@ POCKET FULL OF MUMBLES

Sneak Peek

2012-01-07T15:46:00.001-08:00

WHAT IS THIS?

This is something I've wanted to do for some
time and, as usual, don't have enough cash to
pay anyone to do for me. I don't like waiting
for other people to come around and I really
don't like begging people for favors so....

THE ABOVE IS TWO THINGS.

1) it's the first segment of the first episode
of the DREAMNASIUM web series which
will be debuting this year. Each episode will
be done in different formats so, while this is
the first look, it's not representative of
everything that will come. Not hardly.

THINGS ARE HAPPENING, IS THE POINT.

2) it's the animated adaptation of an existing
comic I did some years ago so, if you want to
know the rest of the story and don't want to wait,

SEE BELOW:

I'm not kidding this year.
I'm really, really not.

Let's Start the Year Off Right

2012-01-06T18:37:00.000-08:00

BOTH my parents taught me this, without ever mentioning this speech.

I live this every single day.

The Year In My Rear View

2012-01-03T16:53:00.000-08:00

Well. Here we are again. We made it.

This year, for me, was less of a struggle in some ways than most of what came before. In other ways it was crazy.

Most the good stuff came in the professional realm. Lots of things that I'd worked hard to see happen did. A few fell apart. The BIG CARTOON NETWORK PROJECT got sent down which was a blow. You guys would have LOVED this thing. Ah, well.

Two big things were negative.

A friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer and is, currently, kicking back at that monster with everything she's got.

Another friend of mine, Dwayne McDuffie, left us. It was awful and sudden and I've said a bit about it elsewhere so there's no need to say much more.

Dwayne was one of the best people I ever met. Gifted. Gracious. Funny. Everything a mentor should be except not old enough to actually be mine.

I feel cheated that I wasted so much time being polite, not pushing the friendship for fear of making him think I was one more Hollywood social climber. I envy those who were his friends for longer. NOTE TO SELF: Do Not Waste Time.

I will miss him and, whether you know it or not, so will you.

I wrote a LOT last year, much of it won't even be seen until later THIS year. Short stories, the blog, comics, a novel, the TV show, the OTHER TV show, even some poetry (thanks to my wife insisting I flex those old muscles again).

Oh. We got a couch.

Normally I use this opportunity to remind people who are struggling that things can work out. It's easy, when things start turning your way, to forget the bleak times when you're sitting alone at three a.m. wondering where the hell your life is going or where you're getting that last 60 bucks to cover your rent.

Readers of this blog will know that, despite my economic circumstances, I've always been a big believer in the turning wheel. No matter what's going on in life, good or bad, the wheel will turn. When things are crappy it's the knowledge of the wheel that you use to get you through.

When they're good that same knowledge is good reminder not to get a swelled head or stop working hard.

People in my business forget that. They forget it a lot which is why you see so much bad behavior coming from the backstage of this industry.

But I won't. My life has been Interesting in the proverbial Chinese way for a long time now but it hasn't always been fun. Fun, it seems, is not the point.

Living is.

2011 was awesome. I very much hope 2012 will at least be the same. I'm going to work hard to make it better. This time next year, I hope to have a lot more to say. That's the plan anyway. We'll see what the wheel says.

Building a Mystery

2011-11-12T19:50:00.000-08:00

A bit of satire on a Sunday night.

2011-10-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

BINARY by Winterjack

REAL LIFE: SHOTGUN HEAVEN

2011-10-12T00:34:00.000-07:00

It was in that house we ended up in in North East DC; the one my Dad called Shotgun Heaven. We’d been bumming around the country, following him as he tried to work out his life after divorcing my Mom and leaving his old profession.

Dad had been a lot of things in his life– a not-quite-criminal street kid in 1940s Queens, a college student, a soldier in Vietnam, a civil servant in the Federal government, even a part-time carpenter and NGO worker.

Due to some very strange circumstances that don’t need mentioning here, he’d fallen on considerably harder times than expected.

At forty-plus years old he had been forced to take a job as a bike messenger in order to keep the ends, if not meeting, at least close together.

If you don’t know, messengering that way involves a lot of dodging of cars, dirty tricks between competing employees and not a few injuries when your bike gets into an argument with an oncoming taxi. It was a rough life. Now that I’m looking down the barrel of forty myself, I finally understand exactly how rough.

Shotgun heaven was two stories of plywood and plaster with enough paint slapped on to hide the caulk and the mold. My brothers and I scored a room on the second floor with Dad and Wife #2 sharing the big one at the end of the hall. The walls were thin and we all got an earful of some of the aspects of adult life that we probably shouldn’t have for at least a few more years.

I’m sure they tried to be quiet but, if I could hear my little brother humming in the living room without even putting my ear to the floor, catching snippets of the two of them arguing every night was guaranteed.

I didn’t know what the fight was about and, frankly, I wasn’t interested. In my family argument was like O2. We did it like breathing. Politics. Religion. Which actor was better than another. Whether it was cheaper to buy bread from a market or bake it ourselves. I wasn’t interested but I could hear it.

Eventually the arguing led Wife #2 to pack her kit and her kid and vacate. I wasn’t sorry to see her go. Not because of any specific antipathy we might have had between us; she was all right, in her way. More than.

It was just that she had committed the one sin that my tweenaged mind couldn’t forgive: she had made my father’s life, already difficult, more so.

Their nocturnal grumblings had exploded into full blown daily screaming matches, complete with slammed doors, broken dishes and encyclopedic streams of profanity. Yeah. I can’t say I was bothered to see the back of her. Nobody misses a hurricane.

Nobody but Dad. He was a grown-up, a man and, as such, was constantly under pressures of which I couldn’t conceive at that time.

Wife #2 had been in his bed, in his life, for several years by then and, while from my POV their relationship had been mostly acrimonious, I see now that it couldn’t have been. There’s fighting and there’s fighting. There’s love and there’s lovemaking. There’s a universe of grown-up life that is impenetrable to the minds of thirteen year olds.

Dad had become adept at showing a brave face over the months we’d been in Shotgun Heaven. He went to work. He watched the Star Trek reruns and listened to the Pryor albums. He made breakfasts and hustled us off to school.

But at night, when dinner was cleared and homework was done, Dad went away. I don’t mean he left us alone in the house. He sat with us, even talked to us about the day’s minutia, but it was as if he was watching us from a distance, like his mind was on other, more important things.

I was the oldest so, with no other adult in the house, I had to take up some slack. I helped with meals, clearing up, getting things set for the following day’s adventures. I also ended most evenings alone with Dad, or, at that time, with his shell.

I learned in the first few days after Wife #2 left that pressing him, trying to see what was wrong, was futile. He wouldn’t talk, not about that and certainly not to some kid who hadn’t even lost his virginity yet.

On those nights I left him in the living room, sitting quiet in his overstuffed leather chair, listening to Havens or Davis and, as often as not, nursing a beer.

I woke up once in the middle of one of those nights, wondering just for second where I was. The sound of my brother almost snoring from the other side of the room anchored me.

Whatever dream had occupied me a second previous, I was now in my own bed on the second floor of Shotgun Heaven. The clock said 3:20 am.

I realized I was hungry. I was a kid which meant I was pretty much always hungry. There was a half a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter in the kitchen, both with my name on them.

I slid out of bed, considered and rejected the idea of giving my brother a quick Wet Willy and crept out into the hall. It’s fun moving around when the world is sleeping. I still like to do it. It’s like being allowed backstage at an amusement park or into a museum after hours. It’s not ghosts that come out at the witching hour but the shades of everybody’s secrets.

Mine was the peanut butter and honey sandwich I’d be eating in about five minutes.

As I moved, I winced with every creak of the floor as might weight settled in. The last thing I wanted was to wake anyone up. It’s no fun having a secret, after all, if it’s not yours. These late-night snacks had been mine for more than a year and I meant to keep it that way.

At the current pace it would take more than the five minutes just to make it downstairs but the vision of the sandwich steeled me. One step, two and I was halfway to the bend in the hallway that led to the stairs. Three, four, five and I was just about to make the turn.

Dad’s room faced the streetlight out front so I could see the silhouette of his bamboo curtains framed in the faintly orange glow. As I oriented on his digital clock- 3:44 am- I was suddenly aware of something moving nearby, very fast and horribly quiet. A black shape rose up in front of me, blocking the view. Before I could even squeak out my shock, something hard and about the size of a softball slammed into my chest, forcing me back into the wall. I was pinned there, gasping for breath, struggling against the pressure on my sternum. The black shape, now sporting a bit of a halo from the streetlight’s glow, had resolved itself into something familiar.

“Dad?” I croaked more than said, still barely able to take a breath

It was him. He hissed something at me in a language I didn’t know and pressed harder against my chest, forcing out more wind

“Dad,” I said, trying to pull the hand away. “Dad, you’re hurting me.

He said something then in that other language and I felt his body tense, repositioning itself for another blow.

“Dad!” I said, managing a weak cry. “Dad, it’s ME! It’s GEOFF! DAD!”

His fist came at me anyway and I knew that I was about to feel a pain unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Maybe even one of those “killing blows” they talked about in my comic books.

There was a crack, a loud angry sound of bone against- something and the feeling of wind beside my face.

“Agh!, Dammit!” said my father, releasing me as he stepped away. A light came on and I saw him, his right hand bloody from where it had impacted the wall. The wall was bloody too and there was a hole in it roughly the shape of his fist

“What the hell are you doing creeping around like that?” my father said

“I wanted,” I was still having difficulty catching my breath. “I just wanted a sandwich.

He told me to go back to bed and I was way ahead of him. I sat there in the dark until sun up wondering what the hell had just happened

He didn’t mention the incident the following day nor on the next several. Eventually he told me it was a flashback to his time in Vietnam, a sort of sleepwalking event brought on by stress. He was sorry, very sorry, for frightening me and he was getting into therapy. He didn’t ever want a repeat performance.

I lied, telling him I understood. Of course I didn’t. I was just a kid.

But he never ever hit me again.

And I never did get that sandwich.

The Prometheus Rules

2011-10-10T13:31:00.000-07:00

I'm pissed off.

Again.

Under normal circumstances that would be a bad thing and I'd take some time to cool off. usually that's when I'm pissed about something external like Repulicans or multinational corporations or racism, stuff like that. being mad about that stuff is often futile in the moment so you need to sit still and think about your options.

no. I'm pissed off creatively. Really pissed off.

There's a lot of stuff I'm NOT seeing getting made by people, stuff I would like to see, subjects I'd like addressed, stories that aren't being told.

I've had it.

So I'm writing some.

Lots actually.

Buckle up.

I'm breaking out the PROMETHEUS RULES.

What are they?

You'll see.

REAL TALK: EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

2011-09-22T11:26:00.003-07:00

ENGAGE CONTEXT ENGINES:::::

Dwayne is the writer of Justice League now until he doesn’t want to write it anymore. – Dan Didio to NEWSARAMA in an interview in 2009

CONTEXT DRIVE CYCLING DOWN TO CRUISING SPEED

Well. It had to happen. Anyone who knows me knows there are certain buttons you probably don’t want to push on me unless you want the hurricane.

I don’t like when people behave unfairly, cheat or rip other people off. I don’t like hypocrites. And I’m not a fan of race hatred, whatever color you happen to be. I don’t believe in “soft” racism. I get hot when my buttons are pushed and not the Luther Vandross let’s-turn-down-the-lights kind of hot.

Right now, for the last months, DC Comics (as distinguished from DC Animation which is different people doing different things that mostly don’t piss me off at all), has been pushing my buttons.

They’ve wedged themselves very nicely into a space that seems to hit all of them in some fashion, simultaneously. What it is, in a nutshell, is this: I think DC comics is evidencing a policy of racism and sexism both in their output and in their hiring practices. More on that later.

What’s bugging me more than that, what is relevant to this blog, is typified by the quoted statement at the top of the page. That statement was a lie.

A short time after he’d been brought in to work on the Justice League, after months of constant meddling and undercutting by the very same people who claimed he’d have carte blanche to write the book as he wished (a courtesy generally extended to people like Joss Whedon, J. Michael Straczynski and industry greats like Alan Moore or Frank Miller) Mr. Didio terminated Mr. McDuffie’s contract.

Not or poor work output. Not for missed deadlines. Not for excessive expense account billing (or any at all) but because he had the temerity to speak honestly about his treatment at the hands of DC editorial and that not even in any sort of an aggressive way.

He was asked questions in public forums and, as was his wont, he answered them truthfully. For which he was, as I said, fired.

“Yes, Geoff,” you will say. “But Mr. McDuffie has passed away and his treatment at the hands of DC editorial was well-documented by McDuffie himself as well as the good people at POP CULTURE SHOCK, CBR and BLEEDING COOL to name a few. Why bring this up now?”

Funny you should ask.

Dwayne McDuffie was and remains an icon in comics despite the efforts of a number of people to keep him from being in comics at all. There was a concerted effort on the parts of the so-called comics news media in the time of MILESTONE Media’s initial run as a comic book publisher, to paint the company as a “blacks only” business. For Us, By Us, according to the
press” of the day. This was, of course, a lie.

Milestone was formed, in part, to address a giant hole in the mainstream comics world, one that exists to this day. It was a positive response to the question “Where are all the [insert minority] in your comic book universe?”

DC’s traditional answer was, “Hey, look, the Martian Manhunter is green! How much more diverse can we get?”

After we all laughed in their faces, we realized that was their actual answer and, barring a few valiant attempts by individual creators (who, to the individual, got their attempts erased, removed or shafted) DC wasn’t going to change. By “we” I mean the non-white members of DC’s audience, the ones that are paying attention.

The four co-founders of MILESTONE chose to respond to that ignorance and racism by taking an affirmative step, by lighting a candle instead of a pyre. They founded MILESTONE not to be a blacks-only company but a diverse company with a diverse product that addressed the fact that there are LOTS of human beings out here and the majority of us are not white males with blond hair and square jaws. If the company could have had a stated ethos it would have been “We’re all in this together.” E Pluribus Unum? Think it’ll catch on?

Except, as it turns out, “we” in the comics industry, and I’m including a great many of the fans in this, maybe even most, really doesn’t mean to include blacks, latins, women, Asians, the handicapped, homosexuals, or people of non-Christian faiths. The message was and remains clear: there is one model for the Heroic Human Being and that model is a white male, preferably straight.

“But, Geoff,” you say again. “This is also old news. DC has been DC since before you were born. Don’t you remember Pieface and Tyroc and Extrano and blah, blah, blah?”

Oh yes, I remember. I also remember the odd attempt to do Right made by individual creators that has been habitually undercut or erased by DC Editorial. Even now they are touting their “DCnU” (a spate of new #1 issues that partially reboots their universe) as a more inclusive, more “diverse” iteration of what had come before.

They have on their current roster of comics, STATIC SHOCK (not truly a DC character but one used by permission of MILESTONE MEDIA), MR. TERRIFIC, the 3rd smartest man in the world, BATWING (an African Batman, set in the DRC) as well as featuring VIXEN (in Justice League International) and CYBORG (in the new Justice League). They are continuing the adventures of FIRESTORM, a so-called legacy character rebooted as black (more on that later). There is also VOODOO (stripper with superpowers), a transplant from another formerly independent publisher.

It sounds good, right (well, except for Voodoo)? They are certainly making sure we know it sounds good by pointing big waggy fingers at how “diverse” they suddenly are. But, when you examine DC’s track record in this arena, both over the long run and in the more recent term, it is pretty much impossible to accept their pronouncements at face value. And I don’t.

STATIC SHOCK – Initially co-written by John Rozum and Scott McDaniel (why McDaniel was needed is unknown as Rozum is a fantastically gifted writer with a long history of work with Milestone, having created their Xombi character), is now being written solely by Mr. McDaniel or, possibly, by another co-author who is as yet unnamed.

BATWING – Written by Judd Winnick, at best, a hit-or-miss writer who, according to his own words, had to do extensive research in order to even attempt to write a story involving an African man living in Africa. And he turned out the expected humdrum, facile fare one would expect. And this one did expect.

MR. TERRIFIC – written by Eric Wallace, DC’s only black writer and, I think, currently, the only black writer working for either of the Big Two. I wanted to love this because Eric’s day job, writing for the hit show, EUREKA, told me to expect great things. We didn’t get those great things and I believe we didn’t for the same reasons Dwayne McDuffie had such a bumpy ride on Justice league.

VIXEN – part of JUTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL, written by Dan Jurgens whose track record when writing minority characters is, at best, lackluster. Vixen, despite the obvious market potential of the character, has garnered only a single mini-series and has never been more than a secondary or tertiary player in the DCU. If this book survives I predict it will do so without Vixen.

FIRESTORM – sometimes referred to as a “fan favorite” but never able to sustain a presence in the DCU after his initial run was done. Laying fallow, some brave soul said, “Hey, let’s bring him back and, maybe, since nobody’s using him or has been in more than a decade, let’s make him black.”

The “fan” response to this was cries of tokenism and a sudden, almost rabid need to see the “real” Firestorm back in the saddle. The only problem was the original was dead. So they brought him back, first inside the head of the current Firestorm (long story) and then, now, as his own physical character. This was done, apparently, to assuage the hurt feelings of those who don’t want their Firestorms to be black. Courting the racist audience? Really? Are we that desperate in 2011 that we need the support of racists to keep our books in print, DC?

Which brings us to Cyborg and the Justice League. If you need to use the facilities or get a snack, do it now. This will a take a minute.

For years the most well-known Green Lantern, indeed the only face anyone outside of the comic book industry would associate with the name Green Lantern was a black man called John Stewart. Initially created during that time of flailing around to compete with Marvel’s black characters, Stewart was literally the Angry Black Man (as seen by his white creators and editors of the day). He was the back-up Green Lantern to Hal Jordan’s primary.

And, despite several attempts by various creators to make him more than that, DC Editorial always returned him to the backfield or to invisibility. Until the televised version of the Justice League on CARTOON NETWORK, John Stewart was the “screw-up” Green Lantern, having actually murdered an entire planet of people due to his own “arrogance.”

But the cartoon changed that, presenting to a wider audience of fans a better, well-rounded, truly heroic John Stewart that only fans of DC comics had a problem with (and not all of them). John lasted in this role until the series was finally cancelled and the last frame wasn’t even finished playing before DC began a concerted effort to return John Stewart to the backfield and return Hal Jordan to his “rightful place” in the front.

Why is this all significant?

Because of the new Justice League #1 – written by Geoff Johns who, in addition to being the writer of this book and several others in the “new” DC, is, not coincidentally, one of the aforementioned editorial Powers That Be at the company. Some might say all this is his vision being carried out, in fact. Yes. Some might say just that.

The Justice League is meant to be the “big guns” of the DC universe; its core membership is comprised of the most powerful iconic heroes in that universe. Superman. Batman. Wonder Woman. The Flash. Green Lantern. Hawkman. Aquaman/ Martian Manhunter.

On television those big guns looks like this:

The animated version replaced Hawkman with Hawkgirl and the white Hal Jordan with the black John Stewart. It was, by any measure, a PHENOMENAL success. Far more successful, in fact, than ANY iteration of the Justice League that has ever existed in comics or on television. The obvious lesson for anyone who can’t keep up is “diversity expands your audience.”

Obvious. Obviously. Except…

The new DC comic book, portraying their adventures looks like this.

Green Lantern is white again. Hawkgirl is gone in favor of Aquaman and the token black character, no doubt included to keep people like me quiet, is Cyborg.

CYBORG? Really? Cyborg.

All right. Fine. Not a terrible choice, on paper. He’s been around a while. People know him. Kids might remember him from the animated Teen Titans. So far, so good.

Except here is what Cyborg looked like when he was introduced, decades ago.

As you can see, he was a mostly human man, with some machine parts. It was sort of a riff on the Ben Grimm character in Marvel’s Fantastic Four i.e. a character who should be filled with rage at his condition, setting aside his personal tragedy to be a hero. And it worked. No problems.

Except Mr. Johns has taken pains to show that now, instead of being mostly human with some machine parts, Cyborg is now mostly machine with, basically, just part of his upper body and head still being flesh and blood.

In this Justice League he is not only redundant (everyone else can do everything he can better than he can) he is also not a “real man” anymore. He has, literally, been castrated by Mr. Johns and then placed front and center with the most powerful white icons in the DCU. And please, note, if you will, the not-so-subtle placement of Green Lantern’s big, ahem, weapon, in this image.

Ugly. I’m sorry. Either this was intentional or it’s the result of things some people need to work out on their own time with a psychiatric professional. In either case: ugly.

But, initially, I was comfortable letting it go. After all, who the hell am I? Nobody, right? Nobody anyone at DC cares about. No one they would ever listen to, whatever my tone or approach. And I’m not stupid. I know DC’s track record. It’s not like it’s a big secret or anything. I know with whom I’m dealing here and I really would have let it go until I saw this.

“As widely accessible as possible?”

Really? This must be some definition of “wide” that is missing from the OED.

“We try to diversify as much as possible.”

Really? These must be some definitions of “try,” “diversify” and “possible” that- ah, hell. You get the idea.

What it really is is obfuscating language used to hide the fact that they are not interested in actually expanding their market share beyond the hidebound and racist oldsters who seem to comprise its core nor are they interested in hiring those of different genders or ethnicities than the approved straight white male, preferably one that at least one of them went to high school or college with.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s the same paradigm that prevented minorities from getting into the corporate world and then, once in, from rising above a pre-ordained “glass ceiling.”

(How many women are writing for DC right now? One? Excellent. That is one hell of a wide net.)

DC Comics is a nostalgia engine, looking ever-backwards to the period of time during which the current editorial powers personally discovered comics, namely the early 1970s, which is, to insiders, just after the end of the so-called Silver Age and the beginning of the Bronze of DC comics. This notion that they are “always pushing diversity” is, very simply, a lie. It has never been true in their line of comics and it has never been true in their hiring practices.

This was a period of time when DC Comics was getting its ass handed to it by Marvel Comics largely, in my opinion, because Marvel’s creative model included inclusion, at least in the product, if not backstage. It was also a period of time when whites were a lot more comfortable with their fictional “negroes” in very small, easy-to-ignore doses because their real-world blacks were quite the opposite. Marvel chose, on some level, to embrace that new status quo. DC, as has been their pattern, chose to dig in and retreat.

At a time when Marvel was giving us THE BLACK PANTHER, LUKE CAGE, MSHULLA, THE PROWLER, BROTHER VOODOO, STORM, BLACK GOLIATH, DC was giving us TYROC, MAL DUNCAN and, their only decent attempt at a black superhero at that time, BLACK LIGHTNING.

Black Lighting was a good character, not only as a “good guy” superhero, but as a well-constructed character that was WELL within the tropes of superhero comics. His blackness was a flavor, something that made him not the average and yet was in no way exploitative or patronizing. Which meant, of course, DC couldn’t support him and he faded into obscurity for DECADES. There’s more to that story having to do with creators’ rights but we’re not on that subject today.

It should be noted, from time to time, individual creators working for DC did try to in inject non-whites into their universes without patronizing depictions- Mike Grell, John Ostrander, Tony Isabella, Gerard Jones, Marv Wolfman and several others, DID make valiant attempts at inclusion but those efforts were always undercut or erased by DC Editorial such that the net gain was nil and there was never any traction for any of these characters to last long enough to become “iconic.”

Fast forward to the present and fill in the intervening years with more of the same. Same pattern, over and over and over. Never deviating.

As usual, Dwayne McDuffie said it best.

And all of that is still true. It’s why being able to remember all this stuff, to actually describe the pattern is helpful. It shows a continuity of POV and intent that undercuts all the current hype about being more inclusive.

Of the characters that DC claims it means to become mainstays in the “new” DC, I predict none will actually survive in their own books and most will not survive elsewhere, except as the much-cited “token” characters DC traditionally prefers them to be.

At the end of all this, no matter what they say in public to the contrary, their pattern is the same one it’s always been: that of croneyism and, yes, of that “soft” sort of racism and sexism that pretend-liberals exhibit while they pat us on the head and tell us “these things take time.”

Well.

Time’s up, kids. It’s been up. Time to look elsewhere and, more importantly, SPEND elsewhere when it comes to getting comics that are not only excellent but reflect a better world-view than DC comics apparently can. You’ll find a short list at the bottom. Feel free to add any you think I missed.

And if anyone thinks I'm being too hard on the sweet folks at DC, please remember this: The smartest Africans in the DCU, “new” or old, are gorillas.
Not much more needs to be said.

Now, why does any of this matter to you? I doubt very much that it will. What do I want from you? Nothing. I have no illusion that anything I write here will sway you to stop buying Superman, or hunting down that one issue of Detective Comics that will complete your collection. Anyone who knows about this stuff is likely too addicted to it to put even a single one of these titles away much less the entire line of books as I have done.

But what you can do, what you MUST do, is support the efforts of creators who go against this tide. Not ALL of them; some of them are crap and I would never tell you to spend money on crap. But there are a lot of creators doing stellar work that need a bigger audience and your support.

Here’s that short list I promised. See how that works?

MIRANDA MERCURY
BLACKJACK
FORCE GALAXIA
SOUTHSIDE NEFERTITI
THE ROACH
ZERO KILLER
THE BLACK PANTHER
THE BLUE MARVEL
HEROES FOR HIRE
THE DEEP
TEMPLAR, AZ.

These are just off the top of my head, of course. Don’t expect me to do ALL the work for you. But you can trust that these books are as good or better than what’s being put forth by DC comics and, more importantly, anything that WILL be put forth by DC comics as it relates to anyone who isn’t a straight, white, male.

I’m not asking you to stop reading their stuff, lord knows it’s like asking a crackhead to put down the pipe. But I am asking you to step a toe or two out of your comfort zone and look at the work that is being done elsewhere and needs you to keep it alive.

If not you, then who? Right?

copyright © 2010-2011 Geoffrey Thorne

"OUTSIDE" by Jenn Kao

2011-06-26T23:45:00.001-07:00

A friend and colleague of mine made this about a year ago (maybe slightly more).

It's freaking fantastic. Have a look.

Outside from Jenn Kao on Vimeo.

REEL TALK: STAR TREK: FEDERATION: BRYAN SINGER &.... me?

2011-05-14T12:07:00.000-07:00

Okay.

Over the last few weeks there's been a tiny stir about the so-called "Bryan Singer Pitch," some years ago, for a possible new Star Trek series. Setting aside the various opinions about the relative quality of the idea itself– some like it and some don't, just like anything– I'd like to get some things straight.

1) Bryan Singer did not write this pitch. Nor did Bryan Fuller. Nor did Chris McQuarrie. Nor did Robert Burnett.

2) FEDERATION was not based on any prior works of scifi, nor influenced by even one novel written by any scifi luminary, much less a series of them.

3) FEDERATION was not influenced by other/prior pitches for new series or new animated series or Star Trek novels or Star Trek comics.

How do I know? Because...

1) Star Trek: FEDERATION was written, from the ground up, in its entirety by yours truly. Yes. 100%

2) I did not base it upon any prior works. It was not influenced in even the slightest way by any military scifi or other TV series either in pitch form or what might have been on the air at the time. it came, entirely, out of my head and my love of the Star Trek franchise.

Here is what actually happened.

I met Robert Burnett some years ago at a comic book shop we both frequent. I had just come off an unpleasant freelancer pitch to, I think, STAR TREK: VOYAGER, the TV series and was bitching about it to a friend of mine. I said something to the effect of "I don't know why some writers are bastards when they see another writer. Everyone started out as a freelancer. They have to know how it is."

"I'm a writer," said this guy I didn't know but had seen around."I don't think I'm a bastard."

The guy was Rob Burnett and, to make very long story short, we hit it off. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Burnett is in serious contention to be Star Trek Fan #1. Look him up.

Anyway, we got to talking and, in relatively short order, he agreed to publish my comic book mini series, THE RED LINE that year. Things didn't work out with the comic book but we remained somewhat in each other's orbits and, a few months later, he emails me, asking be to drop by the office for a "serious talk." What the hell, right? I went.

When I get there, Rob lays out this wild conversation he's had a few nights before with Bryan Singer, Bryan Fuller and Chris McQuarrie who are, apparently, good friends of his. Pretty amazing to me, a massive USUAL SUSPECTS fan.

Awesome for Rob, I suppose, but what does it have to do with me?

Well, it turns out the other three guys are big Star Trek fans, Fuller having actually written for the franchise and Singer wanting to, possibly, take s stab at taking it over. At that time ENTERPRISE had either fizzled out or was in the process of and the various parties were already circling the property with a mind to taking over. The big front-runners, at least as the rumor media reported it, were Singer and Abrams.

So the Big Guys wanted to throw in something great but none of them had the time to actually do it. All they could agree on was the title: FEDERATION. They were all engaged in big projects at the time and literally couldn't peel off enough brainspace to dig on on Star Trek, as much as they might wish to. So Rob suggested bringing in a contractor, yours truly.

"That all sounds great," I said. "But what's in it for me?"

I was a freelancer at the time with no big credits to my name and I wasn't looking forward to doing a bunch of work without some sort of payment. As much as I love STAR TREK and the work of these guys, they weren't MY friends and I saw no good reason to just do them this little favor for free.

"You'll be on staff, instantly, if the series goes," says Rob. "And you get to make up anything you want."

"Anything?" I said.

"Anything," he said. Rob had told them about me, about the way I think about the Trek Universe and how I'd always said I'd approach the series, given any sort of a shot at it. "The only rules are "Make it interesting. Make it relevant. Shake things up. Make it Star Trek."

That was good enough for me. Awesome. I got to work and, about a week later, had what is now called The Singer Pitch for STAR TREK: FEDERATION.

I never met the Bryans or Chris. No one ever modified or gave me a note on my work outside of Rob himself who only insisted that our new captain be named Kirk (I was against that but I caved) and that our intelligent ship's computer not be called M.A.J.E.L. (he caved on that.).

The awesome Michael Okuda had been brought in to do the designs and update the tech.

We exchanged a couple of emails, very generic stuff. And then it was done.

It was a great pitch. I'm sorry, but it was. AWESOME. I'm extremely proud of it and, had things gone the way everyone wanted, I would have been absolutely thrilled to take the promised staff job and let the others take full credit for the work. But, as we know, the pitch did not happen. Mr Abrams is driving now and all the Big Guns have moved on to other things.

So I don't think there's a problem laying out the actual facts here.

It was fun. I think it would have made for a compelling TV series that would have pleased not only Star Trek fans but the massive non-Trekkie audience which was my primary goal with the thing.

Anyway. That's it. That's what actually happened. Anything you read anywhere else that doesn't line up with this is not accurate.

Thanks for the use of the hall.

REEL TALK: No, I will not produce your TV Series Idea (because I can't)

2011-04-15T19:57:00.000-07:00

Someone asked– elsewhere, not here– how you go about shopping a treatement for a television series idea if you don't know anyone and are fresh off the boat/out of college.

Well, obviously, the short answer is "You don't."

That's what you tell the noobs so the faint of heart will bail out before they get hurt. Everybody who stays after that gets the long answer.

I hadn't actually thought about that long answer in some time so, when I did, I came up with some stuff that might be useful to some of you.

As with any advice, it's worth what you pay for it.

Unless it's worth more.

Anyway; like to hear it? Here it go:

METHOD ONE: Agents/Management

You need an agent. Or a manager or, in some cases, a lawyer. There is almost no way to do this otherwise. The process of submitting work to an agent varies slightly by agency and, again, in general, the big guys do not much care about noobs because they already have their own pipelines in place for finding new material and clients.

METHOD TWO: THe Hollywood Creative Directory.

This is a massive catalogue of all the legit production companies in Los Angeles (and sometimes elsewhere) listing their main employees and what sort of material they do as well as their lists of credits. You can go through this book, company by company, and make phone or email contact with the ones you think will be open to the sort of work you do. As with Method 1, the vast majority (90+%) will not be interested. Do NOT pitch them over the phone.

METHOD THREE: Mailroom

This sucks. It's ABSOLUTELY no fun. I'm telling you this up front. You get paid crap, there is stiff competition not only from wannabe writers, actors, directors and agents but also from the children of the rich and famous who may have one or more top-level connections that put them in the front of every line and at the top of every pile. You fight for the right to work in the mailroom at some agency, do an excellent job, make friends with assistants and junior agents and, at some point, let them know you're a writer. It's not a sprint. It's not for the weak.

METHOD FOUR: Create a web presence discussing some hot topic that you can either blow up or make funny. Build a following, opine on blogs. You can become friendly enough with "big players" that one may be interested in taking a look at your stuff. That you actually wrote. Because nobody gives a damn about a great "idea."

METHOD FIVE: Nepotism

Be the child, friend, lover, husband, wife, brother, sister, father, mother, uncle, aunt or cousin of someone who can greenlight your project or get you to someone who can. Sadly, this one is mostly out of your hands and I would NEVER recommend finding someone to sleep with just to get ahead in "Hollywood." Although LOTS of people do just that. Don't.

Ugly. Pathetic. Don't.

Also, and this is very important, WRITE THE PILOT. Nearly nobody is interested in a series pitch from someone who can't actually write. You can't skate by on "ideas." Ideas are worthless in this business. Why? Because EVERYONE has them. Literally.

All anybody cares about is execution. If you can't write, as a noob, no one will care about your series. There's too much money at stake to waste on an unknown kid with a "good idea."

METHOD SIX: ASSISTANCE

Find a job as a producer's, writer's or director's assistant. This is a pivotal job on any TV series and, for your purposes, gets you right in the thick of the action as it really happens.

You call up the company in question (or series production office if they are local to you) and ask if they have an HR department or if they are looking for the sort of assistant I've described here. If you get an interview, you get one shot. Competition for these jobs is INSANELY stiff.

The writer's assistant has to be EXCEPTIONALLY organized, a very, very, very quick typist and able to "read" the mood of the writer's staff so they know when to speak up and when not.

Most TV productions get freelance scripts, first, from Writer's Assistants and THEN from normal freelancers. Most series try to promote from the inside for obvious reasons. This is a VERY legit way for a young person to get noticed and even employed as a writer but it's not a quicker way to get your pilot seen.

Also, when you try this method, 97 times out of 100, you will not get the job. See Method Five for reasons why.

METHOD EIGHT: SIZZLE REEL/ WEB SERIES

If you have the right friends, time and skillset (and maybe a little money, depending on needs) you can make a micro version of your Genius Idea as a web series.

IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA began on the web. Adam Sandberg was/is a member of THE LONELY ISLAND where he and his friends made comedy shorts of the same kind they now do for SNL.

The Lonely Island - comedy web series
CENTRAL DIVISION - dramatic web series
Trenches - scifi web series

SIZZLE REEL:
A sizzle reel is like an extended trailer for your series or film, showing all the elements, and shopping you as a producer (or director, writer or actor as well, depending on how deep your participation will go). Here's an example of a very expensive sizzle reel shot over a weekend by "Hollywood Pros."

I'm sure you can find your own versions. As with anything Hollywood-related, competition is stiff. But, as with anything web-related, ANYONE can jump in any time they want and take a shot which is something I recommend. "No risk, no reward," I always say. Really. Always. I'm saying it right now.

But, again, no one cares about the "idea;" ideas are just speculation. What "Hollywood" cares about is execution.

Bottom line, there are no shortcuts. ZERO.

No tricks. No secret handshake. No hookup. Stop thinking about them. If your last name isn't Paltrow or Hanks or even Whedon, forget about all that crap. It ain't happening for you that way.

Here are your options. Be super lucky. Be super hot. Be super talented. Be some combo. Any two of these three is a lock. Sometimes only one.

TALENTED AND LUCKY

HOT & LUCKY.
MOSTLY LUCKY.

SMALL PRINT: And, if you can manage it, if you can get your mind to bend this way, forget about the making of TV series altogether. It's a rough business and is made mostly of tears and disappointment for most who dive in. If you have ANYTHING else that you feel passionate about, pursue that. I promise.

oh, internet. Why are you so awesome?

2011-03-27T17:49:00.001-07:00

This isn't an ad for TOSHIBA. Well, yes, it is, but it's also damned funny. I make no pronouncements on the relative quality of the product but, damn it, funny is funny. Enjoy.

REAL LIFE: Addio, Maestro

2011-02-28T23:41:00.000-08:00

Some years ago, a great many now, I walked into a comic book shop (something I was extremely likely to do in those days) and began browsing. I picked up my normal stack of stuff, the Xs, the Legions, the Avengers and the Knights in the Dark. This was in the time when new companies were popping up all the time and, though smaller than the so-called Big Two, were offering some pretty competitive work. Elementals. Grendel. Mage. Elfquest. A Distant Soil. Nexus. Too many to mention, really, to anyone who doesn't already know.

The world of comics was undergoing a sea change at that time, decentralizing, giving more and more power to the creators rather than to their editors (a dubious blessing in some cases) and, in some few instances, actually challenging long held notions of what might make a go in the marketplace.

So my stack included a good many of these because, though I was much younger than I am, I was already old then in the multiverse of comic books and reaching that edge where they just would no longer easily satisfy. Some people might call that edge the end of adolescence but I call it pattern recognition.

For many years by then I'd become increasingly dissatisfied with the way people who look like me- brown skin, predominantly African descent- were treated in the medium I loved. As a child I had loved the damned things without regard to their social meaning and influence. I followed the Bat and the S, the 4 and most of those who came after, never realizing that, despite the wide variety of color and experience in the real world, a world in which I lived, the world of comic books was a Klansman's wet dream– Four colors of white.

It was the work of industry Great Will Eisner, his Spirit in particular, that pulled me up short and hard.

This was a character I loved created by an artist I loved, to whom I was exposed via a large-sized, hardcover book called THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES. I loved the characters in that book so so much I wanted to find all their adventures wherever I could. This was during a time when comics weren't valued so much so, early on, it was relatively easy to put hands on certain ancient comics if one was ready to dig a bit.

So I dug. So I found and so I read. So I met Ebony.

I won't bore you with how he was depicted, how he spoke, what an hideous portrayal of people like me he was, though not as bad as his replacement, a lovely yellow fellow called Blubber. Ebony was the first but by no means the last of this sort of version of black people which was only slightly worse than the general absence of decent black people in comics. Or really, non-whites of any sort.

It was pretty ugly and it hit me in the face like a freight train. My heroes were part of the same ugliness that was, at the time increasingly becoming part of my real life. The older I got, the more real that ugliness became, more pervasive and more subtle. This created in me (and thousands of others) a sort of cognitive dissonance as I (and they) attempted to resolve the vicious contradiction of love for the various heroes and rage and hatred for their chroniclers who seemed intent on spitting on me who had only ever wanted to bask in the glow of their adventures.

Love won out but it was not without a cost. There was always this simmering undercurrent, a sort of gnawing expectation that oscillated between hope and dread as I waited for the next depiction, knowing it would likely be ugly but never knowing the degree.

Once in a great long while a reasonably decent character might appear (mostly in Marvel comics, nearly never in DC) they were nearly always in the background of the Important Whites, weaker, not as smart, never the point of the story and nearly never the hero.

But love won, as I said, and I sucked up this constant insult, pretending mostly not to notice unless the offense was so pointed it could not be ignored.

"That's what comics are," I told myself. "But, as long as they don't actually mention non-whites, they're not truly being offensive."

I made myself content with invisibility as the better of two evils. I was a child and didn't know that one was the same as the other. But I was content enough.

Until I met ICON.

When I picked up that random book on my weekly excursion to the comics shop, I met Icon and, through him, STATIC, The Blood Syndicate and all the others created by Milestone Comics (now Media).

"Finally," I thought as I poured over the pages. "Finally someone got it right."

I don't need to describe the actual books to you. They're out there and I recommend finding them. The point is every story was written and drawn by people who either were relatively well-known at the time or weren't but went on to greatness after the company let them show their stuff.

It was also the first comic book I ever felt compelled to write a so-called fan letter.

It was then that I met Dwayne McDuffie for the first time.

As I said, comics were (and largely remain) a wasteland when it comes to non-whites and here was an entire line of comics for the rest of us and for whites as well. It was, as Dwayne himself proved to be, an entirely benign response to a fairly ugly situation- building something new instead of railing against the injustice of the existing paradigm.

Sadly, this was met with hostility by the so-called "industry media" of the day, painting the books as diatribes against the wrongly characterized "mainstream" industry (they were not) created by poor artists and writers (again, not so).

McDuffie, one of the two or three black writers that had ever managed to score work at either of the Big Two, persevered, telling the truth of his work to anyone who would listen and moving forward as if simply telling the truth and showing the work would be enough to win. He was, like me, naive about the public he hoped to serve, gifting them with a cleanliness of spirit they did not and perhaps do not possess. The fledgling stories were, ultimately, rejected by the larger audience and the industry at large, left to fade back into what they could only have thought was rightful obscurity.

I envision a lot of smiles from some men who should consider themselves lucky we will never meet. I get angry, you see. I have an extremely low tolerance for cowards and an even lower for racists. These men were both. And likely still are, those that are still alive, as there has been nothing to change their minds. Indeed, DC comics has gone into clear retrograde over the last couple years, literally killing off the few minority characters that had managed to squeak through.

I would have been incensed by these men, mostly lesser talents, having this sort of control over an industry and using that control to squash something benign and beautiful.

Dwayne was not that way. He was better than that. He simply moved forward, thinking so far outside the box that the thing itself could scarcely be defined as such. He moved on without rancor, without too much anger (though I'm betting there was some. None of us are immune.). Began the climb in another, more broad arena, that of animation. To say he excelled there, where money rather than feelings is the bottom line, is to understate things in the extreme.

He wrote for many series, created others winning award after award until he had carved out a bright career for himself as well as a legion of friends and followers both backstage and in his now more massive audience. I don't know that I could have done this. Maybe I could. But not without some shouting and fist swinging. I'm not made for the path he took however much i see it and recognize it as the better one.

My correspondence with Dwayne grew over the years from that initial few lines, to the sort of web-based friendship that most now take for granted but which, at the time, was rather rare, until finally we met face-to-face and became actual friends, rather than virtual. And, more than that, Dwayne was a great teacher, never shy to share anything he knew about writing or any of the other endeavors in which we were both immersed. It's not an exaggeration to say, without his input, I would not have garnered the successes I've had. He's one a very select few in that regard but at the top of that list without doubt.

I wish I could have learned the trick that allowed him to take the slings and bullets of his "peers" with such grace, but, as I said, I lack that gene. I hold grudges. I get angry.

Even though he was repeatedly treated poorly by the industry he so loved, he never ceased to believe that simply making something beautiful was the best way to clear out something ugly.

And he was, as always, right.

That first note led to a friendship that started small and grew into something I loved and which continues to this moment despite his current silence and great distance. He's dead now. Taken in a useless random way just as he was reaching the apex of his powers as a writer. We will never never see what amazing things he was to create. I know for sure he had plans to amaze and was lucky enough to be asked to participate in them but, like the rest of you, I will never know what those things were. he is gone now. For good.

Over the next few weeks people will lionize him and rightly so, but much of that praise will be from the very people who did their best to thwart him when he simply tried to say, with everything he produced, that we are ALL valuable, we are ALL here and we are ALL in this together.

It was true then. It's true now. It always will be true.

Good-Night, Maestro. You will be missed.

copyright © 2011 geoffrey thorne, all rights reserved

REAL LIFE: On Things Lost: Crashing the Memory House

2011-02-02T14:41:00.000-08:00

When I saw the [RED ROOM] request for a blog about The Worst Thing You Ever Lost, I went back into the deep recesses trying to find something significant. It was not the easy task I had imagined. My mind is like that mythical Smithsonian mixed with the New York Public Library mixed with a junkyard.

There's stuff everywhere, some organized and clearly labeled, some in the wrong box, in the wrong shape and, very often, randomly stuck to something from another time and place. Piles on stacks on mountains.

Messy. It's a wonder any thoughts manage to navigate the place, much less the odd story or script.

Still, once begun is better done as the saying I just made up goes. I was in already. It seemed stupid to leave without some version of the trophy. I wiped the dust from my Victorian era giggles, pull the thick leather work gloves up to my wrists, tied them off and started sifting. I wish I'd remembered to wear the dust filter but what can you do?

The first thing I found that was significant loss, you know: something other than a bag of marbles left on a park bench or a jacket at a theatre, was a crate marked "Formula One."

Now, in my mind, in my memory, this thing is the size of a real car. You can get in, you can drive it (if you can clear enough space which you can't because of the mess but, y'know, in principle.). In truth it was a toy. Sometime just before or just after my parents' divorce (these things get murky when the decades stack up) I was presented with an authentic replica of a Formula One race car. This was no matchbox. This thing had every gear, every piston, every decal every strip of actual leather that the original possessed. The only thing truly "fake" about it was the engine which, of course, wouldn't burn petrol or anything else.

I loved that thing the way only a six or seven year old can, playing with it constantly, picturing myself behind the wheel, screaming past Speed Racer and some unnamed Frenchman on raceways of infinite impossible complexity. Always winning. Always after insane obstacles had been narrowly overcome.

I left it, I think, at the home of one of my playmates who, subsequently somehow was unable to locate it. Ever.

Neat. I hadn't thought of the thing in years and yet, in the Memory House it still sits, ready for my key and my inclination to drive. File that away for the next boring Sunday.

The next thing I found was a box of comic books, mostly from the late 1960s and into the 70s, a bequest from my father who, during one of his many travel-related adventures, managed to lose not only the box but the letters I got back from NASA explaining why there were no black astronauts at the time and another from John Romita Sr. telling me to keep up the good work and to practice, practice, practice, if I meant to become a comic book illustrator.

The letters are around here somewhere but I don't need to dig them out. They aren't really lost once you read them. And most of the comics have been restocked since then so we can score that a wash. No hard feelings, Pop. Life goes on.

I rifled through a bunch of stuff, some of it glittery and strange, some of it quite mundane.

My first wedding ring is in here. I'm crap with jewelry. I left it on a restaurant table and, as it was raw silver and carved with intricate celtic symbols (something my wife and I both love). When i scrambled back at lawbreaking speed to retrieve the thing it was, of course, gone into some lucky person's pocket.

There's also the first "really good" short story I ever wrote, left on a Washington DC Metrobus as I transferred between my morning school (one side of the city) and the post-lunch classes (the other side). It was a story about a sparrow and an otter at the city Zoo in winter typed and stuffed into a manilla envelope for easy carrying and, apparently, easy loss. It stings me to this day that I was stupid enough to let that thing disappear. I'd kill to have it back.

I'm not kidding.

I had to take a moment after that one. I sat down on my Plan for a Personal Flying Harness and took it.

The rest of the morning was heavy lifting, shifting of old OMNI magazine articles, a copy of the RIVERSIDE SHAKESPEARE I'd won from the Folger Theatre for doing scenes from Hamlet in competition, some old-school GI JOES and then I was pretty near the center of the place.

I was stuck in that workman's crouch; you know the one: hands on knees, head a bit bowed, short huffy breaths as you consider your next move. Sweaty, suffering from acute melancholy and nostalgia (both fatal if left untreated) and scanning around absently for something that would make the trip worthwhile.

It was then I saw it. Well. Not so much "it" as "her."

There was a young girl standing almost dead center of the place

She was no older than sixteen, long dark hair spilling in waves over her shoulders, skin the color of dark amber. She wore a very modest school uniform- grey and white and green- not one of your anime fetish things so get your mind out of the gutter.

Priscilla.

Okay. I know what you're thinking. You think she was my first, right? Well, yes and no. When I met her I was living in Africa with my father and my idiot brother. I attended a English style "prep" school (again, not what you think. It was just a school where we had to wear uniforms and lessons were taught from the British POV rather than the more acceptable American one (that's a joke, son)). She was three years older than me and she was completely, absolutely, impossibly perfect in every single way.

Her mother taught french at the school. Her boyfriend was some scottish superhero named Ian who played soccer and rugby and was mostly elsewhere doing that. I hated him the way a mongoose hates a king cobra. In my genes.

She hit me like a thousand kilograms of bricks. She inspired poems. She inspired stupid classroom antics so i'd get sent out of mine and get to walk by hers on my way to a punishment that was ABSOLUTELY worth it. She inspired me to take ballet after school so I could be in it with her (leading, paradoxically, to my father meeting his second wife but that's another story). We became the sort of friends that an older girl can be with a boy who is so obviously smitten.

She tolerated me. I made her laugh. I mocked her idiot boyfriend for not being there when he wasn't and for being a jerk when he was. Eventually he did the thing all idiot boyfriends do with awesome perfect girls: he broke up with her.

And i was there. We became what I'd always wanted us to be. When i'm talking to guys she was my first real kiss. My first "second base." Guys, for the most part, are idiots. When I'm talking to women, I tell it straight.

She was my first. The first person other than my parents who completely owned my heart. You remember what that's like. I don't have to spell it out. Words make it maudlin. You know.

But the nature of expats working in foreign lands means, eventually, they have to return home and so we did. Her to the Seychelles and me to DC. We wrote. Lockets and bracelets were exchanged. It was all very earnest and heartbreaking. Lots of teary promises.

Then I did the other thing that idiot boyfriends do with awesome perfect girlfriends. I misunderstood her.

In the last letter I got from her she finished with a sad paragraph about how awful it was that we would not see each other again for at least a couple years ( I had to get out of high school first, right?) but she began with "Anyway, forget about these stupid letters..."

I never got past that line. The whole preceding meat of the letter was so sad and defeated and filled with what I now know is teenaged angst but which, at the time, felt like tragedy, that that one sentence destroyed me. I couldn't read more. She was, I thought, saying good-bye.

It broke me. Right through. A crack as big as this. I was a wreck for a good year before I really got over it. Then I did get on with life. I had other firsts.

And then, years later, I was going through some old boxes and I came across the letter. I won't lie and say there wasn't a twinge. There was. How could there not be?

I read it, straight to the end this time and I realized that, had I gone on before, had I NOT been such and angsty,hyper dramatic teenaged IDIOT, I would have realized that the last few sentences of that letter where an apology for being so bleak and a reaffirmation of our deep perfect connection.

I wouldn't have tossed that letter into a bin. I would have written back.

Sure it was impossible. Sure we would have grown apart and found young men and women to pair off with that were closer to home. That's what happened anyway. It was always what would have happened. It's what happens.

But I would have written back. Instead all she got was silence. I know how that hurt her because I felt the same even though it was my own stupid fault. I would have written back.

If you can replace something, you didn't really lose it. That's my feeling anyway. If you can't, it's really and truly lost.

So that was and remains the biggest. A whole human being. An entire place and time. You can't get things like that back. You can't refill your childhood. Once it's spent, it's gone.

I've got my own awesome perfect girl now. married. locked in. she definitely owns my heart.

But Priscilla will always be there, right near the center of my Memory House, smiling her Da Vinci smile.

The Year in My Rear View

2011-01-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

So it's the second day of the reshuffled deck and I need to do this or I won't get to it. The last eighteen months have been crazy. Awesome but crazy.

Much of my conversation here has been about the roller coaster and what it takes to survive it. I came up with equations, some zippy one-liners and some, I hope, fun anecdotes about all that, all in aid of saying, "This is doable. It's wicked hard work but it's doable."

That paparazzi-chasing gadabout Marcus Aurelius popped this one off a little while back and I took it to heart. "Because a thing seems difficult for you, do not think it impossible for anyone to accomplish."

He's a quippy little bugger, old Marcus is, but that one is true.

So. The last eighteen months.

To compress a really long story into something bite-sized, I made it a policy over the last few years to say, "yes" to any paying gig that involved me writing, polishing or consulting on the writing of fiction of any sort. I met, worked with and for a lot of people in that time and wrote a stack of stuff I'd never have written otherwise.

So one of those former employers came to me with a proposal - "Co-write something with me and I guarantee the right people will see it." So I did. So she did and we ended up staff writers on this:

It was an interesting experience in the Proverbial Chinese way. I wrote a lot. I learned a lot. I met some great people. My partner (yes, we were partners for the duration) and I were not asked to return. They say this means nothing in the big scheme of professional TV writing but to me it felt like being fired (because that's what it was) and it was the first time in over 20 years of professional employment that I'd been fired.

Well. Wait. No. Right out of college I worked in a sort of cold-calling sweatshop managed by a former classmate who fired me for being ten minutes late. Once. He was a prick but ten minutes is ten minutes, I guess. Live and learn.

Anyway. I was rescued from professional oblivion (the sort of oblivion that exists only after you've been fired from something you've worked years to attain. can you say "bleak?") by the good folks at this place:

I loved this show and had tried for two seasons to get a seat at that table. They always liked me, they said, but the money was never there. This year, in the proverbial nick of time, not only was the money there but there was an empty chair.

I packed up my kit at Law and Order on a Friday. That Monday I was at Leverage.

The next twenty weeks were, by far, the most fun and the most rewarding of my professional life due ENTIRELY to the awesome crew of people I was lucky enough to work with there. They bust their asses to make that show and they manage to do it with a smile (usually) and without becoming [expletive-deleted]'s. To say I loved this time is to understate the feeling by parsecs.

I helped with all the episodes (everyone does; that's how it works) and I got to write this:

and co-write this:

Fun, baby. I mean If-You-Seek-ing FUN.

And scary. Flying solo is always scary, no matter how many times you do it.

I have to stress, too, that this was, none of it, due to lottery wins or luck. I don't believe in luck. I don't believe in thanking the spirit world or providence or any of that for the wins I get in life or blaming my many losses on the bad will of evil ghosts.

I believe in hard work. I believe in taking the punch and getting off the mat as fast as you can. This blog has, when it has talked about anything serious, stressed that one view over and over.

Another thing that happened this year– and, by "happened," I mean "something else I worked hard to make real."– was this:

My friend, Todd Harris, and I did this comic, all 96 pages, in tiny slivers of our "spare time" over about three and a half months. Just the two of us. Everything. And then we would go to our day jobs and write and draw there. In addition to the extremely positive response from fans and critics (EXTREMELY positive) this comic book was instrumental in getting the attention of the creators/producers of this:

I'm immature. Most people who know me know this. I watch shows like this, not because I'd like to write them ( I would and that's a part of it) but because I LIKE them. I enjoy the adventures and the intrigues and, as this has been the case for over 30 years now, I don't think it's going away. Immature. Me.

So I'm at Geek Mecca (aka the San Diego Comic-Con) last year and I get called out on the floor by one of said producers.

"Hey, Geoff! I read Prodigal! Really nice work, man!" (paraphrase, of course. they don't talk like that. I do.) "Would you like to write an episode of our show?"

I said, "Hell yes," of course. And I got to do it. I got to write two. More on that later.

The other thing, the newest and maybe strangest, is this:

I read this : John August's Blog

I was inspired by that to create this: The Winterman Project

Things are going well. More on that later too.

So that was the year. 18 months. Sounds great, right. And it is. It really is. But please, please, PLEASE, remember the point of all this.

This is, none of it, the result of Luck, or Fate, or Chance or Magic or Prayer. No divine hand reached down and tapped my shoulder. No mystical voice spoke secret words in my ear. And, during times of adversity, there is no curse on my back, no dark mark in the sky, no blot on my forehead.

Life is flux. Life is change. Life is work. And Life is buckets and buckets, stacks and stacks of failures.

Strive. Fail. Fall. Rise. Strive. Fail. Fall. Repeat.

No fate but the one we make.

But, getting back to Marcus Aurellius...

Maybe you think it's pretentious to mention him at all. Fair enough. Another quippy guy, a bit younger, a bit more recently said something similar to the first one. He goes by the name of Mamet:

Yeah. You're God Damn right.

Life is short. Kill that [expletive deleted]ing bear.

Book Trailer ahoy!

2010-09-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

My kind of Garage Band

2010-09-16T15:36:00.001-07:00

Transformers from repey815 on Vimeo.

PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

2010-09-03T16:06:00.000-07:00

So, here it is.

I took some time off to see at least one of the summer films that I haven't been able to due to work. That's right. I haven't seen INCEPTION or SALT or PREDATORS or THE EXPENDABLES or THE AMERICAN or really anything and I had had it.

So today was INCEPTION day except, due to the Friday-ness of the day, the screening times changed and I was not able to blow another hour waiting around for the revised showtime. What to do, what to do?

Well, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD was playing and, though I was lukewarm about the source material (nothing wrong with it; it just didn't blow me away as it did so many others) I figured, "What the hell. I'm seeing SOMETHING today, damn it."

I'm not going to spoil it for you but this was, without exaggeration, an AWESOME film. It had everything and it also managed to be innovative and fresh. There were no clunks, no missed opportunities and, best of all in a romantic comedy, it had depth and wit and was actually about something.

I think John Hughes' ghost is smiling down on this film which should be no surprise since folks are staying away from it in droves. Mr. Hughes often got that treatment from his contemporaries and yet, now, he's recognized for the genius he was. It's a shame to see SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD get similar short shrift but what can you do? People are often stupid.

So consider this a little reminder: go see this film in a theatre while there's still time. It should be seen on a big screen and, unlike so many so-called "blockbusters"the boys and girls in marketing shove down our throats, this one is actually worth the price of admission.

Do as I tell you because, later, when people are talking about how awesome this film was, when young people, now in their late 30s and into their 40s are saying how it was a pivotal moment at the end of their adolescence (or even the middle) you will all nod and pretend that you were there too.

But you weren't. As of this writing, most of you weren't.

So save yourself the secret shame of lying about a shared experience in a few years and actually have the experience now.

Go. Do it. Do it now. The poster looks like this:

You won't be sorry.

2010-09-01T17:01:00.000-07:00

So, a couple of things...

I've launched THE WINTERMAN PROJECT: through which I'll be funneling certain projects of mine that I think don't fit elsewhere due to length or approach or because I don't want anyone else's hands on them.

Initially only my own work was published through this venue but, in the coming months, that will change.

You can see the current stable of books and eBooks by heading out to THE WINTERMAN PROJECT. If you like what you see there, make a purchase and tell somebody.

Because this is still my secret theme song

2010-08-25T21:24:00.001-07:00

2010-07-30T20:17:00.000-07:00

Today was an extremely good day. Night, night.

2010-07-28T09:22:00.000-07:00

So, I went to Geek Mecca over last weekend and communed with the Geek Muses and the Geek Masses, refueling for the next year. That's right, my calendar begins at Esdee Seesee and continues until the next celebration.

As I've been making this pilgrimage with my partner in Art for the last few years, I've confined most of my opining about it to the blog we share, posting our consensus opinion about all things relating to what we do. But this is about me, I suppose, what I do, what I mean to do and why and how it's all come to this.

Over the years I've written and spoken (God how I've spoke. God, how I love to speak) about wheels and how they turn and how nothing is actually over until... well, when was that, then? But this year I got to thinking about what actually makes the wheels turn.

I'm one of those people who Life rarely touches, you see. Up or down, good or bad, I generally maintain what my father and other sailors refer to as "an even keel." This means, to you lubbers out there, that I maintain my balance. Or, outside my head or outside my home, I seem to maintain. Mostly, over the last few years I've been living in the "seem to" column with only a few people getting access to the actual inner works. Life, in short, has not been a picnic and being untouched by that lack of picknickery has been, well, challenging, to put it as mildly as possible.

While the challenge has not diminished- Life is Life, after all. There's no sweet without the bitter- the wheel has been turning all this time. I know this because, all this time, I've been pushing the sonofabitch.

Over the last several weeks I was privileged to be allowed to do the thing I'm made for in the company and with the support of people who are made the same. It was, I think, the first time I've been able to do that, to work in synch with Life rather than pushing, pushing, pushing, against the apparent flow. It was, after meeting my wife, the greatest experience of my life (and I've done some pretty cool stuff).

But it wasn't a windfall.

It wasn't a lottery win or the result of random chance. Nor was it, exclusively, the result of grit, hard work and determination. Whatever this last turning was, it came from some fuel, some force that sits between Chance and Design, between Providence and Labor.

As the friction between these extremes is often on my mind (sorry, folks, Creationism is bunk and so is ID) I began to wonder, as I said, about what it is that actually makes the wheel turn. As of now I don't have an answer. There are too many people like me, indeed, superior to me, pushing, pushing pushing, just as I have done, against the flow of Life that says they shouldn't, that they should be reasonable and do safer things. Most of those will die pushing.

The late Paul Newman referred to this phenomenon as "the tyranny of good luck" but, in my family, "luck" has always been considered a myth. You make your own, is how I was taught and, if it's you making it, it's not luck.

But, again, there are lots of others pushing their wheels just as hard as I did and do and getting nothing back for it. Going to Geek Mecca did help refuel me but it's also put juice into these nagging questions of mine.

It's a puzzle.

So I'm thinking about it.

That's what you do with puzzles.

2010-04-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

Just so's you know what the kid has been up to while writing his awesome comic book that's out on the stands now. This was the old job and it was pretty amazing

This is the new one and it's like coming home.

So, please forgive me if I've been off the mark with the posting for the last few months.

Hands full, don'tcha know.

PRODIGAL IS GO!

2010-04-13T14:45:00.001-07:00

Yes, fellow members of the Genre Nation, we are back and we brought nuclear weapons! ITEM ONE! PRODIGAL: EGG OF FIRST LIGHT #1 Hits the stands TOMORROW! Not next week. Not in six months! TO MOR ROW! We don't have the exact locations of every store but we're confident, if you live in a major city, somebody nearby will have a few copies. If not? MAKE THEM ORDER IT!! You don't want to miss out, trust us! ITEM TWO! Signings, baby! If you live in the Los Angeles area (sorry, rest of the world), the ever-impressive Todd Harris, a full 50% of of Genre 19 (some say the best half) will be signing copies, doling out sketches and generally being charming as hell at the world-famous EARTH 2 comic book shop.

Did we say "the" EARTH 2? Well, it gets better. Todd will be at BOTH locations all day tomorrow! No, not simultaneously! Don't be crazy. If you want to see him, come on by. EARTH 2

SHERMAN OAKS 15017 Ventura Blvd. 91403 818-386-9590

EARTH 2

NORTHRIDGE 8967 Reseda Blvd. 91324 818-993-7804

Call for times!

That's not all, folks! CONVENTION news is coming up!

Who says we don't kick all that ass!

Red / Shift

2009-12-23T08:36:00.000-08:00

Hello again, Jacketeers. Settle people, settle. As we gear up for the last of 2009 (bringing us inevitably to my annual recap blog, early in 2010) I thought I'd take a break from trumpeting the upcoming advent of PRODIGAL and just mention something else, something a little less flashy and something I did for fun. Kindle. eBooks in general but the Kindle to begin with. They're awesome. One way or another, pretty much everybody who reads books on a regular basis is going to end up with some version of the Kindle in the next few years and I finally figured, after some minor experimentation with the platform, to take a breath and dive in. So I'm offering RED/shift, a wholly original science fiction-fantasy-action-thriller set on a well colonized planet Mars. It's a novelette. It was a finalist in WRITERS OF THE FUTURE 22. It's fun (I think). So, if you're one of the vanguard who already has eReader capability, drop by the AMAZON shop and take a gander. Here's the official pitch. A dashing killer trying to outrun his past... A world-weary cop determined to close her most baffling case... A dying heiress desperate to find a cure for her disease... When these stories collide on the same Martian night the results are not only explosive but deadly. The author of Star Trek: Titan: Sword of Damocles presents an original tale of murder and magic set in a future that is both familiar and strange. Here's the cover: here's the link:

RED/ SHIFT And here's me wishing all of you a happy holiday season. Seeya in 2010.

Sneak Peek

2009-11-25T01:00:00.001-08:00

This is only half of the first issue of PRODIGAL: EGG OF FIRST LIGHT. If you want to see more, you know what to do.

2009-10-02T11:32:00.000-07:00

February. Mark your calendars.

2009-06-13T08:47:00.000-07:00

The editor and publishers of FULL-THROTTLE SPACE TALES: SPACE GRUNTS have graciously allowed us contributors to post segments of our stories here for you guys to see.

Obviously it's only a portion but it's hoped you'll like what you see enough to pick up a copy. It's a crazy scheme but it just might work. These are stories of soldiers on the front lines, coming home, fighting, dying, winning, losing and they are a hell of a lot of fun.

Mine isn't even the best. If you want more, there's a clickable link on the left. Right there.

Here's the cover.

And here's the story. Part of.

TRUTH METRIC
By
Geoffrey Thorne

[MEMORIAL CAPSULE: HYPERCAST: CHAN, TSAO: CAPT. CGS APEX]

Dear Elliot, Please forgive my familiarity. Your core life metric indicated you prefer not to be addressed by title and I am attempting to respect your wishes.

I remember you when we put out from the Bridge Station on Ganymede. You and your spouse seemed so proud seeing your own child among the Apex’s inaugural crew. In fact I shared your feeling.

Apex is a new ship, one of the new Sabre class that CoreGov Tactical believes will turn the tide of the war.

It is a terrible thing to have to inform a parent of the death of their child. It is a terrible thing to hold oneself responsible for that death.

There are no words, not in any human language nor in any of the alien ones to which I’ve been exposed, that can ever encompass or adequately describe the awful grief that follows such a tragedy. I won’t presume to tell you the things you must certainly already know about your child. No stranger can reveal much to a parent that they didn’t nurture or battle themselves over the years.

You were there at the beginning and through all of the firsts and seconds and thirds. All we see is the end product of your hard and, in this case, exceptional work. [HYPERCAST TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTION//REACQUIRE//]

“Jesu!” said SM Boylan just as the hull burst ahead of her. She had only a microsecond to vault backwards over the lip of the access hatch, away from the blast. Just in time.

Even as the shards of flying metal shredded Nelson and Kim to chunks of flesh and a thick crimson fog, the plexi seal came down at either hatch point, sealing the ruptured area off. Safe. She was safe. For the moment.

There was hard vacuum rushing in there now, forcing what little atmo that remained to whoosh out into the dark and carrying Kim and Nelson’s confettied remains along. The claxon went off even as she was smacking the comm node to signal the bridge of her status.

“C and C,” she barked over the siren’s wail, “This is SM Boylan. Apex has been breached. Two span of deck fourteen, hullward, is exposed and gone. Screens at hatch points are locked so the bubble is secure. Waiting for sealant. Affirm.”

“Affirmed,” said the voice stretched to nearly robotic thinness by its trip trough the grid. “Casualties?”

“Adjunct Kim and Spaceman Nelson, KIA,” she said, natural adrenaline having pounded her emotions flat for the moment.

“SimGrav and spark read active at your position,” said the voice. “Affirm.”

“That’s affirmed, C and C,” she said, taking minor pleasure in the fact that she was not floating around a dark and icy corridor either whole or in bits. “What the hell happened?”

“Unknown at this time,” said the voice. Probably Rogers but she couldn’t be sure. “Are you injured?”

“Negative.”

“Stand for orders,” he said.

“Affirmed.”

Boylan watched as sealant foam flooded the space between the plexi sheets, filling it like a wave of cottage cheese. In ten seconds it would be as hard as the hull and the plexi would retract.

Her hands shook a bit, partly from the close call and partly from the adrenaline the near miss had sent surging through her. They quieted soon enough and her mind started in on her lists.

What happened? Possible attack. Possible collision. Possible defect-inspired structural failure.

Protocol? Go hot and get set to repel boarders? Dig in and ride out the passage through this asteroid swarm or whatever it was? Wait for the brass, or figure out what the hell was up on her own? Get hold of Alex before she had to kiss her ass good-bye?

As the sirens continued to scream, Boylan sparked up her BIORB, telling the little implant to tap the nearest AI for current ship status. C & C wouldn’t tell her more than they felt she needed to know but there was often a massive gap between what the brass thought was important and what could save her life.

“Data, data, data,” her dad had always told her. "There’s safety in data.” He’d never been proved wrong yet.

Something had punched Apex in the guts, puncturing Boylan’s position as well as sixteen others on the port hull. So far there were only three more losses beyond Nelson and Kim with some injuries being tended on the spots. The brass were up there hanging response scenarios.

Tick, tick, tick, she thought, clocking the seconds. Tell me something.

She wasn’t good to anybody just sitting there but, without knowledge of which protocol to run, she couldn’t move either. She hated not being able to do anything. More than that, she wanted something to hit.

When the second volley of whatever-it-was pounded Apex again, this time killing the gravity and slamming her hard into the opposite bulkhead, Boylan found she wanted something to murder.

Her BIORB flooded her brain with casualty reports and system failures so numerous and immediate that she was forced to mute it to spare herself the cascade

“This is C and C,” said Rogers’s voice, now recognizable through the static. “All decks report casualty and damage numbers. Affirm.”

“Hit them back,” she said, knowing he couldn’t hear her and wouldn't heed her if he could. The brass kept their own time.

This second impact had killed the grav and set her flying so now she was obliged to flail every limb in hopes of finding purchase on one of the surfaces she slammed into.

Finally her fingers caught the lip of the bulkhead seam and she was able to right herself. She hung there, waiting for her BIORB to tamp down her heart rate and tweak her adrenals.

Then the lights went out.

[HYPERCAST TRANMISSION REACQUIRED// LOADLINK ACTIVE]

By now you certainly know of some of our situation here, Elliot. Apex was dispatched by CoreGov Tactical to track and destroy a Mercanti [datalink: MERCANTI] spore reaper that had been devastating our colonies on the Rim worlds.

We are also tasked with defending the remaining worlds from further incursion. The reaper is an horrific weapon, Elliot, truly like something out of a nightmare. I am prohibited by Core Directive A1HB from describing either its specific effects or design but I can say that Dante would have had trouble processing the atrocity of its transmutative attacks.

Apex was forced to cleanse both Pollux and Samsara II of all organics rather than let a single Mercanti spore-child off either planet. There were ten billion humans spread between both those worlds, not to mention the pets and livestock and the indigenous forms. The Mercanti [REDACTED] them all, forcing us to obliterate what they left behind.

The Mercanti are a vicious species. There’s no other way to describe them. Vicious. Brutal. Implacable. There is no reasoning with them. There is no commonality of experience between us and them from which to form diplomatic bonds. Their only drive seems to be the destruction of any intelligent life that is not identical to their own.

There is a reason CoreGov doesn’t reveal the details of their attacks to the general population and why I can’t do more than hint now. Let me just say that there are some deaths that are far more desirable than anything the Mercanti allow. They must not be permitted to approach the central Core.

I don’t say all this to blunt the effect of this communication or to distract you from your grief. I simply want to paint some picture of the situation out here that, perhaps, the newsfeeds and immersion holos can’t provide. You should know how it is, how it really is. I believe it will help you to know.

There’s no need to recount the details of our pursuit and confrontation of the reaper. There are seventeen remaining Rim colonies and, so far, we have managed to keep them safe [datalink: RIM WORLDS]. I will tell you that the battle resulted in the reaper’s crippling and a high number of casualties among my own crew.

Despite our victory, our situation, I won’t hesitate to tell you, was and, to some degree, remains, dire. >>>>DATA STREAM CORRUPTION EXTANT>>> SCRUBBING>>>]

The lights were back, thank Jesu. The simGrav reasserted but poorly. The ceiling was the floor now and, as she jogged along its uneven contours, trying not to stumble on what had just been the overhead lights, she had to wonder what the hell the skipper was playing at.

Why hadn’t they swiveled the turrets? The whole point of the damned Sabre class was that its breach engines were also its cannons. Anything big enough- she knew it had to be the sodding reaper back for another go- to smack this much hell out of Apex needed to be slapped back, fast and Hard. Slapped to death if they could manage it.

The Breach cannons had been used to purge two planets so far and to put whopping big holes in the flesh of the reaper they’d been sent to kill. The twenty-five Sabres and their Breach weapons were CoreGov Tactical’s best shot at ending this. Everybody at home knew it and Apex had been sent out here to give the Mercanti the news. Only, since when did the reapers turn and fight back? When did the big spore makers ever engage in nose-to-nose space fights?

They were planet killers or, more correctly, she supposed, reformers. The bastards didn’t kill the populations they attacked. It would have been a mercy if they did. Instead the Mercanti reapers rained those hellish spore things down on them.

The spores turned anything they touched into hideous tentacled monsters that screamed and killed and ate everything, even one another. The brass called them spore children.

The spores the reapers belched out turned anything living into that in just about the time it took for someone to describe. Too fast to stop it once the attack was underway. But they’d never, not once, turned and fought back against an attacking cadre of ships.

Maybe we never had anything big enough to bug them before, she thought and smiled.

The holes Apex put in the reaper during that first skirmish had obviously been severe enough, if not to kill it as they had thought, then to force it to rethink its program.

Maybe the brass knew what they were doing after all. So, why in the hell hadn’t they swiveled the turrets? If it was something tactical, they needed to get their heads out of their asses and finish the thing, now. If it was something technical, some glitch or damage that was holding things up, she wasn’t equipped to help. There wasn’t much call for hand–to-hand in space.

“Hit them back,” she said again, to no one. “Hit those bastards back now.”

SPACE part one.

2009-06-10T22:46:00.000-07:00

I was asked to do this a little while ago- by a professional astronomer, no less- so, here it is. Well. Okay. It wasn't a little while ago; it was months. And she didn't so much ask me as she did inspire me to promise, proactively, that I would. She really is an astronomer, though, and that is the crux. She is one of those people who actually does the thing that scribblers like me only dream about. Such promises made to such people must be fulfilled or, y'know, woe betide. It took me too long to write this because, well, it just did, that's all, and I'm sorry. Can we just begin, please? Thank you. Anyway. What this is, as you can see from the heading, is something to do with space. That's right: all that twinkling black nothing that rotates overhead every night (if you're lucky enough to live somewhere where the sky is actually visible over the nocturnal urban haze.) SPACE. Except it's not empty, is it? No, it turns out "space" is chock full of all manner of exotic, even impossible stuff. Dark matter. Super Earth's. Ancient gamma ray spewing black holes. Just all sorts of wacky stuff. I'm surprised there's any room to move around at all. Turns out all that Empty isn't. I don't honestly remember when I first started thinking of Space as an actual place but it was fairly early. I'm slightly younger than NASA, I think- by about a decade. So you can say I grew up with space the way people in their 20s grew up with MTV. It was just there from the time I started thinking about it. As a place, I mean. As a kid my dad and I would watch Star Trek reruns on our local station. On camping trips to the desert or the Pacific Northwest we would lie out and look up and he would talk about how far away this star was or how long light took to reach us from the Sun. I think I remember some of the early space walks being televised on CBS, narrated with appropriate gravitas by Walter Cronkite. I might even remember this: Though that may be apocryphal. All I know is that I decided early on that I wanted something to do with Space. I wanted somehow to get there, to touch it, to see for myself what what really going on Out There. It was a decade before I realized that this was one of the most fundamental human desires, indeed, maybe one of the defining ones. Gods live in the sky, after all. It's where rain and lightning come from. Who wouldn't want to get up there and take a personal look around? Cyrano de Bergerac wrote about going there. Jules Verne, of course. Over the millennia a veritable army of fictioneers have put pen to paper or inky finger to cave wall to describe their weird compulsion for posterity. It's almost like we all know something is missing from our terrestrial lives, some piece of our collective soul, maybe, that can only be found Out There. So I went through the Astronomy phase, learning the placement and names of the constellations and the insane distances between and ages of the stars that made them up. I collected NASA emblems that could be stuck to school books or refrigerators or, God forbid, my mother's Camero door. I played Spaceman, building elaborate "lunar survival equipment" out of styrofoam packing and bits of broken radio parts. I was going there, you see, eventually I was going and I had to get ready. I had to make sure everything I was was focused on getting Out There. But it was all fantasy. Even with all the facts from parents and school to erode the false impression I'd got from the fictioneers, I just couldn't shake the idea that there was a whole vast civilization Out There, with evil dictators and heroic adventurers and smoking hot princesses of all shapes and hues just waiting to be rescued (what was to be done with them after the rescues was always muddy but I figured I'd noodle it when the time came). Bradbury and Herbert owned me at a frighteningly early age. And, of course it all got muddied further with the arrival of comic book superheroes and films like FORBIDDEN PLANET and ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN. I just knew Space was like a massive theme park and I only had to wait long enough to grow up and get my own E ticket. And then this came along.

Message to the Past

2009-06-08T01:13:00.000-07:00

i'm just sayin'

2009-06-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

You French BASTARDS! (well done, lads)

2009-05-26T10:08:00.001-07:00

La Main des Maîtres
by -CaYuS-

APE NATION

2009-02-23T12:28:00.001-08:00

Well, it's official. The comic book I created with my partner in crime, Todd Harris, has been picked up for publication by APE ENTERTAINMENT. This is their awesome logo , right here. You can check out some of their other titles by clicking THIS LINK. It was a long time coming and fraught with perils I will never describe in mixed company but we made it to the beach. In the coming months you'll be able to find out more about the project by clicking the GENRE 19 link on the left. It's called PRODIGAL and it kicks ass. 2009, baby. Only a couple months in and we're already cooking with gas.

Something's coming...

2009-02-19T12:03:00.001-08:00

because every now and then...

2009-02-12T23:06:00.000-08:00

You need to be reminded what greatness is...

I go away for five minutes...

2009-02-05T22:00:00.000-08:00

Bone-tastic!!!

2009-01-28T17:14:00.001-08:00

I love this show. I love the charisma of the ensemble cast (you RULE, guys). I love the premise. I love the delicate balance the writers strike between low-key humor and crime filled tension (you also rule. you are co-rulers). I. Love. It. So, with help of my lovely assistant, HULU.COM, I'm spreading that love. Check it out, baby. I wouldn't steer you wrong.

The Year in My Rear View

2009-01-25T13:38:00.000-08:00

Well. It's a bit late this year. Busy, busy, busy in casa Thorne. Overall this was another banner year. I'd tell if it wasn't, believe me.

I'm not going to talk about the election.

We all know what we did on that score and we all know what we have to do.

There was bad news this year. Some deaths. Some people lost their jobs. A lot of them, actually. You probably know a few. You may be one yourself.

The one closest to me so far is described in the NEWS page so click and look. The good news, as always, is the writing. Better this year than last but, sadly, much of the Good is still in-process and Time has taught me to fear the Jinx so let's just say, things are moving in positive direction earlier than the pundits predicted.

Deals made for several anthologies last year will hit the bricks this year and I'm having a lovely time jobbing around Lost Angles in various guises. I have two original novels out to different publishers and there may be a collection in the works as well. Who knew?

Well. My wife did.

She's largely responsible for this turn of events. But that's part of the job description.

Note to readers:

ANYONE WHO TELLS YOU THERE ARE NO SECOND CHAPTERS IN AMERICAN LIVES IS A BIG FAT LIAR.

Write as many chapters as you effin' like, I say.

There were a couple of really tasty false starts too but they were fun, despite the unhappy outcomes, and new people were met which is always a good thing.

The nephews thrive like the happy, rambunctious weeds they are.

The sibling seems poised to take up the pen (or, I guess, keyboard. Who uses pens anymore?).

Life is good. One of the better things that happened didn't even happen last year but in the very early days of this one so I'm going to allude to it but not actually mention here. Next post will be wholly devoted.

Be well. Stick around. Buckle up.

The ride is bumpy, yeah, but the effects are out of this world.

Writers

2009-01-16T12:04:00.001-08:00

That she or he who hopes to climb The vaulted ivy-covered walls Must needs believe what holds the heights Surpasses that which plods and crawls. There's naught in Life that's proven gold Without we several thresholds cross. The first is to divine the means Of separating gilt from dross. The second proves much harder still For some who look but cannot see The difference 'tween a selfish screed And sometimes-cold Reality. There's nothing bought that isn't sold There's nothing gained that isn't won There's nothing learned without a cost There's more to sky than Moon and Sun. There's all the stars that fall between Like snowflakes made of burning light. They sing us, "Ex Astris, Scienta. Now, morituri, rise and fight." And that's the third and hardest gate To cross; to know in heart and bone We're gladiators, one and all. The arena is our only home. Copyright © 2008 Geoffrey Thorne

Hot, hot , hot!

2009-01-06T15:58:00.003-08:00

Happy New Year!

2009-01-03T01:19:00.000-08:00

OMG

2008-11-20T21:02:00.000-08:00

Hair of the Dog

2008-11-05T09:36:00.001-08:00

So. We did it. The good guys won and we did something, once again, that has never occurred on this planet before. A member of the low tier, formerly enslaved social class has now achieved this nation's highest office making him, literally, the most powerful human being in the world. We hung together and let the spirit of E PLURIBUS UNUM drive us. When it does that, when we let it, we become the thing too many of us think we are simply by virtue of birth. We become Americans. That is an activity, to my mind, rather than a state. Like Clint Black says about Love, it's something we Do. There's more to this victory ( I won't say historic because everyone else is doing that) than parties and pats on the back. This is not the end of anything. It is, if we are VERY lucky and VERY careful, the beginning of something better, something new. But it's not a Christmas present. No magical aliens are going to swoop down with cures for cancer or an injection that blocks homohobia. It's still just us down here, building the world and, sadly, still tearing it down. So. What do we do now, after the confetti is cleared away and the residue of last night's victory champagne is offset by combos of protein shakes and Red Bull? Well. The past is prologue, folks. While a significant change has been made here and a slightly larger number of people who believe in the promise of this place than those who harken back to its darker times made their voices heard, the conditions our new President faces on day one are nearly as daunting and certainly as dire as those facing FDR or LBJ. In some ways, more so. We are a debtor nation. We have massive social and economic issues that plague us still which the election of a single individual, ANY individual, will not offset. Even as we embraced one sort of tolerance and expressed our desire to put one form of bigotry behind us we continue to treat our LBGT population with , well, something less than decency. That's something that needs fixing. It's not something that can be done by Presidential edict. Nearly none of our problems can really be solved that way. So. The question. Again. What now? What now, folks? I think the new President has been saying it the whole time. He's not our Saviour. He's our first citizen and, in some cases, our leader. But, as he's said many times, this election, this nation is not about him. It's about us. Who's going to implement the "Change we can believe in?" We are. We'd better. I think we can. It is, after all, what we do.

2, 4 one

2008-09-20T11:36:00.000-07:00

Well. It's that time again. I've been meaning to do tis for months and now I've finally got off my butt to do it. Periodically I like to highlight people I've met (or have known for years) who are doing something worth letting people know about. First up is one Warren Drummond- personal friend and gifted artist. For many years warren has been working as a professional storyboard and "pre visualization" artist for film and TV out here in LA. While, like all the arts, being a pro in his field means running a professional gauntlet for each and every job that would make the average worker cringe into the fetal position, Warren seems totally unfazed by the gladiatorial nature of his profession. Competition is stiff, in other words, and most people like to keep what they know to themselves. Not Warren. He keeps a blog HERE, detailing his ups and downs and the nuts and bolts aspects of what it really means to do what he does. If you want to do it or learn about what it actually is, do yourself a favor and check it out. Second up is Gregory Pence, someone from the other end of the spectrum. I just met Greg a little while ago. He's young, extremely energetic and, i think, a straight shooter. He's also a gifted new talent with a lot to say about a lot of things and I think, someone who folks will be hearing about in years to come. I'm jumping on now so that later, when I need a loan or something, I can call Greg and he'll feel he owes me. I'm nakedly self-serving that way. here's an example of one of Greg's political cartoons, used by permission. and here is his link. RIGHT HERE! That is all.

Prince? no. King.

2008-09-19T09:22:00.001-07:00

Rebuttal

2008-09-04T11:35:00.001-07:00

OBAMA (cross post)

2008-08-28T20:50:00.001-07:00

All my life, against whites and blacks, men and women, gays and straights I have always argued that Americans need to be a tribe, a real honest-to-God tribe, if we are going to move forward, if we mean to survive. Everything that has ever been best about us has adhered to that notion. Every deep failure has been the result of straying from that ideal. When those planes smacked into New York, murdering not only all those innocent souls but also any notion that we, Americans, were somehow above the world's mundane concerns, they also provided a window for the right person to step through and lead us toward that goal of Tribe. It was a tiny window, maybe only a week long, during which more of us than at any time in history thought of ourselves as a unit, as a tribe. We were united in our grief, united in our disgust, united in our desire to do something, anything, to prove that that ugly moment wouldn't define us for the next few centuries as so man ugly moments had in the past. George Bush could have, during that window, insured that he would be the single greatest President in history if he'd only spoken to that grief and harnessed it into what it necessarily should have become. "I feel what you feel," he should have said. "I know what you know. We are in this together." But he didn't. He failed. He squandered the moment, that precious tiny moment, on more political maneuvering that led us, ultimately to not only the sorry social/economic state we're in now but also to the bloody morass of the Iraq conflict. He has cost us lives. He has cost us livelihoods. He has cost us centuries of hard won respect not only on the world stage but also our collective belief that the notion underpinning our society- that divergent ethnicity or gender or faith was not a deal breaker, was not even an impediment but an asset. Instead he made us craven. He made us desperate. He made us torturers. But, worse than all those things, worse really than anything, he failed to see us as a nation. He failed to see us as a single people, despite our superficial differences and to remind us of that positive, nurturing, affirming fact in our time of need. I have hated him for that failure. I have hated him for all the others as well and for the lives he and his cabal have cost us but I have really hated him for killing that moment. A little of our collective future died when he did that, strangled with both hands by him, personally, on international television. I used to try to make this point to people but, largely, they haven't wanted to hear it. Not since that week, certainly. They need to eat and fill their tanks and, dammit, we aren't a tribe so why didn't I just shut the hell up about it? Barack Obama is why. Not just the man himself. He's just a politician at the end of the day, but, if even half of what he said is true, both of his plans and the motivation for those plans, I think we may just have a shot at a second chance. You don't get many of those in life. The older I get, the more I know that to be true. Second chances are rare and important second chances are almost unheard of. I honestly never thought I'd live to see it. Certainly not after that moment passed. I absolutely never thought I'd se a black man, surrounded by tens of thousands of Americans of all stripes (and watched by millions more) make that case not only as a good idea but as the central reason for why he should be the next President. E PLURIBUS UNUM. Hot damn. So. The window's open again. I hope we don't fail. Maybe I'll live to see that tribe after all.

Canada. I mean, DAMN!

2008-08-15T21:42:00.000-07:00

Middleman fans, bring the noise!

2008-08-04T23:25:00.001-07:00

I want to talk to you about this show. It's got space aliens, demons, secret high tech protection agencies, at least two hot arty-geeky gals (who can ACT, btw. not just eye candy) and a guy called Noser whose knowledge of musical catch phrases is a wonder to behold. It is the MIDDLEMAN, in case you didn't know. It's the brainchild of one Javier Grillo-Marxuach of LOST, MEDIUM and SUPER SKRULL fame. A lot of people think the show began life as a comic book that then made the jump to live-action TV. Not so. The show began as, wait for it, a TV show. Well, as an idea and proposal for a TV show that its creator shopped around to folks who basically slammed doors in his face. Yes, thats right, kids. You can have the goods. You can have the connections. You can have the track record and the kickass resume and STILL the answer is mostly, "No. Sorry. We can't use you." However, like most people who get anywhere in the world, Mr. G-Marx gave TPtB the old finger, reworked the concept into a graphic format, found a great artist to draw the sucker and released it as the hyper successful MIDDLEMAN series of mini-series' from VIPER comics. THEN, after it proved it had legs in another venue, the brave souls in Hollywood took another look. More than that, they took a shot. MIDDLEMAN is currently airing on ABC Family at 10pm on Monday nights. Why it's not on ABC proper is beyond me but, hey, I am not a programming exec and have only the barest clue how they do what they do. The point, for you reading this and me writing, is this: TEN PM MONDAYS. Get it?! ABC FAMILY! Yes? MIDDLEMAN! GO THERE. You're not busy. Don't lie. You're just sitting there. It's MONDAY frickin' night. You're hot. There's nothing happening in the world (at least nothing you can be bothered by at 10pm on a Monday night). You're just sitting there. You know you're just sitting there. That's what Monday night is: a lot of people sitting in a semi-stupor, trying to process the fact that yet another weekend is over and it's going to be a hellish four more days to daylight. Well forget it. The weekend is a myth. There is no weekend as far as you're concerned. Don't even contemplate the weekend until THURSDAY effin' NIGHT or you'll go nuts. Nobody wants that, do they? No. They don't. Uh. yeah. Anyway. You're just sitting there is the point. So? Sit and watch. Be entertained. Be amused and impressed by the tasty scifi-comedy goodness and then, and this is important, go and tell friends to do the same. MIDDLEMAN deserves a shot. It's smart, hip (are we still saying hip? If not, substitute whatever the new hipness is. Nobody tells me these things.) and it is the result of the sort of tenacity that should make any scifi fan proud. I know I am. And I'm watching. Join me, won't you?

Swing out, baby!

2008-08-04T02:32:00.000-07:00

Love Supreme

2008-08-04T00:13:00.000-07:00

Yes, it should be obvious that I'm tweaking the site. I've got a billion of these blogs all over and I'm trying to get them so each has a specific function with little or no overlap. We can consider Pocket Full of Mumbles the generic base camp for now. Not much news. just me rambling n about whatever with occasional nods to people whose work I dig. In fact there will be something along those lines coming up soon. Stagnation is death. Change rules.

DREAMNASIUMS?

2008-07-31T09:38:00.001-07:00

So some of us are having a discussion. Do me a favor. Compare and contrast these display modes. the first is iPaper

Dreamnasium #1 - Upload a Document to Scribd

and this is Issuu:

Worship the JOSS

2008-07-15T01:52:00.001-07:00

And the Jed and the Zack! DR. Horrible is GO!

2008-06-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

I'd like to take a second to mark the passing of a great artist today.

Stan Winston, while not what many in the lay community would consider an artist, trading as he did in gore and monstrosity for most of his life, was, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest ever.

That's right, EVER.

If you don't know, Mr. Winston was the mind and hand responsible for the vicious dinos in the JURASSIC films, for the bugs in ALIEN, for the 'bots in TERMINATOR and creatures and people from a stack films almost literally too long to list. He was the mentor and teacher of most of the subsequent greats in FX either directly or simply by virtue of his AWESOME and innovative body of work.

I had the honor of meeting him on more than one occasion at his studio and elsewhere, most notably when the lovely woman I was dating was used as the model for Kirsten Dunst's dead mother in INTERVIEW w/THE VAMPIRE. He was a kind, gentle, wickedly intelligent man with that spark they talk about that makes the eyes seem as if there's lightning behind them.

He wasn't a freind of mine. I didn't have that honor. I doubt he would hve remembered me if he'd walked into me at a party. But he did give me one of the best bits of advice I've ever gotten from an artist about making stuff.

I asked him, with the advent of CGI replacing the more old-school "practical" FX for which he and those like him had grown famous, how he was coping. He was coping fine, of course, having just as much fun with the new techniques as he had with the old. So I asked him why he still, despite the sexiness of the computer stuff, continued to use Old School methods at all.

"Do what works best for the job," he said. It sounds simple but it really isn't and, if you think about it, you'll see why. You have to be humble enough to know what's best, after all. You have to be skilled enough to do it. He was both. For decade after decade he was both.

I didn't know him, as I said, but I will miss him and my heart goes out to those who were lucky enough to be close to him at any point in his life.

Sleep well, great man. We are lesser without you.

Contracts today

2008-06-05T00:27:00.000-07:00

2008-06-01T11:56:00.001-07:00

This made me think of us

2008-05-31T19:44:00.001-07:00

M-I-C-H-I-O.....M-O-U-S-E

2008-05-31T12:28:00.000-07:00

Rant #000245601

2008-05-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

I know nothing. I want to get that out front so that there's no illusions. I don't know the short cut. I don't know the secret handshake. I don't have friendly puppeteers in high places pulling strings for me. I think a lot of folks who want to get into the arts think that talent is the thing that determines success. A quick look at the slate of TV shows and feature films that come out every year will tell you that's ridiculous. Not only are most of them complete crap but a significant number were made by people who KNEW IN ADVANCE that they were complete crap and just wanted to part us from our pocket money. So. Talent, alone, is not it. NOT IT. It's just one card in the deck and it's not the ace. Sorry. Forget about that. Lock it in a box, weld the box shut, bury it and salt the freaking earth over the grave. Talent alone don't mean diddly. How about beauty or sex appeal? For performers, yes, that's a big plus and, at parties, that can certainly go a long way to getting a step or two farther on the writer track too. However, while performers can go for years, even decades on a fuel of Sexy, at some point, even the most achingly beautiful or pulse-quickeningly hot writer must sit down and actually write. If the scribbling sucks after that, you can be sexy at parties all you like. No one will pay you to write. So. Beauty, alone, not the deal closer either. Connections? Sure. Helpful; If you're Gwenyth Paltrow you'd be a moron if you didn't at least try your hand at the craft in which nearly everyone you and your parents know is engaged. However, if you suck after all those doors have been opened, you still go back on the slush pile. And, again, your relative Paltrow-ness will not sell your book for you (with the single caveat of your already being a star). So what does that leave? Work. Yeah, that's right. Four letters, really unpleasant. Work. Hard ass, boring ass, tedious ass, thankless ass work. Reading. Writing. Failing. Starting over. Over and over. Sucking it up and doing it again. I know I harp on this and I'm sorry. Be thankful you don't know me in person because it would likely get really old really fast. I'm sorry. I wish we could all be Lana Turner sitting at the Schwab's counter. I wish we could all have our Paltrow-ness genetically encoded along with the box of silver spoons. I wish talent was the beginning and the end of the story and I wish it was the middle too. But it's not. It just is not and there's no use pretending otherwise. Writers write. They don't talk about it. Well. Okay, they do talk about it but it's not just talk, if you get what I mean. The ratio of talk to scribbling is pretty low at the end of the day. And, if it's not, you're either Harlan Ellison or Stephen King. I'm betting you're not. I'm not. Nobody I know is. So maybe, just maybe, stop sitting in the coffee shop dissecting Spinoza or regaling your crew with your new theory to explain the disappearing murderer from Macbeth. Maybe, just maybe, you should do as we all do, us mortals, us non-Paltrows. Maybe you should actually write something. Several somethings. Sit your ass down and write.

Keith, you are the MAN!

2008-05-24T01:17:00.001-07:00

Mr. Boombastic

2008-05-23T12:48:00.000-07:00

So, here we are again. Occasionally I like to blow up the activities of people I know who have work that's worth looking at and today, because gas is so high and our troops are still not home and the idiot democrats can't just get on with it, I thought a little diversion would be apropos. Item one: HUMOR. There's this guy I've known for a little while who is quite intelligent, very knowledgable about current events both at home and abroad and whose insights into various social issues always make me think. All of which would qualify him to be a Current Events teacher or, god forbid, a pundit. Luckily for the world he has another attribute that I think is even more valuable than the rest of that which is this. He's damned funny. And his sense of humor has finally led him to start blogging the weird things he thinks and sees in his travels. His name is James and you can find the beginnings of his wisdom HERE. This is the ground floor, folks. Get on now. Item two: ADVENTURE There're these other guys I know. Actors, Swashbucklers. Avid orientalists and periodic karaoke performers among many other things. I told one of them about THESE GUYS and he decided to join the fun. Now, in addition to the lovely neo-retro radio dramas of the ever STELLAR Decoder Ring Theatre, you can also listen to the podcasty goodness created by my friends Mike and Taliesin and their band of ruffians as they give you Tales of the Extraordinary. You heard it here first, folks. Well. Not here. You have to go there to actually hear it. You know what I mean. Anyway. Item Three: THE GOODS This one is last but by no means least. As a writer who started selling slightly before the web really became what it needed to be and what it is still becoming, I was given a vast amount of help by attending an impromptu virtual master class by the one and only Dean Wesley Smith. He told us little flickers of light the unvarnished truth about what writing is, what it takes to get going as well as staying in motion and, very importantly, a great many simple structural rules and tricks that helped transform this talented amateur into a paid professional. He did this, by the way, for no charge whatsoever and without fanfare. Those of us lucky enough to have stumbled on that message board know we were part of something special. That door is, sadly, closed now (though he does have a RL class that's supposed to be AMAZING) but buck up, little soldiers. There is a light at the end of this very short tunnel. It's that time again. No, it's not Mr. Smith again and it's not specifically prose related. However the world of podcasts has just recently presented those of you scriptwriting geniuses who are aching to get into the comics biz a weekly window into just exactly how that's done. If you're looking for short cuts or the secret handshake or backstage deal that will jump you to the front of the line and the forefront of success, don't bother. You're not serious and you'll just be wasting your time. But , if you want to know what it actually takes to write comics or scifi on a professional level right out of the box, Brandon Easton is telling you how, every week with his WRITING FOR ROOKIES series. Don't be an idiot. Go there and listen. So. There you have it. For my American friends, have a good and safe Memorial Day. For the rest of you, Cheers.

2008-05-20T15:22:00.001-07:00

Yet another reason to love David Letterman

2008-05-17T16:49:00.000-07:00

In honor of Prince Caspian

2008-05-17T00:17:00.001-07:00

Parallel Uni

2008-05-16T16:57:00.001-07:00

Except she didn't leave. She still loves me and the dancing is as much for her as it is for me.

Grinding, baby. Always.

2008-05-16T01:00:00.001-07:00

It's one a.m., Jerry. I'm at a cockfight. What am I clinging to? Sing it, Dan.

And no Jar jar in sight

2008-05-11T23:58:00.002-07:00

That's all I'm saying for now

2008-05-07T08:49:00.001-07:00

4 me 'N' U

2008-05-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the best Monday since she told me she loved me. Good things happened and I needed to share. So here's an appropriate song, appropriately live and appropriately acoustic. Details of the goodness later.

I NEVER get enough of this video

2008-04-28T23:51:00.000-07:00

2008-04-20T15:46:00.000-07:00

Canon Fodder

2008-04-16T13:55:00.001-07:00

Causality: the description of the relationship between one event- the cause- and another - the effect in which the latter is the direct result of the former. Canonality: the description of the relationship between one set of fictional stories- those depicted in television and film- and another- those depicted in print. Every day, certainly, perhaps every few minutes, a new Star Trek fan discovers the width and breadth of the Trek-verse extends well beyond the lovely filmed entertainments that draw us all in. In that discovery, whether through the writings of DeCandido or Mangels & Martin or Ward, the new fan is quickly introduced to characters, plotlines, even entire species that have no connection whatsoever to the ones on the big and small screens. Despite the fact that most writers of Trek-Lit spend considerable energy making sure their printed tales line up as closely as possible with the filmed stuff a certain friction often develops in the mind of the new fan when reading. It is a combustion of feelings that leads invariably to the question, "Which one of these versions is true?" Which is canon- that is to say trusted- and which is to be tossed out? There are endless cycles of discussion of the value of canon vs non-canon vs fanon, which elements should supplant others and which should be ignored completely. The party line has always been that only what is filmed is considered truly "true." The books are fun, even illuminating on occasion, but ultimately only the films and TV series' actually "count." Despite this official edict, the fan community continues to have what is often a heated debate about where and how characters like Elias Vaughn fit into the canon. They take a dim view when the answer is a flat, "He doesn't." As a victim of its own success, the Lit-verse must shoulder most of the blame for this. If the printed stuff weren't so stellar, nobody would care about it and, by extension, what aspects are to be considered canonical and which are not. Even amongst those fans that only watch the filmed versions of Star Trek there are grumblings about any perceived deviation from what they feel is "authentic." DS9 is (or isn't). Enterprise wasn't (or was). The Klingons wouldn't (or would). Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Setting aside the fact that ALL of it is fiction and therefore is only as true or false as it pleases each member of the audience, here is a humble solution to the old debate. As usual it is to be found inside the official filmed material itself. Star Trek plays fast and loose with Time and the travel therein. On the one hand we have multiple depictions of time lines being "broken" or "altered" and some iteration of our stalwart heroes moving to fix the breach("City on the Edge of Forever," "Yesterday's Enterprise," etc.). This implies that there is only one timeline and that breaches of that line have catastrophic consequences for our heroes and often the universe at large. On the other we have stories showing an infinite number of alternate lines ("Parallels," "All Good Things"), each created when any choice is made or rejected. This is sort of analogous to the so-called Many Worlds Theory and it pretty much cancels out the other version. This second approach, while apparently undercutting some great stories, has also, unintentionally, settled the debate as to what is canon and what isn't. If there are an infinite number of possible timelines, each branching from another infinite number of histories, it follows that timelines can neither be broken nor corrected. Everything that can happen, in short, DOES happen. The Borg assimilate the whole universe, the Klingons take over the galaxy. Sisko refuses the commission to Deep Space Nine, etc. Therefore everything you've ever seen or read, from fan fiction to the next J.J. Abrams epic, is canon. All of it. In fact, taken to its next logical extension, not only is every fictional Star Trek story true, every story ever written about any subject whatsoever is also true. Somewhere, somewhen it is all happening. If you miss the old smooth-headed Klingons and hate the ridges, well, you're in luck. Turns out you've only been watching the adventures of those Klingons that The Powers That Be have chosen to show. The smoothies are still out there insulting bartenders, fueling civil wars and generally running gleefully amuck without any hint of a human-made Augment virus to twist their foreheads one way or the other. More than that, somewhen there's an entire Star Trek series featuring the adventure of Christopher Pike and where no one has ever heard of James T. Kirk. The Rihannsu are the true Romulans, regardless of what happens or doesn't happen on screen. And, yes, somewhen out there, the captain and the first officer have finally given in to their deep and burning- Well. You get the idea. So, when the question comes up again in about ten minutes, "What is in the canon?" you now have the final answer. Everything, folks. Everything. IDIC.

2008-03-30T14:52:00.001-07:00

Another reason to love the Swedes!

Tron
by freres-hueon

REAL LIFE: For Ms. NTF, wherever I may find her

2008-03-03T19:12:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school I was called before the guidance councillor, Ms. Name Thankfully Forgotten.

She was a skinny mahogany pole of a woman who smelled of something musty. She took a dim view of me and my activities which, while not truly delinquent, were certainly outside her frame of personal reference.

After a fairly stellar academic career and a stack of extra curricular activities, our difference of personality led this lovely woman to tell me that the career I should prepare myself for was one at the end of a mop.

Now, there's nothing wrong with being a janitor. There's nothing wrong with ANY job that you do well and in which you take a certain pride. My folks raised me to respect every person who warrants respect and job description has never been the determiner.

Ms. Name Thankfully Forgotten's intent is what is important here, you see. She found me, for whatever reason, the wrong sort of student. Too mouthy maybe or not as perfectly respectful of adult authority as she deemed appropriate or maybe she just didn't like me. Whatever.

She sat me down in her office and, under color of her authority, proceeded to map out the rest of my life as she saw it. She wanted, in short, to hurt me. A child.

Now I'm no angel and I wasn't then. But I never did anything wrong enough to merit even a reprimand from a teacher much less get suspended or even detention. And, it must be said, I didn't much care for Ms. Name Thankfully Forgotten either.

Still I had the good manners to steer clear of her whenever possible. Why tempt fate, right?

But she had it, as some might say, in for me and she made no secret of it. She tried, at the end of my senior year, to take this one last crippling shot at me. Needless to say, it didn't work.

I've never been one to let somebody saying mean things to me slow me down. But it did piss me off. A grown-up trying to hurt me for no reason? Trying to wreck my life, my sense of self, just because she could? No. That was wrong.

I can only imagine she did it to others both before and after I came along. I can just picture those other kids, who, for whatever reason, fell outside Ms. Name Thankfully Forgotten's idea of the norm.

Maybe they weren't all stiff-necked bastards like me. Maybe some of them actually took those edicts of hers to heart. Not everyone has the kind of parents I have or the sort of ego that gets angry at attacks rather than folding up shop.

I can imagine some of those kids, if not folding, at least being hampered by the ghost of that ugly little woman and her ugly little mind. I can imagine it well.

I've met plenty of adults in my adult life who are complete bastards to children just because they can be. Viewed through adult eyes they're nothing more than pathetic cowards but to a child they can be like the voice of doom. And they know it.

They move through life being Absolutely Right about Absolutely Everything and punishing anyone who falls Outside. Well. Anyone they can.

I have to say that I actually hate people like them. Life's plenty hard enough without them mucking it up for the rest of us. I wish they would all go away. But they don't. They stay and muck and cripple.

So, it's up to us, when we can, however we can, to let them and each other know that they aren't right. Not about us and not about the world.

It's hard, sure, even brutal on occasion, but it's not evil. And being Outside one sect only means you're In another, maybe a larger, maybe a better one.

They're not right.

Spread the word.

And, if anyone reads this and knows this woman (presuming she's still with us), maybe pass this next little tidbit on with a kiss from me.

You were wrong.

About all of us.

the videos, obviously, do not belong to me.

BHM

2008-02-09T14:24:00.001-08:00

It's that month again. It sort of snuck up on me this time, I confess. Already the various networks are trotting out their ethnocentric programming and their heartfelt PSAs. There are official discussions of Dr. King's legacy. Commentators and pundits are, apparently, looking forward to something they call a "post Racial" society. Black History Month. Again. I'm very ambivalent about the whole thing, i don't mind telling you. I'm a black man. Not an African American. Not a Negro. Certainly not a nigger or any of the other lovely epithets. I know a pretty good chunk of "my people's" history and I take extreme pleasure and pride in their ability to bear up under a cruelty that I don't believe most Americans can conceive. I think survivors of the nazi death camps might have an idea. I think survivors of the Boznian and Rwandan genocides might. I'm fairly certain most South Africans do. But the thing is, I'm black. Black. That is to say my skin is brown and the majority of my ancestors hailed, most likely, from somewhere in West Africa. Shouldn't I be an American by now? I see this month barreling down on me every year and I wonder, after all this time, if it's really the right thing to do. Next month is Hispanic Heritage month or something like that. I'm sure there's an Asian Heritage month and, eventually, I have no doubt, there will be a Gay/Lesbian/Transgender Appreciation month. Why not? Why not for any of it? All these peoples have, at one time or another been horribly oppressed in our society. All of them have been castigated simply for arbitrary "differences" between them and those who make up the majority culture. They are all owed a whomping great apology for all that. A sincere one. The thing is I don't think that debt will ever be paid. Even when the government (and it has to be a friendly one) does apologize, there's something missing because for the most part, it wasn't that particular iteration of rulers who did the most dastardly deeds. So it smacks of being much too little, much too late on the old apology scale. Skip it, I say, in fact. What's the point? Which is, on a certain level, how I feel about this month. My ancestors- including my parents and grand parents- weren't fighting to get a little separate piece carved out for themselves. it wasn't so they could have their own ethnic homeland somewhere in the U.S.. They fought, they died, they survived horrible tortures and deprivations not so they could wear a badge of exclusion but because they wanted to be Americans. They wanted to have this nation live up to the sign written over the door. It was the single unifying theme, the ethos, the zeitgeist. But now, about a third of the way through this month that is supposed to honor us, I find my stomach a little jumpy and my fingers drifting towards my head for a scratch. Shouldn't this be unnecessary by now? I mean, shouldn't school kids just be getting all this at once as part of normal history classes? Shouldn't they know about Banneker and Hensen and Carver and Bethune and the rest? And not only in terms of how they responded to the vicious racism that put walls around their lives and mines under their feet? Shouldn't those great men and women have been folded into the batter by now alongside Adams, Franklin and the rest? When we talk about our forefathers (and our foremothers) shouldn't Frederick Douglas just be part of the granite pantheon? Every American owes Dr. King and it wasn't only blacks who walked with him or who felt, as he did, that we could and should be better if we'd just do as we promised in the first place. I dunno. I'm glad a few more folks will hear about some of these great people. They deserve to be trumpeted. But I think, if the goals of "my people" (just people, really. our people) were going to be met, a simple thing like changing the textbooks would go a longer way to creating that country they dreamed about. That's what the sign says, right? Something like "All for one and one for all?" I think we could spare the annual month-long national festival of horns if we would just put a little more unum in our pluribus. Anyway. That's how I feel today. Tomorrow it may be all about Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable. If you don't already know who he is, maybe we do need this month after all.

Benjamin Banneker

2008-02-08T17:51:00.000-08:00

Mathematician. Architect. Inventor. Clockmaker. Astronomer. Eloquent smack talker. My man, Benjamin Banneker. I named my character, Banneker Jinks after him and wish there was a movie about his life because he was freaking awesome. You can check the wiki for some of it but, for today, I thought it would be fun to pass this little tidbit on. It's something he wrote to one Tom Jefferson. "Sir, how pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of Mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges, which he hath conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves." IOW: Suck it, Tommy, you big fat hypocrite. AWESOME.

New stuff

2008-02-04T09:04:00.001-08:00

Nothing too big this week (hey, it's only Monday). I would like to announce the name of an anthology I just placed a story in. It's from the great people at Hadley-Rille Books and the title of my story is ANTIOPE IN BLACK. It's set in my ALT.WORLD universe and I think you'll find it tasty. The book's called BARREN WORLDS and it will be availble in a few months. The H-R guys put out anthos on a regular basis and each is themed. You're doing yourself a huge favor by checking out their catalogue and buying at least one. Oh. here's a tidbit. You prolly know it already but there may be daylight on the WGA strike. That's like the Heavens parting where I come from.

My secret theme song

2008-01-23T01:25:00.001-08:00

DREAMNASIUM UPDATES!

2008-01-17T13:39:00.000-08:00

Ook OOk, baby

2008-01-16T11:05:00.001-08:00

2008-01-12T19:17:00.000-08:00

2008-01-05T01:28:00.000-08:00

I dunno why. This song's just running through me lately. I wish there was some profound thing to say about the futility of war or the waste of lives for oil and rich guys' wallets but, y'know, it's all been said. It's all just stupid and we should have been done with it by now. Effin' monkeys. You get what you pay for. And you pay for what you get. One way or another.