like.

I guess I did feel a need to get this rant off my chest, though. Sorry about that!

Leaving Twitter

March 16, 2023 / JennyDetroit / 1 Comment

It’s about time.

I mean, it’s about time I left Twitter because I really don’t use it to communicate. I’m a lurker. I read the stream of stuff that shows up when I log on — other people’s stuff — but I don’t post anything. Weirdly, since I really enjoy blogging.

But I don’t enjoy posting things on Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. Or whatever. I’m too shy. (Again, weirdly. Because I do share stuff here and in my newsletter. I have no idea why blogging is easier for me, but it is.)

It’s also “about time” because it’s about time. I waste a lot of time reading what other people are writing on Twitter. I waste a lot of it thinking about the cool things people are doing on Twitter: all the books they’re releasing, all the clever ideas they are having, all the funny stories they are sharing. I read Twitter and then I get down on myself for not releasing as many books or having so many clever ideas or sharing so many funny stories.

I don’t want to waste time. I want to write more stories. I want to write more thoughts on fantasy literature (hello, newsletter) or my writing process or what I’m reading, but I want this writing to be long-form, to be personal, to be less of a race to popularity.

Also, I have a fundamental antipathy to social media. I signed up for these sites years ago because of the promise that they would help me connect with people or whatever. And I can’t deny that they didn’t help a little. I met cool people at the TCM Film Fest via Twitter.

But I didn’t make any lasting connections. Maybe that’s on me; maybe I didn’t use Twitter the right way. Frankly, I don’t think it matters. Right or wrong, I haven’t found it to be beneficial.

I’ve wasted a lot of time reading other people’s tweets. I don’t post my own stuff very often, mostly because I’m shy, even on the internet. I don’t like sharing little bon mots. I’m glad other people do and that they’re good at it, but it’s not for me.

I like blogging, I like my newsletter. I’m gonna try a micro.blog and see how that goes.

But I’m deleting Twitter. Probably in a day or two. I should have deleted it a long time ago. I think I was afraid of doing it, as if somehow having a Twitter account was necessary for reaching my readers.

But it’s not. It’s not necessary, at least not for me. For me, it was a negative experience. Not that I didn’t have fun reading stuff on Twitter, but it caused all these residual negatives that I’m better off getting rid of it.

Maybe it’s easier to be on Twitter, maybe it’s safer. Less risky. Build a platform the way everyone else is doing it. Maybe I’m a fool for getting off the big social media sites (though my husband will continue to maintain my Facebook page because he likes to… I forget I have Facebook most of the time).

But I’m tired of the time-suck. I’m tired of the way social media makes me feel like I’m in middle school again. These are my hang-ups, not anyone else’s, so if other people love Twitter or Instagram or whatever, that’s great. If people feel that they need to stay on these sites professionally, also great.

But I don’t want to anymore. I’m done.

Another Lost Weekend

January 30, 2021 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

Once again I’ve failed to use my Saturday wisely. Many worthy and important things could have gotten done; instead, it was T.V. time. An episode of Jim Henson’s Storyteller Greek Myths (much more tragic and somber than its fairy tale counterpart); an episode of The Crown (which led me down the rabbit hole of Googling all the stuff from the episode to see if it was real; sadly, some of it was); and then Ken Burns’s Jazz ended up being on PBS when I turned off Netflix, and I watched that for half an hour.

Yikes.

I am so bad at getting my work done when I have *actual time to do it.*

Instead, I waste such time, and when the eleventh hour arises, I scramble like mad to do all the work I’ve been putting off for too long. It’s bonkers and unhealthy, and I wish I was better at being disciplined.

Having just read James Clear’s Atomic Habits recently, you’d think I’d know how to develop small habits that will make my life run more smoothly. Alas, I feel like most of my days are filled with too much to do and not enough time to do it, and then when a weekend like today rolls around, I’m so burned out that all I want to do is veg.

I wish I knew how to make my normal weekdays not so stuffed with things to do. I’m sure this is a common feeling for many people. The question I have is why are we all so busy all the time? Is it modern life that’s made things busy? Is it our jobs? I don’t work a high-powered corporate job or anything; I’m a high school English teacher. Is it having to work and raise children that makes things so busy? I know others who work and have kids and they don’t *seem* particularly stressed or overburdened (maybe they just hide it really well…). Or at the very least, I don’t see any of them turning a perfectly good Saturday into a wasted “lost weekend” of vegging and avoiding work.

Why do I do this to myself? What kind of small “atomic” habits can I develop to avoid this cycle of over-work/giving-in-to-acedia? I think it’s interesting that I’m self-diagnosing my problem as acedia, because that implies this is a spiritual malady and not necessarily something I can “life hack” away. With all things spiritual, prayer is often the first priority, so maybe my problem is lack of prayer. Maybe I need to work on my habits of prayer and see what else will fall into place after that. Small habits of prayer might lead to more small habits elsewhere.

Maybe next Saturday can be a little less lost.

Confessions

January 26, 2021 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

Look, the second book in my Merlin’s Last Magic trilogy is not finished.

It has been more than four years since The Thirteen Treasures of Britain came out. This is not something I’m proud of. I HATE that it’s taking me so long to finish.

Part of the problem is that I’ve written a lot of words, but they haven’t all stayed in the manuscript; by this point I’ve written well over 75,000 words, but only about 40,000 of them are usable. This has slowed things down.

What’s also slowed me down is lack of inspiration. I want the novel to be great, but so many of my ideas are not great. They are cliche, predictable, boring. Whenever I work on coming up with ideas, I end up coming up with ideas for other stories, other worlds, other novels.

It’s not like I haven’t been writing. I’ve written short stories, poems, blog posts, even several chapters of a novella. And I’ve been working on Ysbaddaden too. It’s just taking awhile.

I’m also blocked by my perfectionism. I freeze up and can’t write because I’m afraid that my writing will suck.

I wish I didn’t think of this novel as being “important.” That would help a lot. But since it’s been more than four years since my first book, I feel like this sequel has taken on importance just because the wait has been so long. I don’t want to be frozen by perfectionism. I don’t want to go another year without finishing this book.

I wish I had a snazzy pep-talk thing to tell myself so that I could blaze through the next few months and finish this novel. But I don’t have any snazzy pep-talk things to say. I know I need to sit down and put words on paper. I know I need to have the courage to write as well as I can and not worry what people will think. I know I need to somehow find the energy and time to get my work done. I know I will eventually finish, even if it’s not anytime soon. But I will finish, as long as I keep writing. That much I know.