http://melindasnodgrass.com/star-trek-the-missed-opportunity

http://melindasnodgrass.com/?p=1457

Star Trek. Well, where to start.

*********************************************************Here Be Spoilers*********************************Spoilers**********************************************************

It had a really terrific cast. Chris Pine has definitely grown into the role of Kirk. Quinto is amazing as Spock. Benedict Cumberbatch has become one of my favorite actors working. Unlike many I like the Spock/Uhura pairing. There’s something enough off kilter about it that just works for me.

This might just be childhood fondness for original Trek, but I think it was a slightly better movie than Iron Man 3, but both films suffer from the “missed opportunities” syndrome. Just as there was a powerful film lurking in Iron Man 3 there was a genuinely interesting movie lurking in Star Trek: Into Darkness. Unfortunately it got lost. The decision to use Khan and make a pale imitation of the original film seemed like a decision borne more out of laziness then calculation.

I really enjoyed the first half of the film. I had avoided any information so at first I thought this really was a movie about a disgruntled Star Fleet officer who becomes a terrorist and I was interested. What had happened to this guy? Why is he so angry? But then it turned out he was Khan, and my enjoyment and interest slipped significantly. They gave themselves elbow room by creating a new time line. Why not use that? And there were way too many nods to the old show that felt more like pandering and less like an homage.

Watching Kirk be unready for command was a lovely theme, and the interactions with Pike were excelleint. His critique of Kirk was powerful and spot on. “You don’t respect the chair.” What a great sentiment. I could have done with more of that.

I liked the subplot with Scotty, and Simon Pegg did a great job with that character and his moments. But again confusion reigned. There were all these shuttles going into the hanger of the dreadnaught, I guess. Scott slips in with them, and then there are like 7 people on the ship? Who was piloting those shuttles? And about that giant dreadnaught…. How did this get financed? If it was done in secret then somebody should have checked out Marcus’s petty cash requests, and how would you have silenced the construction crew building the behemoth. Finally, if it was authorized by Star Fleet then that sort of blows holes in the whole “we’re not a military organization” thing.

Then we had the villain problem. Who really was the problem in this movie? Marcus? Or Khan? The result was that neither one ended up seeming very threatening and Marcus’s motivation seemed moronic. I’m going to force a war with the Klingons because there’s going to be a war with the Klingons. Yeah, because you caused it.

Khan’s motivation seemed to be that he wanted his people back, but then he devolved into a mustache twirling bad guy. The original Khan was a complex, interesting man. This guy was just either robotically evil or scenery chewing evil, but he wasn’t very interesting. Cumberbatch is a superb actor — check out his understated performance in Tinker Tailor Soldier, Spy — but he was wasted in this film.

And they made our people stupid. When Perky Blonde turns up nobody reacts. And once Spock finds out who she is why wasn’t thrown in the brig until they were absolutely certain she wasn’t a threat? And the underwear scene? Really? What was that about? I had thought she was going to be the crew member who becomes fascinated by Khan as was the case in the original episode Space Seed, but instead she had very little reason to be there at all.

I know what they were trying to do by having a mirror image of the scene from Wrath of Khan only having Kirk dying rather than Spock. A sort of space/time entanglement, but it didn’t work because there was no emotional impact. In the 1982 film we had watched these men interact for years on television and in two movies. We had witnessed the growing friendship. I believed that Spock’s death was emotional agony for Kirk. In this new film they have known each other only a brief time, and part of it was spent with Kirk as a student and Spock as a professor. They have only served together for a year or so. And when Spock does the “Khaaaaaaaaan” bellow — I confess it, I giggled.

Kirk’s death also had no impact because I knew he was going to be resurrected. I had known it from the third scene of the movie because they telegraphed the twist, cheat — whatever you want to call it — of Khan’s blood in a fashion that was way too on the nose. Contrast that with the lack of foreshadowing about Marcus to make his motivations believable.

Final note. A problem that I see consistently with Orci/Kurtzman films is that the Big Problem would be solved if anybody ever talked to anybody, or took a really simple action. This goes back to the first Transformers where the Transformers desperately need these glasses, but Sam has put them up for sale on Ebay. Optimus Prime couldn’t scrape up a few bucks to just buy them?

In the first Trek film the pissed off Romulans chase after Old Spock and blow up Vulcan. Why didn’t they just go home and warn their planet? “Hey, ya’ll the sun’s going to blow up in 17 years. Maybe we ought to move.”

And then we come to this current film. All “Jon Harrison” had to do was blow the whistle on Admiral Marcus and the story is over. Clearly Khan has escaped from Marcus — how we do not know — but he could easily have given the story to the New York Times that there was this crazy, militaristic admiral who was holding Khan’s crew hostage to force Khan to help Marcus build a giant dreadnaught so the admiral could provoke a war with the Klingons. I’d call that a scoop. Granted Khan and his folks were viewed as dangerous 300 years ago, but dude, hire a good lawyer. Instead he blows up a library then shoots the shit out of the assembled admirals. If Khan had managed to kill Marcus how would that have helped him get his people back? And somehow putting people in torpedoes strikes me as a very bad idea. Even if they don’t have explodie stuff inside it won’t do the corpsicles much good to get smashed onto a planet.

There was one more thing that I liked that grew out of the whole terrorism, 9/11 call backs that littered the film. The final scene of Khan and his 72 people in cold storage was an interesting analogy to Guantanamo. Without trial or hearing they have been condemned to cold sleep indefinitely. That’s, if you’ll forgive me, rather chilling.

Bottom line. It’s not a bad movie. It just could have been a really good movie. And that disappoints me because I love original Trek.

The entire essay (cleaned up and revised a bit) is here, if you're interested.

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I'm heading out for Phoenix Comic Con! And though the trip itself will be long and boring, the weekend promises to be a blast. So come out and see me! Here's my schedule.

Also, here's my Twitter feed. I link it here, because the odds are very high that I won't be doing any blogging - just snapping selfies and other assorted shenanigans, and uploading it all for your amusement.

So! Tune in, show up, be amused. That's my suggestion.
And for now ... I'm outta here!

[:: zoosh ::]

The Starship Century Symposium proceeds apace.  Aspace?  Absolutely fascinating.  More than a hundred space people gathered
Very concentrated work yesterday, more than twelve hours.  Unwound with a glass of wine in the motel bar with a few of the participants.  But only one glass, and then staggered up to bed.  It's hard work, concentrating and taking notes (how'd I ever get through six years of college?)

Twenty-five pages in my 4X6 notebook, after fifteen pages the first day.

Greg Benford made an interesting comment from the audience yesterday.  There are billions of dollars of "junk" in geosynchronous orbit – very high-tech junk – and it belongs to whoever goes up and claims it.  Some American entrepreneur should be hatching plans now.  (No other country yet has integrated public and private sectors in space flight, but that won't last long.)  One thinks of a near-future story redolent of old pirate tales.

 "Avast, Matey – can't get me space helmet on with this dagger between me teeth!"

One of my old MIT students, Peter Diamandis, came up in this regard.  He's one of the founders of H.O.P.E. – Human Outer Planet Exploration.  They want to prospect and claim the most valuable Near-Earth asteroid.  There are about 1700 asteroids that are easier to get to than the Moon, which I didn't know, but it makes sense.  (To use resources from the Moon, of course, you have to go down its gravity well and return; the asteroids are "nearer" in terms of energy.)

Well, I'm somewhat on stage today, a panel of sf writers.  So I'd better do a little research.

Joe

So in my never-ending quest to be more like Sterling Archer, I purchased a Groupon for 10 Krav Maga classes. It was only $39 so it seems like a pretty good deal. I've never had any martial arts training, and I haven't been in a fight in close to 20 years.

But as my inner boy scout likes to say, be prepared.  Maybe I've been watching to much Walking Dead, or something, but I think being better able to defend myself isnt a bad idea. i'll update after I've been to a couple of classes.

“Ten Things I’ve Learned” by Stephen Leigh (Part Two -- see yesterday's post for Part One)

6: In the beginning, always say “yes”

This will probably be somewhat contradictory against some of the other advice I’m ladling out, but that’s okay. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

What’s important early in your career is that you’re working—making writing that dirty habit I mentioned earlier, right? It’s also important that you’re wide rather than narrow in what you’re willing to attempt and what you’re willing to do. When you start out, you’re still not only trying to find your own unique voice, you’re also trying to figure out what you do best, and what you enjoy doing best.

I started out writing short stories. One of things I eventually realized was that I was trying to cram too much story into too small a space. I was essentially trying to shove a novel’s worth of idea into the container of a short story, and as a result, my stories were 1) not very good, and 2) were getting increasingly longer.

Something in me wanted me to be a novelist. Not a poet. Not a short story writer. Not an essayist. I enjoy writing short fiction (and have written lots of it—and hey, I think I’m finally getting better at it...). I enjoy writing poetry (though I think that I would have to study poetry far more than I have to be anything close to a decent poet). I like writing creative nonfiction as well. But mostly, I know I that I like the scope and breadth of character and story that I can examine in a novel.

 If you don’t try your hand at everything that’s possible for you, you may never discover what it is that you really like. So don’t shun poetry. Don’t shun creative nonfiction. Don’t shun short fiction. Don’t be afraid to attempt a novel. Try every genre. Try every style and every approach. Experiment. Bend and break all the rules of good writing you’ve been taught. Push the envelope.

Try everything. You’ll fail often enough—because that’s what we all do when we’re learning—but let those failures teach you. When someone asks “Have you ever tried this?” and you haven’t, give it a shot. If you see a market report that sounds vaguely interesting but isn’t something you’ve attempted before, go for it and submit your effort. If someone asks you to write something for them, even if it’s entirely outside your experience, say “Sure, I’ll do that for you.”

 Say yes to everything.

Further on in your career, you’ll inevitably reach a point where you’ll need to learn to say “no” in order to retain your sanity and to have any chance at an unstressed life. There is such a thing as having to juggle too many projects at once without crashing and burning at the same time. But saying “no” is a trick you can always learn later. Hopefully.

 For now, the answer is “yes!”

7: Don’t write for fame

Writers have egos.

How’s that for the world’s most obvious “Duh!” statement?

Actually, when you think about it, the whole “submission” process is fraught with ego. After all, in sending out your story, poem, article, or novel, you’re essentially saying “Hey, I think this is so damned good that everyone should read it.”

Writers need ego. We need to think we’re capable of doing something special or we wouldn’t even make the attempt. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of self-confidence.

Just don’t let your expectations destroy you.

When I started out, I wanted fame. I wanted my name to be on the lips of every reader. I wanted to top the best-seller list. I wanted everyone to say “Oh yeah, he’s that brilliant writer who wrote…”

Here’s the problem with chasing fame: you can’t catch Fame from behind. Fame, if it wants to, will instead catch you.

Let’s say that the current Big Thing in bestsellers are novels about zombie were-weasels in Victorian London, and you’re thinking that hey, I can do that as well or better than the one I just read that’s currently #1 on the NY Times list. And maybe you can. But the reality is that by the time you research Victorian London and zombie were-weasels, finish plotting, drafting, and revising your novel, and start sending it out, the new Big Thing will be romances set in haunted RVs in the desert, and the editor will look at your zombie were-weasel novel and just shake her head. It could be the best zombie were-weasel novel ever written, and it’ll still get rejected because it’s already passé.

You can’t catch the current popular wave of publishing. Ever. And you shouldn’t even try to do so.

Want to be famous? Imitation won’t get you fame. What might do that is creating the next Big Thing, but you won’t know that you’ve done that until it happens. The reality is that most writers never manage to do so… but that’s okay.

You’ll get fame if Fame wants you. If it doesn’t (and be aware that it’s a fickle, fickle master), you won’t. Whether or not you ever become famous is not under your control: therefore, don’t worry about it. At all.

What should you be writing? Well, be patient. That’s covered under Realization #9.

8: Don’t write for money

Don’t get me wrong here. I like it when I get paid for the work I do. I want to be paid for my writing. I make a decent percentage of my annual income from writing and I don’t want that to stop. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being paid for your creative output.

What’s wrong, in my opinion, is when the money is the only reason you’re doing something.

This one took me awhile to process myself, alas. It’s also an easy trap into which to fall. I’ve fallen into it more than once—and hey, let’s be honest: if someone dangles enough money in front of me, I may yet fall into it again. I’m a slow learner sometimes.

Yes, I’ve written novels strictly because there was decent money involved, even though I wasn’t incredibly enthused by the project because it wasn’t mine but someone else’s. Here’s what I’ve found, every single time I’ve done that: I’ve ending up hating the project, it’s been a terrific slog to finish, and I haven’t been happy with the outcome.

 Mind you, there are times when you might have to do this, so if it happens, don’t beat yourself up too badly. How many of you hate the job you’re doing now, after all? How many of you dread slogging into the office every last weekday morning, and can’t wait until you can leave again? How many of you are laboring strictly for the paycheck and benefits you get as a result, because you need the money just to survive?

 If that’s the case, you already understand what I’m talking about. If writing is your sole source of income, please feel free to disregard this piece of advice, since you may well have to undertake assignments that don’t really interest you simply to pay the bills. Do it if you must -- because I certainly have.

But… be aware that you might end up poisoning the well. You might make writing something you dread rather than something you do because you can’t stand not to write. You might make writing just another lousy job. You don’t want to end up being the bitter, jaded writer whose first question is always “How much are you going to pay me for this?”

Writing purely for fame or purely for money are the wrong reasons to choose writing as a career. Which is why we have Realization #9...

9: Write for passion

So if you’re not supposed to write for money or for fame, what the hell should drive your writing?

You should be writing because you’re writing something that you absolutely love. You should be writing because what you’re working on is something that you can’t not work on. You should be writing because you believe passionately in what you’re writing: whatever that may be, whatever genre it happens to be in, whether the work is serious or comic or somewhere in between.

Good things happen when you’re writing simply for the joy of the work you’re doing. You look forward to working on the current project. You enjoy your work—all of it, from drafting through revision to final polishing to marketing to (hopefully) the eventual publication. You finish the work you start.

This is especially essential for novels. The longer the work, the more it had better be a work of passion—because if it’s not, the great likelihood is that you won’t finish it. It’s perhaps less critical with poetry or short fiction or short nonfiction, not because they’re inherently easier to write, but the time expended tends to be far shorter than with novels. But even then…

When you write something that you’re passionate about, it’s easy to find the time to work on it, because that’s what you want to do. You’ll want to make it the absolute best work you can make it. You’ll be willing to take the time to inspect and polish, to revise and revise and revise again to make the words sparkle. You’ll make it good, and if you’re lucky, you’ll even make it great.

That’s what passion can give that nothing else can: the drive you need to make your work your absolute best work. Passion will make you push beyond your current boundaries, to explore aspects of the craft you hadn’t expected, to become a better writer because the work demands more of you.

Leaning the craft is a function of Intellect: you have to do that too, to be a decent writer. You have to learn the craft. But passion is all about the heart and being willing to tear open a part of yourself and let it bleed onto the page, if that’s what it takes. It’s about being willing to be vulnerable and all the risk that implies.

But (and I swear this is the truth) a good reader can tell when something is written with passion and when it is not, and the difference is stark to them. Write with passion, and your work has the chance of being special and great; write without passion, and it will never be either of those.

10: Enjoy what you receive

It’s easy to get so caught up in life and your career and your expectations that you forget to take the time to enjoy what’s happening. So you’ve set up a book signing in your local bookstore, you’re ensconced behind a towering rampart of your shiny new publication, and you’re hoping for a line that stretches for blocks around the bookstore. But what you get are two friends whose books you already signed a week ago and one stranger who’s buying your book mostly because you look so pitiful sitting there all alone. Period.

Sucks, doesn’t it? How the hell are you supposed to feel good about this, huh?

It is what it is. Talk to your friends as long as they’ll stay. Talk especially to that stranger who bought your book—she’ll tell a half dozen other people about this cool book and how you sat there and talked to her about it, and a couple of them will come in to the bookstore to buy the stock you signed.

This is nothing new for a writer, no matter how well-known. Understand that all of us have sat behind the rampart of new books for a signing like that. Sometimes those things go well, sometimes they don’t. It’s nothing new, it’s not your fault, and the universe doesn’t hate you. It’s what life has deigned to give you today and you can’t change it, so you might as well enjoy it.

Celebrate the good things that happen along the way and take the time to relish them. What you don’t want is to look back later and realize how you wasted your best times worrying and always wanting more.

Look, one of these days if you’re persistent and dedicated and stubborn and passionate enough about this craft, you’re going to sell your first (or second or third, or tenth or twentieth) story, and you have a choice. You can think that it’s about fucking time the universe recognized your awesome talent and allowed this to happen, and now that it has happened, it’s probably going to be fucking forever until it happens again. Isn’t that what you’re thinking, Eeyore?

Or you can embrace those successes and revel in them. Each time, you can taste all the pleasure the moment holds, then carefully place the memory in the section of your mind labeled “Excellent Stuff To Recall.” You can think that maybe, perhaps, the universe has just aligned itself a little more in your favor, and that it’s now more likely that things like this will continue to happen.

Yeah, I know. Sometimes it’s really hard to avoid the dark universe, Eeyore’s universe. We all struggle so hard and get so many rejections that depressing thoughts sometimes dominate. I still fail at holding onto the brighter place myself. The truth is that the universe itself probably doesn’t care one way or the other, but which way of thinking gives you more joy? Which way of thinking makes you feel better? Which way of thinking is more likely to help you persist, to push yourself even harder than you already are?

So take the time to enjoy each step along the way. Stay in those moments as long as you can. Take pleasure in them and celebrate them, because you really can’t know what the future holds.

Enjoy what you’re doing while you’re actually doing it. It’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

*******
So those are some of my insights after decades in this business. There is one further, overarching Truth to cover, though, and that this: There’s No Right Way To Write.

Hey, I’m a skeptic. It sets off my alarms when someone tells me “This is the way the world works and it’s the only way the world works.” The little realizations above are my truths. They are what I’ve learned and what has worked (and not worked) for me. That doesn’t mean that any of the above necessarily applies to you, because the last time I checked, you’re not me. You have a different background, a different temperament, a different set of experiences, and—let’s face it—the world continues to change, the publishing world no less than any other, and so what worked in previous years may no longer work now.

Feel free to argue and disagree with anything I’ve said. But if something here resonates with you, if it feels right, then give it a shot. Who knows, maybe it will cause you to miss one of the pitfalls or take a shortcut to the top of that mountain you’re climbing.

Let me know what the view’s like from up there!

A dream from last night ever-so-slightly too long for Twitter:

Queen Elizabeth had died and a young princess was being crowned Queen Anne. She was certainly not a princess that actually exists in real life. Long, lovely black hair that she wore down for the occasion, swept over her shoulder and flowing down the front of her white dress, obscuring all the medals and sash. She had thin silver crown.

I was a flutist playing in the orchestra for the coronation. Anne started crying in the middle of her coronation speech. A crowd of ministers with pelican heads rushed to console her and guide her away from the crowds. We had to stop playing and wait for her to return. But she didn't.

Ages went by. We finally started playing just to entertain everyone, anything we could think of. Then no one could think of another song and we all got up and started dancing with our instruments and each other on the floor of Westminster Cathedral until the flute section all turned into crows and flew up to roost on the buttresses. Anne was hiding up there, too. Her black hair flowed under her gown to become big black wings.

And then: alarm clock.

A dream from last night ever-so-slightly too long for Twitter:

Queen Elizabeth had died and a young princess was being crowned Queen Anne. She was certainly not a princess that actually exists in real life. Long, lovely black hair that she wore down for the occasion, swept over her shoulder and flowing down the front of her white dress, obscuring all the medals and sash. She had thin silver crown. I was a flutist playing in the orchestra for the coronation.

Anne started crying in the middle of her coronation speech. A crowd of ministers with pelican heads rushed to console her and guide her away from the crowds. We had to stop playing and wait for her to return. But she didn’t.

Ages went by. We finally started playing just to entertain everyone, anything we could think of. Then no one could think of another song and we all got up and started dancing with our instruments and each other on the floor of Westminster Cathedral until the flute section all turned into crows and flew up to roost on the buttresses. Anne was hiding up there, too. Her black hair flowed under her gown to become big black wings.

And then: alarm clock.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

I'm thrilled to announce the cover and existence of my next collection of short fiction: The Melancholy of Mechagirl, from VIZ media, and my awesome editor nihilistic_kid.




This is a unique collection--while Ventriloquism was a general collection of everything ever, Mechagirl brings together all my Japanese-themed short fiction. That turns out to be rather a lot. Some, or perhaps even most of you, know that I lived in Japan for several years and the experience had a profound effect on my work. I'm very excited to have all of it in one place, and with such an amazing cover and team behind it. I mean seriously, just look at that cover!

It'll be out in July and is available for pre-order now. There's also a brand new novelette called Ink, Water, Milk in it, along with some other rare, out of print, or new pieces. It'll also be simultaneously published in Japanese, which is very exciting for me.

Now, there's an elephant in the room, and even if you don't see it, I do, so I'm going to go poke it in the trunk.

Yes, this is a collection of fiction about Japan written by a white woman. Yes, that white woman lived in Japan because of the US Navy and her ex-husband being an officer in said organization and that is not a value-free situation. Culturally, it is quite, quite fraught. And when VIZ first approached me concerning this project, their first from a non-Japanese author, I didn't know what to think, whether it was the right thing to do. I have always tried (and it's not even close to my place to say if I've succeeded) to write about Japan with respect and quality and sensitivity to the fact that I am obviously and forever an outsider. Nevertheless, it was a period in my life that had a profound and indelible effect on me, and in writing about it I have always been trying to integrate and interrogate my own experience, both from within and without, without being overly kind to myself and my culpability or overly romantic or unforgivably ignorant or bullheaded concerning Japanese culture. That is always an iterative process. You circle the thing itself endlessly and never quite arrive at it. I could not have helped writing about Japan, it was always only a question of how I wrote about it, and I hope, I hope I have done well.

And ultimately, what decided me was that a Japanese publisher thought I did at least well enough to ask for this collection and put their weight behind it. And if I wrote these stories to begin with, I should be willing to stand by them as a body of work. This is a very personal book, full of feels, as the kids say these days. It is not a book that purports to speak for Japanese culture in any way, but one which speaks for its author, for a span of ten years of circling Japan and never reaching it, and a single woman's relationship with a nation not her own, but one which, very occasionally, sat down to tea with her.

Here's hoping you enjoy it. (And stay tuned for another collection post shortly! My new general collection, The Bread We Eat in Dreams, is coming out in December!)

Words: 2241
Total words: 58949
Files: 4
Tea: Peppermint.
Music: Orchestral Suites 1&2
Reason for stopping: People stop? People stop when they're writing about Socrates trying to have a dialogue with robots? No, wait, people do totally stop and go to bed and then go to Wiscon in the morning.

I'm off to Wiscon in the morning! I am packed. I'm going by train to Chicago and then I have a ride from there with ashnistrike. I'll be reading in Madison on Thursday, and there for the con, and not home again until Wednesday night next week. I did think seriously about taking the DOS laptop with me so I could write on the train, but I decided the DOS laptop is too precious to risk. Normal thuds will be resumed as soon as possible.