I Am NOT On Ron Moore’s Viral Marketing Team

But I suppose I should be.

T’was a very Galactica day. One of the Wife’s clients is a small design/marketing firm and one of the owners for it is a pop culture kind’a guy that goes in for good TV and had never watched the show, so I promptly shoved my season 1 DVD collection of Battlestar Galactica down his throat and he proceeded to inhale it and then promptly go looking for season 2 through more… enterprising, online digital means. As repayment for me tipping him off to this most excellent of shows, he has decided to throw some good TV karma my way in the form of season 1 of Lost. I guess now I’ll finally see what all the screaming is about. As soon as I got it back, I remembered that the Father-In-Law had mentioned that he vaguely remembered the original show, and kind’a liked it, though he confessed that his most recent favorite Science Fiction show would have to be Babylon 5. Having now firmly put Babylon 5 on the 2nd place/silver medalist pedestal, I figured I’d better share the joy and for all I know, now he is sitting around going, “Starbuck’s a WOMAN!?” at this very moment.

In other news, I finally had a breakthrough and managed to survive Crossroads by Eric Clapton/Cream on the expert level of Guitar Heroes. Slowly but surely I am starting to come to grips with the game and have graduated from competent to Starting To Kick Ass. Heck, maybe I’ll get a real guitar after this…

Oh yeah, I wrote a review for the game which is now online.

More Existentialism On The PS2 & Ron Moore

A quiet Friday.

So far the bulk of it has been spent in quiet recreation. There was the educational aspect of Battlestar Galactica, which more or less means I listen raptly to the commentaries and think “Gee, Ron Moore’s like one of the smartest writers in television today” and envy the fact that I’m not him. Also, just for the heck of it we had dinner at one of our old dining haunts when we lived in our former apartment. The guy who runs the Indian food stall actually remembered us and noted he hadn’t seen us for a few months. I guess it’s nice to be recognized and remembered…

But mostly we’ve been taking turns tackling Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga 1, yet another in a long line of Atlus demonic RPGs that examines the purpose–or complete lack thereof–in life, and wonders aloud if God really does exist, and if God exists, is he really all that great, and isn’t it about time someone really stuck it to him. Frankly I’m amazed that America even tolerates such blatantly anti-Christian sentiments in video games, but since the series addresses these themes in surreal images with minimal gore and no sexual element, it slides right under their radar in the same way that Heavy Metal gets past censors here because they think “It’s a comic book.”

Kind of funny to me how potentially, the SMT series of games can corrode Western values in impressionable minds far more than something like GTA San Andreas, but because it stays away from “flashier” content like sex and violence and instead heaps questions and scorns on the entire Christian faith, this is somehow far more acceptable. The United States apparently would rather die than expose their children to some skin or some gun play, but hey, let’s let these video games turn their children against fundamental cultural tenets, that’s perfectly harmless.

Tech Toys, First Meetings & PC Blues

There’s always a kind of cautionary feeling to meeting new people for potential work. It’s this sensation almost of warplanes circling each other, testing for maneuverability or weaknesses before finally clashing in engagement. You need to suss each other out, find exactly where the Jerk Tolerances lie, see if there’s any kind of compatibility at all in terms of work philosophies–and more importantly, creative philosophies–and even after all that, there’s still no guarantee that any work is going to come out of it.

Still, once in a while it turns out to be a pretty okay experience. My friend Rachel reccommended me to someone who’d just come back to Singapore after a decade long hiatus and was looking to start messing around in the videos & features game in Singapore and so he needed to meet up with various creative types, including writers. I don’t think he was really expecting to meet anyone like me here, since I seem almost permanently trapped on campus in my approach to work and creativity, but there ya’ go. It was nice to meet someone new and sit around discussing creative issues. Especially since he was the one that was out of the loop in terms of what the industry here is like and I found myself in the ironic position of being the guy In The Loop.

Also, it comes about five freakin’ years late, but having only recently noticed that our television has an S-Video cable input, we finally got around to buying an S-Video cable for the beloved PS2 and I am pleasantly surprised to be able to say there is a definite improvement in the quality of the picture. The image is crisper and the color seems a little richer. It’s like getting a new graphics card for the PS2, except that there’s no near total annihilation of your system and total reconstruction just to get it all to work.

Speaking of which, that is exactly what the Wife is going through right now.

It’s one of those days when you really wonder why the computer industry doesn’t take more notes from the console industry.

The Wife figured that since she’s doing a lot more illustration work, it was time to go Hardcore and get a decent, professional level monitor for herself. We popped into the Singapore electronics Mecca, aka Sim Lim Square, and she picked out a nice, shiny 19″ LCD monitor that has one of those rotatable features built into it so that it can actually be pivoted for “portrait” viewing as opposed to the traditional “landscape” or “widescreen” orientation monitors normally have. It’s a Viewsonic VP 390 or something like that, and local tech-head magazine (And owners of GameAxis) Hardware Zone gave it a mess of awards, so it seemed like a pretty safe bet.

Unfortunately, the Wife has a tremendously bad track record with her PC. It seems like anytime she buys anything new for it, be it a new hard disk, more RAM, a new graphics card, a new driver, whatever… The thing refuses to work, and once installed, usually brings her entire computer to a halt. This has once again happened with the new monitor. Or at least, the software that comes with it. The monitor seems fine, but as soon as she installs the software the monitor refuses to work. So she’s kind of resigned herself to operating it in a half-crippled state for the moment since it seems like it’s on the warpath with her PC.

My theory now is that this is one of the reasons why Microsoft got into the console business. They were probably starting to wonder if was within the realm of possibility for their company to create anything that could operate just by turning on a switch that didn’t come crashing down due to driver incompatibilities, hardware conflict, or any of the other million, buzillion things that make the concept of “plug and play” on PCs a blue moon event at best.

Games, Deadlines & Galactica

The Wife has officially turned into a gamer. She’s not a hard core gamer, and she’s not going to be takin’ it online and trash-talking with the l33t speak anytime soon in Counterstrike or Quake servers, but you know you hit a turning point when the often ignored portable gaming system (In this case, a Nintendo Dual Screen that was given in the Christmas of 2004 as a gift and went by largely unused) finally gets a game and is played whenever possible.

I myself finally slacked off on Guitar Heroes, but that was because of two prime factors, Battlestar Galactica and work respectively. Work was articles and scripts. Of the three articles I’m owing to GameAxis, two have now been cranked out with a final one probably finished by tomorrow. There was also another Nanoboy script and that’s also been done and submitted.

But my God, I’m still in abject amazement of how good Battlestar Galactica is.

I mean, I loved the show when I saw the mini-series. I was digging it even more when I saw the first season. Now I practically worship Ron Moore. He doesn’t have the wittiness of Joss Whedon (And to be honest, Joss will always be the more “fun” writer for me) but man does he go places with science fiction that no one had ever dared and he goes right into the heart of darkness, turns on the flashlight, and makes sure you take a good, hard look, no blinking allowed.

I think the thing that I’m really, really starting to love about his take on this show is the ambiguity of it, which translates, ultimately in more believeability. If I had to start tossing themes at this show, one of them would be “No one’s hands are clean.” Because the main characters, as likeable, admirable, or pitiable, or sympathetic as they may turn out to be, make mistakes. And sometimes those mistakes are big ones that can cost lives. In a situation like that, do you simply say “You screwed up, I don’t like you anymore?” Or do you try to reconcile it with what you previously knew. CAN you? In the same light, antagonist characters that are nominally supposed to be “bad guys” are capable of inflicting great suffering but are also capable of reacting to suffering–of themselves and others–in very real, very understandable and even respectable ways. So when they perform acts of courage, or compassion or when they suffer unspeakably, do you say, “The law is ‘what have you done for me lately’ and since this latest activity is a good one, I don’t hate you anymore?” Or do you try to reconcile that with what you previously knew. CAN you?

I really, really, really love this show…

Oh My God

Battlestar Galactica is so good it makes me weep.

I feel like one of those Catholics that went to church one Sunday just to hear the priest’s sermon and instead ended up with an angel putting in an appearance and singing Hey Jude with an actual heavenly choir for back up.

Does humanity even deserve TV this good?

Don’t Frak With Me

Because thanks to a belated Christmas present from my friend Eugene I now have Season 2 (Or the first half of it, anyway) of what is shaping up to be the best science fiction TV show I have ever seen, Battlestar Galactica.

Needless to say, it is time to ignore EVERYTHING and just turn on, tune in, and drop out…

Poor Little Giant Monkey

I finally got around to watching King Kong last week, so this is a belated review. It only just occurred to me that I hadn’t talked about it.

It seemed to me that The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe and King Kong suffer from opposite problems. Narnia was too rushed at the expense of moving from action scene to the next, not giving much time to develop characters in the last half of the film, whereas Kong spent entirely too much time on both characterization and action sequences, and honestly could have had anywhere from 45 minutes to a full hour cut out without really doing the picture much harm.

I enjoyed the movie immensely. I thought it was incredibly fun, moving and watchable and I didn’t see anything particularly bad about any of the film’s content. However I did question how much of it was entirely necessary. I sort of got the feeling that Peter Jackson must’ve had the same dilemma most writers have when a novel is finished, that being you put so much into it and then it comes time for the painful pruning. But in this case, he just didn’t have the heart–and the studio didn’t have the desire–to cut any of his hard work out.

I can understand that impulse, although I don’t think it’s always a good idea to follow it. For the last novel I wrote, The Pale Summer I had to do a major hatchet job to get the thing to approach 100, 000 words, and I threw out a lot of stuff that I liked quite a bit, but I also knew the story would survive without it, no matter how much fun it would have been. Sure enough, once the deletions had been made, no one would’ve known they were in there at all, except me, and the story just moves along at a much faster pace.

It’s situations like this–and, far more notably, George Lucas–that really make me question whether having total creative control really IS such a good idea, to the point that when people are telling you something is extremely problematic, you can still ignore them and go on to create an ungainly, bloated thing… that has your fingreprints all over it.

I know it’s extremely hard to judge when you think something is essential to the story, and when it’s simply an emotional attachment to a piece of story you’ve crafted, but increasingly I’m coming more and more under the viewpoint that you really HAVE to have other viewpoints (obviously with sensibilities you respect) take a look at your work and honestly tell you what is working and what isn’t. It does no good to a storyteller to praise every single thing, and it does even less good to say something stinks with no explanation or possible solutions.

I guess it’s just that delicate question, “Can you make the distinction between your sense of story and your ego?”

I don’t think George Lucas can anymore. I think I’ll try really hard to maintain it. So far I’ve been pretty good with criticism–both good and bad–of my novels, and I’ve made changes when the reasoning seemed sincere and compelling. Of course there have also been times when I’ve ignored advice, but then you have to do that as well, I think. In the same way that you can’t ignore every criticism levelled at your work, you can’t incorporate every single suggestion or criticism either.

Another Slow Weekend

Not doing much today except for a little bit of shopping the acquisition of another chiropractic style pillow (hereafter referred to as “The Brick.”) and messing around with Guitar Hero. I have now entered into the Expert Mode and it is bringing me to my knees in ways that would make Baby Jesus cry with its satanic guitar solos. Once again, Ozzy Osbourne proves that he is indeed in league with the devil, because Bark At The Moon as a guitar piece–not to mention Pantera’s Cowboys From Hell–are positively unholy.

With the force of a million suns, Guitar Hero also manages to suck the Wife into its Geek Gravity Well, and now she too is rockin’ hard. The game cannot be resisted, it’s almost frightening how fun it is.

In other news I went looking for James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces out of idle curiosity and the Wife had to remind me that I was in the wrong section, because I went straight to fiction.

I Am Almost Inspired

I admit it. I’m now officially a James Frey junkie.

I check the net every half hour or so to see if there are any new developments because for some reason, I am intensely interested in the outcome of this situation. I suppose part of its because this falls within my sphere of interest. It is news, dramatic, discussion worthy, highly debateable and yes, exciting news about a writer.

A writer who has lied.

Of course, it was Neil-O himself who once wrote, “Writers are liars, my dear. Surely you have realized that by now” in Calliope and here is that concept coming out once more. But this time, there seems to be greater consequences. Because there is so much money, and, more importantly to Oprah Winfrey, so much reputation at stake, drastic measures are being taken that are doing things that no literature professor or writer could ever do single-handedly and usually takes a few generations to really take hold.

Oprah Winfrey is redefining how we define literature.

It is kind of stunning to me now to hear phrases like “It’s a new kind of memoir,” and “The important thing, the thing that REALLY matters in a memoir, is the EMOTIONAL TRUTH, not the historical truth.”

Everyone is passing the buck here. Oprah has said that she relies on the publishers to ascertain the authenticity of the non-fiction they receive, so she’s washed her hands of the entire affair. Doubleday, the publishers have said that they accept the manuscript as is, giving responsibility to the author and assuming in good faith that it was written as recollected by the author. And James Frey himself is saying the Emotional Truth is what is the most important thing here.

It would seem that slowly, ever so slowly, the mentality of reality television where things are carefully prepared and then staged as truth is beginning to take hold in literature as well.

The thing that really knocks me on the head is that I should be agreeing with this stuff. I am, after all, an aspiring novelist. I’ve already written three very weighty books with not an ounce of historical fact to them, but plenty of what I think are emotional truths, so I definitely believe in the importance of something feeling right. Of something feeling like truth even if it didn’t actually happen.

What I find myself in violent disagreement with is the ability to create an emotional truth and then go on to incorporate that emotional truth into your own personal history, deliberately altering your own life and then positing that that this more dramatic, more emotional truth you have manufactured actually was your life, and is what people should accept, rather than what really happened.

It’s kind of like saying to all the middle class white kids who desperately want to be black, “Go on, tell people you killed someone and that you’ve been in jail for drive by shootings and drug trafficking, if that FEELS true to you, then it’s MORE true than something as boring as What Really Happened.”

I’m getting so full of thoughts about this whole situation that it is sorely tempting to me to just sit down and try to tell a story (Fiction, course, I want to be honest here) about truth, and how people twist it or reject when it proves to be inconvenient. It seems to be a side-effect of the abundance of information that rather than making it easier to find the truth, more information has hidden the truth.

Or, speaking metaphorically, truth is just one kind of plant in a forest of information, and we’re now wandering in California redwood territory, when truth just happens to be a beat up little pine tree like the Christmas tree on Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown.

I’m wondering why, if it’s the emotional truth that counts, Frey didn’t just stick to his original presentation of the novel as fiction. I’m wondering why, as fiction it was rejected 17 times, and I’m wondering why, when it was finally accepted it was at the suggestion of the editor that it be changed from fiction to a “memoir.”

Why, if everyone is going on and on about how it’s the emotional truth that counts, is it still being pushed as a memoir? Why can’t it simply be a beautiful lie, like great fiction? Henry Miller, who is–unsurprisingly–a huge influence on James Frey, wrote The Tropic Of Cancer by combining elements of his own life with his imaginings, his thoughts, his opinions and his wishes. It was a hodge podge of reality, idea and emotion.

And it was marketed as fiction.

If Frey admired Miller so much for his integrity, his absolute refusal to compromise on anything, including his writing, then how could he have allowed himself to do what Miller would probably find to be the literary equivalent of blasphemy? How could he have done the one thing his idol would loathe?

He finally broke after 17 rejections. I’m going to tell myself the same won’t happen to me. But I have learned one important thing. If I want to get away with writing something really, stupendously outlandish, the kind of thing that defies all common sense, I should write it for the non-fiction crowd. Apparently fiction fans have a much sharper sense of believability than they do…

My New Author’s Bio

In the wake of just how amazingly effective James Frey has been, I’ve been tinkering around with the idea of “revising” my personal history to make it more marketable. This is my new author’s bio:

Wayne Santos has been addicted to crack since he was in the womb. Unpopular, bullied and tormented by everyone from the doctor that delivered him to the furniture in the house, he grew up surly, misunderstood and was already breaking the law bank robbing and assassinating South American dictators by the age of three. He has consistently broken the law and defied the police, being an outlaw wanted in 54 states of America for the consumption of drugs (All of them. Simultaneously). The most traumatic time of his young life was when a girl he barely knew that he thought of as his best friend died in a horrible train accident when he knocked her and her boyfriend out, drove the car in front of train tracks, locked them in, and stood by as they screamed and he wrung his hands saying, “You were my only friend! I need the trauma in life, it makes me more tragic and likeable!” and she died, in a senseless accident that forever traumatized him and, curiously enough, made him more tragic and likeable with a justifiable chip on his shoulder to explain what came next.

He had his turning point when he was sent to rehab, courtesy of his immensely rich parents who supported his drug and revolutionary habits without question. While in rehab he also made friends with a gangster, a judge, a CEO of a multionational corporation specializing in operating systems for computers, a president of a country obssessed with invading Iraq, and Bigfoot, aka Sasquatch. He also met six former prostitutes who were there for drug addiction. They all continued to maintain a relationship wtih him but were extremely dependent on him and he spent an hour each day talking to them for ten minutes each on the phone when they got out ahead of him.

He later ended up serving 40 years in jail for running over a cop 12 times then beating up the corpse and setting fire to the house the cop’s family lived in. In jail he also befriended a 14 ton gorilla serving hard time for defacement of public property (He climbed the Empire State Building, wrecked an antenna, broke a few planes and hurled ape shit at pedestrians below) nicknamed “Kong” and spent many minutes reading “Curious George” stories to his cellmate. It had to be minutes since the 40 year sentence was reduced to 12 minutes thanks to intervention from the gangster, CEO and president who intervened on his behalf. Unfortunately, just 12 minutes before he was going to be released, the six girlfriends (All of whom he was deeply in love with) simultaneously committed suicide by hanging, jumping off the Grand Canyon, being fired out of a cannon and reading fictional memoirs purported to be the truth resulting in brain hemorraging.

He also, strictly for fun, ’cause that’s just the kind of HARD AS NAILS GUY HE IS, performed a root canal ON HIMSELF WITH NO ANASTHESIA WHATSOEVER, using a pogo stick, a magnesium flare for lighting, and setting his own foot on fire to increase the pain while using said flaming foot to kick several cops, all the while calling them pigs as he does his own dental work.

Every word in his books is true and happened to him exactly the way it was written, especially the part where he gets a bunch of Ayn Rand disciples drunk and has them singing Do You Believe In Magic? And if you don’t believe him, he’ll go on Oprah and say so, so there.