How 3-D Is Ruining Movies For Me

First, let's get one thing straight: there is no such thing as a 3-D movie.

3-D movies are two dimensional like all movies.  In the case of traditional movies, the flat screen uses certain context cues (scale, overlap, etc.) to trick our brains into perceiving apparent depth.  In the case of 3-D movies, an additional trick is used: two slightly off-kilter images, which our brains, assisted by special lenses, combine to perceive apparent depth.

I was perfectly happy to imagine movies as having depth.  I didn't need to wear funky glasses to aid the deception.  In fact, to me, that additional illusion destroys the illusion: the few elements that jump out of the screen only emphasize how flat everything else truly is.

To me, the 3-D movie craze is absolutely ruining my ability to watch the kind of movies I want to watch.

Case in point: Jurassic Park.  I saw it twenty years ago, and I was excited to see it again on the big screen.

But I can't.  Why?  Because it's in 3-D, and the very few 2-D screenings are in the middle of the day.  When I'm, you know, at work.

Most of the movies I enjoy watching--that is, fantasy and science fiction--are now being presented in 3-D.  Soon, they might only be released in that format.  At which point, I'll probably stop watching movies altogether.

And maybe that won't be such a bad thing.  Because the other, deeper way in which 3-D is ruining movies is by dictating their content.  With our fancy new 3-D technology, we take a perfectly nice story like The Hobbit and add endless chase scenes, dropping-off-cliff sequences, and other completely needless nonsense merely because it looks really cool in 3-D.

The technology, rather than the story or the theme or the character relationships, drives the film.

Now, to a certain extent, technology has always played a determining role in fantasy and sci-fi film.  A main goal of such films is to produce the illusion of the impossible, and technology has kept pace in striving to make that illusion convincing.  By introducing another illusory reality to fantasy and science fiction film, one could argue that 3-D is only extending that tradition.

But 3-D, I believe, is different.  To a far greater extent than any of the technologies that have preceded it--stop-motion animation, blue and green screens, CGI--3-D takes on a life of its own: it becomes the film's reason for existence, over and above its function of enhancing the realism of the film's patently unreal effects. If you want proof of that, the mere fact that these movies are advertised as 3-D should supply it: no one ever said, "I'm going to a CGI movie today," even if (as in the case of the original Jurassic Park) revolutionary advances in CGI modeling greatly added to the film's appeal.  3-D, in other words, is a kind of uber-technology, a technology that calls attention only to itself.

And ultimately, that's why it's ruining movies for me (and seems likely to ruin them for everyone in the long run).

We don't watch movies anymore.  We watch the technology.

Like so much in today's digital age, we've added a (virtual) dimension, while losing the thing itself.

Proper Twitterquette

I'm relatively new to Twitter--only about two months tweeting--so I'm sure there's plenty I don't understand about its uses, its rules, its nuances.

That being said, it's taken me only two months to become thoroughly exasperated by what I see as the abuse of the medium by certain users.

I offer, for what it's worth, two categories of tweeters whom I believe are showing extremely poor twitterquette and generally ticking the rest of us off.

The Trivial Tweeter

I read somewhere (probably on Twitter) that the system allows each user a maximum of 1,000 tweets per day.  That's roughly 40 per hour, or two every three minutes.

But do we really need to reach that limit?

I used to follow a guy who tweeted constantly about his coffee-drinking.  As in, "I'm headed to the coffee shop now."  A minute later: "Just ordered my latte."  Thirty seconds later: "Ah!  First sip.  Delightfully frothy."  A minute later: "Almost done.  Time to order another."

I'm not kidding.

Why, oh why, did this guy believe I wanted to know every excruciating detail of his moment-by-moment love affair with caffeine?  Why, oh why, must everything in our lives be reported to everyone else on the planet?  If you're doing something worthwhile, then by all means let 'er rip.  But if you're drinking coffee, or filing your nails, or picking your nose, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW.

When I stopped following this guy, he immediately stopped following me.  I assume he has one of those programs that automatically identify unfollowers and unfollow them.

And all I can say to that is: thank God.

The Serial Tweeter

If anything, worse than the Trivial Tweeter, who's merely annoying.  The Serial Tweeter is trying to sell you something--in my case, one of his or her books.  So every hour, ten or twenty times, s/he tweets a link to his/her works on Amazon.

Let's get one thing straight.  I'm a writer too, and yes, I do advertise my works on Twitter.  As I understand the rules, that's one of its uses.

BUT TEN OR TWENTY TIMES AN HOUR?

This does not make me want to run out and buy these books.  Quite the contrary.  It makes me loathe the writer, the same way I loathe the people who come up to my door and try to sell me things I don't want (usually religion), the same way I would loathe anyone who was constantly in my face trying to sell me something when I'm trying to conduct other business.  Thanks to the Serial Tweeters I've had the misfortune to follow cluttering up the Twitter feed with their endless barrage of "look at me, love me, buy me!" tweets, I can hardly find the other business I want to conduct.

So I'm going to be spending the next couple days identifying Trivial and Serial Tweeters on my list, and unfollowing the heck out of them.  I'm sure they'll immediately return the favor.  To which I can only say: thank God.

Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot.  Maybe there'll be a mass exodus away from my tweets.  Maybe I'll drop instantly from my respectable 80 followers to an anemic 5 or 10.

But you know what?  I'd rather have one good and true companion than countless fair-tweeter friends.

Anti-Social Media

Now that I've amassed a fairly full complement of social media accounts--I've got Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, this blog, even Rafflecopter (though I have yet to figure out how to use that one)--I've noticed a disturbing aspect of them: namely, the anti-social use of social media.

On Facebook, for instance, I witnessed one of my friends engaging in a rancorous, obscenity-laden exchange with one of his friends.  What set them off I'm not sure; I believe it was a simple political disagreement, something having to do with wealth and poverty or guns or the government.  But man, did the expletives fly!  Maybe it was all in fun, though it sure didn't sound like it.  I considered stepping in to recommend civility, but I decided I'd be an unwelcome interloper in their mutual tirade.

Then there was the Twitter exchange I recently--and unwillingly--experienced, where one of the people I follow went back and forth for some time with someone else over the question of what he'd originally tweeted.  He said he'd said one thing, and the other guy said he'd said something else, and by the time they were done I wasn't sure who had said what.  It ended with your basic "dude, whatever," but it was pretty nasty to watch as it unfolded.

And then there are the reviews on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, which range from thoughtful and respectful to downright cruel if not barbaric.  I deleted a couple of my Amazon reviews when I got return comments from people I'd never heard of that went something like, "who the **** do you think you are not to like this movie?"  (I actually wrote to complain to Amazon, whom I thought moderated these things, but their only suggestion was to not post reviews if I was worried about how people would respond to them.)  I'm amazed at the ferocity of some reviews on Goodreads, where four-letter words reign and the goal appears to be to come up with ever more extreme ways to insult and demean authors.  I've considered jumping into a couple of those conversations too--with something like, "well, gosh, you know, it's hard to write good books, and if you don't like a particular book, it's not really as if the author is consciously trying to be mean to you or to waste your time"--but I decided, again, to let discretion play the better part of valor.

What to make of this?  Am I just a dinosaur who believes we should try to be kind to each other, in word and deed, whenever possible?  Or is there something about social media that breeds or at least liberates anti-social tendencies?

I think there is.  Social media are relatively anonymous, relatively risk-free (no real chance of an actual fistfight, which as we know from Fight Club most people assiduously avoid), and--perhaps worst--virtually instantaneous, with little opportunity for the internal censor to intervene.  Under such conditions, it's far too easy for small misunderstandings or disagreements to bloom into posturing, rants, and put-downs.

So I'd suggest we develop an app or a widget or whatever to deal with this epidemic of social media unpleasantness.

Or wait, we already have one.  It's called conscience.

Double Agent; Or, What I Learned When the First One Didn't Work Out

In a previous post, I wrote that after revising my query letter for Survival Colony 9, I acquired representation within a month.

That story is true. But it’s not the whole story.

For those who’ve struggled with agents, editors, and the entire publication process, I thought I would provide the part I left out.

My revised query letter did indeed garner a number of requests for the full manuscript. One agent seemed particularly enthusiastic to read the full—and when we talked, she seemed very much “in tune” with my book, my career, everything. It was incredibly flattering for a debut author to feel that someone really “got” my book, saw its potential, and was ready and eager to start shopping it around.

With the benefit of hindsight, maybe I jumped at her offer too quickly (there was another offer waiting in the wings). Maybe I should have been more skeptical. Friends cautioned me that this agent didn’t have a lot of experience in my genre, but I refused to listen. I was on cloud nine, and I could barely hear all those little quibbling voices from the ground.

So I signed with her, revised the manuscript in accordance with her fairly modest suggestions, sent it back, and waited.

And waited. And waited. I’d thought she’d get right back to me, telling me the manuscript was ready to go out or, perhaps, asking for a few tiny “tweaks” before she started submitting it. But I sent it back to her (much improved, I thought) in March 2012, and it wasn’t until May that I finally heard from her again.

What she told me then was devastating.

The revised manuscript, she announced, was “rough” and “slow,” and still needed tons of work. It wasn’t anywhere near ready to send out. A paid editor would have to go through it before she’d even consider subbing it. When I asked her what the going rates for such editorial assistance were, she told me it could be anywhere from 2K to 5K. I told her I didn’t have that kind of money, particularly not if I was spending it only in the hope, not the assurance, of her sending the book out. I pressed her for details on what was wrong with the manuscript, but she would only answer in generalizations: it needed to be “finessed,” it didn’t yet “sing.” We went back and forth like this via phone and email, until finally—after she told me the story was narrated in the wrong tense—I decided I couldn’t take it anymore and exercised the termination clause in our contract.

I still have no idea what happened. Maybe she, too, had leaped before she looked, snapped up a manuscript she thought was in good shape but then discovered, or was told, that it wasn’t. Maybe she was simply as inexperienced as my friends suspected, and she didn’t know what to do once she realized that. Or maybe the whole thing was a scam, a way of milking novice writers in some sort of kickback scheme. (I doubt this, however; she worked for an entirely reputable agency.) Maybe the manuscript really did stink.

But whatever happened hardly mattered at the time. All that mattered was that I felt as if my dream had been snatched away from me just when it was finally within my grasp.

I picked up the pieces, though. The first thing I did—the very next day—was start writing another manuscript, just to have something in reserve. Then, a month or so later, when I could bear to look at Survival Colony 9 again, I went back to it and revised. I decided the verb tense was fine, but there were other issues that needed to be addressed. I deleted scenes, added others, tightened the language, worked on the pacing, improved dialogue, fleshed out characters, fixed continuity errors, everything. In retrospect, being brought back to earth—however rudely—turned out to be a good thing, as it enabled me to see my manuscript through newly critical eyes. By imagining that it was as bad as she’d said (even if it wasn’t), I was able to make it much better.

And the work paid off. I queried agents again. This time I received a positive response right out of the gate from Liza Fleissig of the Liza Royce Agency. A one-month exclusive led to an offer, which I accepted. Further revisions were called for—bringing the number of complete revisions of the manuscript up to five—but this time, Liza found my changes acceptable, and she started sending the book out. Acceptance by Karen Wojtyla of Margaret K. McElderry Books followed roughly three months later.

It’s a cliché to say you learn more from failure than from success, but it’s true that in the end I benefited greatly from this experience. First and perhaps foremost, I teamed with Liza, as tenacious and talented an agent as I could have dreamed for. At the same time, I learned that every part of the writing process—not only the physical writing but the querying, the relationship with an agent, and all that follows—is a work-in-progress; it’s naïve at best, harmful at worst, to imagine a time will come when one can stop laboring to create and recreate one’s product and oneself.

Finally, in true Scarlett O’Hara fashion, I learned that tomorrow is indeed another day. I was crushed, angered, and dismayed when my relationship with my first agent went sour; I felt like giving up. I was as low that day as I’ve ever been as a writer.

But I went to bed, had some bad dreams and some good ones, and then got up and got back to work.

Monsters under the Bedroom

I watched Jurassic Park III last night.  My son had never seen it, and though it's the worst of the three, we happen to have the entire trilogy on blu-ray, so what the heck.  It's short, fast, and relatively convincing dinosaur-wise, so it wasn't a bad way to spend a Friday evening.

It's also, however, evidence of Hollywood's fascination with reasserting male power and prerogative, particularly in the family circle.  I commented on this in an earlier post on Oz, the Great and Powerful; I comment on the same phenomenon at length in my analysis of the first Jurassic Park in my book Framing Monsters.  It's one of the recurrent themes in Hollywood fantasy film (and, for all I know, in other genres; I don't watch much else).  As such, it's worth discussing.

On the surface, Jurassic Park III is about two things only: dinosaur attacks and cool special effects.  (That's really one thing, I know.)  But look a little closer, and you'll see it's also about a broken family that has fallen apart because, as the movie sees it, husband and wife have been playing the wrong roles.  She's the aggressor, the sexual predator; he's the wimp, the milquetoast.  They've been divorced for a year when the film's action starts, and we have every reason to believe she's the primary motivator of the marriage's breakup: her son is para-sailing with her new boyfriend when the two catastrophically crash on the island of the dinosaurs, an event that sets the whole rest of the plot in motion.  She's reckless, thoughtless, careless: according to her own report, she totaled three family vehicles during the time she was married.  In other words, she's a homewrecker--or, in the fantasy terms of the film, she's a monster.  Thus, though it makes no story sense that the female velociraptors would identify her as the one who's stolen their eggs--we the viewers see that she had nothing to do with the theft--it makes perfect thematic sense: this woman who has failed as a mother and nurturer, who has pursued sexual activity outside the sanctioned bounds of the family, must be humbled by the film's true monsters and, relinquishing the eggs that don't belong to her, return to her proper role within the family unit.

But monstrous women, the film also insists, only exist where weak men allow them to.  Thus the husband must be represented as his wife's polar opposite: prissily careful, incapable, anything but the strong, heroic male figure of Hollywood legend.  He owns a bathroom fixture store, which connects him to the home in a subordinate, "female" role: in Hollywood, it's women who make the toilets sparkle.  He gets his clock cleaned by paleontologist Alan Grant--no impressive male specimen himself, though in the first Jurassic Park he does claim the father's scepter by helping two abandoned children find their way across dinosaur-infested territory.  (Interestingly, in the end Dr. Grant chooses the study of raptors over the charms of his female companion, so that by the time we see him in JP III, he's a childless bachelor, "the last of his breed.")  It's only when the husband begins acting in a more appropriately macho way--lighting fires, operating heavy machinery, saving his wife and child from dinosaurs--that he recovers his lost family: in a completely nonsensical scene, the woman who divorced him a year previously screams hysterically, "You can't leave me!" when she believes he's died defending her from a dino attack.  Perhaps the most interesting moment in the film occurs when the father smiles in grim satisfaction at his son's rejection of his mother's coddling: in the film's terms, the son too has become a MAN, someone who keeps a firm hand over women rather than submitting to them.

I've wondered for many years why Hollywood seems so obsessed with telling such stories, but perhaps the answer is simple.  Along with the corporate boardroom and the political arena, Hollywood remains one of our culture's bastions of traditional male authority: it's a place where almost all the important decisions are made by men, while women meekly obey.  Yet that kind of power never comes without anxiety that someone--Barbra Streisand, the feminists, NOW--might strip it away.  So the film industry neurotically imagines the opposition in the form of female monsters, only to restore male power in the end.

It makes for some interesting analytical moments.  But it also makes for a lot of films that really bite.

Query Me This

I'm hosting a publication workshop later this week in Pittsburgh (feel free to come if you're in town), and one of the things I'll be talking about is writing an effective query letter.  I don't know if I'm the world's greatest authority on this, but I did write a letter that got a fair number of agents interested enough to ask for the full manuscript, so I thought I'd offer my two cents.

The first thing I discovered about writing a query letter is that, like the manuscript itself, it's very much a work in progress.  You can (and should) revise, refine, and even completely rework it as you go along, based on the responses it's getting.  This is one reason it's important not to query every agent in the world at once; if you send 100 queries with a letter that's not working, you're left with nowhere else to go.

My first-version query letter, for example, went out to roughly 10 agents, and generated exactly zero interest.  It was the first query letter I'd ever written, and not surprisingly, it wasn't my best.  Looking back at it, I realize it was too formal and formulaic; it didn't sound as if I was excited about my book, so why should anyone else be?  It was long, packed with information, and in consequence dull; it was as if I didn't trust the manuscript itself, so I tried to tell the whole story in the query.  It also had a totally unnecessary introductory paragraph, one that began: "I am seeking representation for my Young Adult novel...."  There's no reason to include that; why else would you be sending a letter to an agent's query inbox?  The point of the query is to hook the agent, to get the agent excited about the story, not about the fact that Unknown Writer #20,000 is writing to them today.

So I did a little online research, found some good advice and some good models, and rewrote my query from scratch.  In my new approach, I followed two pieces of advice that all writers know:

1. Begin in the middle
2. Less is more

So in the new query, I plunged right into the story with an opening sentence that I hoped would intrigue the reader enough that s/he would read on.  And I trimmed the letter down to its bare bones, eliminating unnecessary sentences and modifiers, planting hints but not giving away too much, resulting in a descriptive paragraph that's fewer than 10 lines long.  I felt that this query was much zippier and catchier than the first; in the manner of a back-cover blurb, it sold my story, leaving the reader tantalized, rather than trying to tell the whole thing.  I sent it out to another 10 agents feeling much more confident in its success.

And sure enough, the day after I sent it out, the first request for the full manuscript arrived.  Other requests followed.  A month later, I had representation.  (There's a much longer story behind that, which I'll tell in another post.)  Maybe I just got lucky, but I think it was the new query that did the trick.

So here, for your enjoyment and/or edification, is my query for Survival Colony Nine.  Again, I make no claims for its greatness.  All I know is it achieved its objective.

***

Dear [name of agent]:

In a near-future world of dust and ruin, fourteen-year-old Querry Genn struggles to recover the lost memory that might save the human race.

His story is Survival Colony Nine, a futuristic Young Adult novel that follows a small band of refugees as they fight for existence in this hostile land.  The narrator, Querry Genn, suffers from traumatic memory loss induced by an encounter with the Skaldi, alien antagonists that swarm the wasted planet's surface.  Unable to recall his past or his identity, Querry is both protected and tormented by the colony's authoritarian commander, his father Laman Genn.  But there is a secret in Querry's past, one that makes him at once a target of the Skaldi's wrath and a key to the colony's future.  The discoveries Querry makes about himself, his father, and his family will change his life--and the fate of humanity--forever.

Survival Colony Nine is currently complete at 74,000 words.  I have begun drafting a second installment in a possible three-book series.  The story told in Survival Colony Nine, however, stands on its own.

I am the author of the book Framing Monsters (2005), a survey of classic and contemporary fantasy and science fiction film.  In addition, I have published numerous short stories in the fantasy and science fiction genres; these appear in such publications as A cappella Zoo, Niteblade, Farspace 2, and Cover of Darkness.

I have included a synopsis and the first ten pages of Survival Colony Nine.  Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

[Me]

***

So there you have it.  I hope this model is useful to others, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and impressions.

Just the Facts?

Though the big news in my writing life of late is the acceptance-for-publication of my futuristic YA novel Survival Colony Nine, I'm also having a run of luck publishing creative nonfiction (under my moniker of J. David Bell).  To wit:

Late last year, two of my essays came out: "Watershed" (about a family excursion to sweep our local stream) appeared in Kudzu Review, and "Body Parts" (about illness, my own and others') was published in Blood and Thunder.

Later this year, my essay "The Last Days of the Frog Prince" (about my career catching frogs) will appear in the environmental journal Snowy Egret.  It's been a long time coming--it was accepted for publication back in 2011--but I think it'll be worth the wait, as I believe it's one of the best essays I've written.

Also later this year, my essay "Moon Man" (a love letter to my son, who was seven at the time I wrote the piece) will appear in The Lindenwood Review.

And finally, I just got word that my essay "Racist Like Me" (about my early experiences with race and integrated education) has been accepted for publication by a journal named--I kid you not--Toad Suck Review.

My guess is that my productivity in this genre will dwindle as I buckle down and focus on Survival Colony Nine and (with luck) other novels to follow.  But I really love the challenge of creative nonfiction, which requires the writer to tell the truth in the garb of fiction (as opposed to fiction proper, which requires the writer to make stuff up yet give it the aura of truth).  Two sides of the same coin, perhaps; maybe even two sides of the same brain.

Or simply two parts of what makes us writers, what makes us human.