Category: Blog

Escape to Julian

Posted on by Geoff

 

The Relentless has had its first outside reading. I am letting it sit for awhile so that I can do the next draft with fresher eyes. It is on to the next novel.

Writing during covid was so difficult because I could not go to any of the locations and get a feel for them. I set part of The Relentless in San Francisco since I have been many times. I have also been to the other settings in Washington D.C.  and Virginia. For Venezuela, I just had to do a lot of research. Ultimately, there is nothing like being there to get a feel for the place you are writing about or using as a setting.

My next novel is set in a single very small town. I really needed to get a sense of a small town like that, so it was off to Julian, California for a few days. They do have great apples, which is about the only thing they are currently known for. The population is around 1500.

It was named after one of the members of the Baily family, Mike Julian, who had been a confederate soldier. The family settled in 1869, aborting their plans to travel to Arizona. What made Julian was the discovery of gold that same year by A.E. “Fred” Coleman, a former slave. He started the Coleman Mining District as well as a gold rush.

Expansion of the town was limited by the lack of water and frequent drought. It also stays small because that is how the town wants it. There was a huge controversy when they built a Subway sandwich store and a Dairy Queen. Both quickly went out of business.

The town is gloriously quirky. Almost every shop was open from 10 am to 4 pm. A very old woman said to Belle about the short hours “Well, you city folk just like to get started earlier than us up here.” Many of the restaurants closed at 6 pm. A couple of them stayed open all the way to 7 pm, at least on weekends. This is in a town that, other than apples, really only has tourism going for it.

We attended the Christmas parade. I joked to Belle that I bet they had at least one tractor covered in lights. The parade was actually led by Santa Claus, driving a tractor festooned with lights. A few cars decorated with lights drove by, and that was the parade. It was a bit different from our local Hollywood Christmas Parade that we are used to.

We went into the town hall, which had their main auditorium, which will become a setting in my story. Being in the place really helped me soak up the feel for it. I also did a lot of listening to get the rhythm of the way people there spoke.

A lot of new elements in the story were developed just from observing. We went to a small Italian restaurant. We had to wait at the bar for our table. Belle kept asking for different types of wine until they found something they actually had (and we are not talking specific vintages but just generic categories like Pinot Noir and Chablis.) They were proud to announce that they now had Diet Coke by the can, as for some reason that is hard to get there and he did warn us that they might not have more the next time we came. The owner worked the floor while his son handled the front of the house.  I reimagined these people with a bit of exaggeration and now they play a major role in the story that I would never have come up with had I not gone to this restaurant.

Another scene was inspired by the local but tiny grocery store. The selections were quite limited, and we wanted some crackers. They had two options and the one we selected cost eight dollars, a lot for just a box of Triscuits and more than double the cost at home. It inspired a scene where a local man is pursuing an out-of-town woman and has offered her cheese and she wants some crackers to go with it. When the only two options at the small store are Saltines and Ritz, she goes for the very expensive Ritz crackers. He tells her “Don’t worry about the price, the fancy stuff just costs more here.”

There is an awesome diner where a model railroad traverses the entire ceiling. A tiny train continually rolled over our heads while we heard the distant booms from the Candy Mine. This was an old basement decorated to look like a mine and filled with old style candy. I bought a couple that I remembered from very early childhood. They tasted like that was about when they were made. One was Cup o Gold, created by the Hoffman Candy Company in the 1950s here in Los Angeles. It was primarily a West Coast candy. Later after we returned to civilization Belle got me one fresh from the factory. Still not as good as I remembered from childhood. My tastes may have gotten a little more sophisticated.

As a journalist I did a lot of coverage of events. It is not just a recitation of who was there and what happens. You wander around and observe, looking for interesting stories. Listening and observing are where you get some of your best information and ideas. You also need to talk to as many people as you can and get them to tell you their story.

It is very similar for fiction, except you get to make up a lot more stuff and you don’t have to worry about getting every detail right. Being on the ground and observing can be one of your best sources of ideas, ideas that come from other people’s experiences rather than just your own.

 

Who’s That Girl?

Posted on by Geoff

 

The girl about to make her way into the maw of the monster is Mimi Gibson. This is from the 1957 film The Monster that Challenged the World. She was one of the hardest working child actors in show business in the 1950s and 1960s. I knew very little about her and her career. This despite the fact that I personally knew her. She was my aunt.

Her career had pretty much wound down by the time I came along and was old enough to understand what an acting career was. It was barely spoken of. We never watched movies or television shows she was in. Until the Internet came along, I knew virtually nothing about her career.

The reason was that my aunt had a lot of simmering anger over her forced career in show business as a child actor, so she would not talk about it, and my mother to this day has a pathological jealousy of her sister’s career, so she would never talk about it. I do cover some of Mimi’s remarkable career in more detail in my book, The Greatest Adventure. When my mother skimmed through an early draft of my book and saw that her sister was mentioned, she went into a screaming rage and I did not talk to her for a year. I assume it wound up in the trash unread as we never spoke about the book again. That’s a shame because it is quite a good read, and she comes across much better in the book than in real life.

I just discovered that Mimi had recently published an autobiography called Working Kid. I bought a copy and it filled in a lot of the gaps I was missing. Though Mimi makes frequent trips to Los Angeles, we have not spoken in maybe 20 years. Our family is dysfunctional that way.

I learned a number of things. I already knew that she started doing calendars at 22 months, but I had no idea of the extent of her print work in advertising where she was in magazines and on billboards. She rode in many parades. She was the very last of the Hollywood USO Mascots, which she did for many years. She was the Tonette Girl. She had a doll produced with her likeness. I knew none of this until I read her book.

She did film and television, and a lot of both. There is no official complete record, but there were some 34 movies and over 200 television shows, along with countless commercials. She worked with a number of legendary directors such as Anthony Quinn, Cecil B. DeMille, and William Wyler. She performed in productions with actors including Joanne Woodward,  John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Jack Benny (my personal inspiration for comedy as a child), Red Skelton, Danny Thomas, Doris Day, Mickey Rooney, Ricardo Montalban, Ida Lupino, Van Johnson, Joel McCrea, Barbara Hale, James Darren, Anthony Quinn, Angie Dickinson, Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, Tony Randall, Charles Coburn, James Garner and countless other big name actors.

She still has some resentment about her life in show business, along with a lot of appreciation. Besides being absolutely adorable, she was also quite a talented child actor. As an adult, I have been able to watch a lot of the things she was in. Being burdened from infancy with being the family’s sole breadwinner, with my grandmother spending every penny she made, did not sit well with her. Even so, she had an amazing career working with some of the top directors and a roster of almost every major A-list actor of the time.

Going through her book, I was amused that we had worked with some of the same people. I tell stories about many of them in my book, not knowing when I wrote it that my aunt had also worked with them. By the time I worked with them, though, they were quite old.

She played the daughter of Cary Grant in the 1958 film Houseboat. I first met Cary Grant when I was directing awards shows. Amazing man. Hanging out backstage with him is something I will always remember. Even at 80 he had amazing charisma.

She was in the 1956 The Ten Commandments directed by Cecil B. De Mille. Despite my being involved in theater since high school and taking directing classes, no one in my family ever bothered to mention that she worked with one of the most legendary directors of all time (and many other legendary directors). My mother’s only comment when I found out Mimi was in it was “You can hardly even see her.” Actually, she is hard to miss.  While I never worked with Charlton Heston, my wife Belle did when she was organizing the Screen Actors Guild commercial strike. She liked him more than she thought she would.

She was in the 1954 Ethel Merman film There’s No Business Like Show Business. It also featured Johnnie Ray, and I have a rather long and humorous story about both Belle and I working with him in my book.

She was on Leave it to Beaver a couple of times. I never worked with Tony Dow, who played Beaver’s older brother and who recently passed away, but I did know him socially. I never knew to ask him about working with my aunt.

She appeared on Johnny Carson’s daytime show. I never made it to the Carson show (several friends did), but as described in my book, I did spend a lot of time on the Carson Tonight Show set.

Her final film was in 1968 titled If He Hollers, Let Him Go. It was one of the earlier blaxsploitation films, albeit not a well-reviewed one. It features Kevin McCarthy, who Belle had to deal with in a live production of a Christmas Carol when she was a rep working for Actor’s Equity. Kevin’s well-known problem with alcoholism led him not to just chewing up the scenery, but to literally knocking it over. It is the only film in which Mimi appeared topless, and I was on national television in the nude, so we both had more exposure than we ever imagined we’d have in show business.

I think that she would agree that her most significant accomplishment was her work on a committee for child actors at the Screen Actors Guild that led to major legislation to protect child actors. This led to articles in the Los Angeles Times where my grandmother’s abuses were made public. Those articles and the Internet are where I learned about my family. Interestingly, Belle was working at SAG at the time and would see her come in, but there was just no interest in any type of relationship. While Belle fought hard every day on behalf of the actors, I think Mimi saw SAG as the enemy.

In some ways I followed in my Aunt’s footsteps, although she had a far more successful career as an actor. The irony was that she was forced into it as a child and I desperately wanted it as a child.  Because of Mimi, my mother did not allow me to act in shows until after I graduated high school when she had little say. People often get into show business because they have a working relative, but I got into show business despite having had a relative in the business.

The Day Before

Posted on by Geoff

I have finished writing the first draft of my novel and it is now being read by someone else for the first time. Then it goes out to readers and I will do another draft based on their feedback. Then we go shopping for an agent. Novels are a very slow process. It is very different from the quicker gratification of seeing your work published in magazines or on the Internet.

Now that I have a little break from it, I have a little time to catch up on some television science fiction. I wrote earlier about how I watch the television series La Brea with the same fascination some people watch a car wreck. It also makes me feel better about myself as a writer. I was amazed that it got renewed and even more amazed that it manages to be worse in the second season, a feat I did not think possible.

It is science fiction, but without much in the way of science. Seems like the writers have never cracked open any science books. They have the Hollywood sign collapse into a sinkhole in a way that would make geologists guffaw. The CG effects continue to be embarrassing. The way they have a wolf fall shows the CG artists missed some important things about Newtonian physics in their education. It is the only show where I dislike every single character.

It was also the only science fiction series on network television, until the return of the late 80’s show Quantum Leap. I am a little hesitant to call QL straight science fiction, as the original had Sam Becket believing that God was in control of his leaps. That is not science fiction. That is using the Deus ex Machina plot device. They never went all the way with that, but it does move it more to the fantasy side of things since any god is technically beyond science.

So far, I have enjoyed it, but I hope they stick with scientific explanations of things. The Halloween episode teetered very close to the line, but ultimately science was the explanation. Still, the character Dr. Ian Wright said in the episode that in Quantum Mechanics, if you believe in something, it helps to make it true. No, dear god, no. Quantum Mechanics is profoundly strange, but the idea that it allows you to manipulate reality with thought is idiotic. It comes from a complete misunderstanding of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

One of my fav sayings, attributed to Richard Feynman (although not definitively), is “If you think you understand Quantum Mechanics, then you don’t understand Quantum Mechanics.” It sure sounds like him. One of my favorite for certain quotes from Feynman is “Physics is like sex. Sure, you can get some interesting results, but that’s not why we do it.” He was a physics quote machine.

Manifest, which just premiered season 4 on Netflix, was another problematic network science fiction series for me. It started on NBC for the first three seasons. I liked the premise and all the mysteries, although I found several of the characters annoying or unlikeable. The acting was only okay. It stars the blandest actor from Once Upon a Time.

As they went along, it seemed to be focusing more on the agency behind the mysteries being God. That starts to turn it into fantasy and not science fiction. No, I am not calling God a fantasy, but once as a writer you go down the rabbit hole of God did it, you are no longer in the realm of science fiction, because if God is beyond science, then God is also beyond the realm of science fiction. You might as well use alien space bats to explain the time travel in your story. Alien space bats and time travel are a thing in science fiction, by the way. You can Google it.

From what I have been reading they plan to lean even harder into the God did it explanation, which is how evangelicals basically explain all science that does not conform to their more literal interpretation of the Bible. It is the laziest and most uninteresting form of storytelling and doing science. It would explain why all the “science’ in this show is so terrible.

Sure, it could just be the writer’s way of spreading their religious convictions, which are the convictions of Biblical literalists. That becomes clear with the absolutely ridiculous connections to Noah’s Ark in season three. There are also Easter eggs like the plane being flight 828, which many of us with a Christian religious education will recognize as a reference to Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

That Biblical passage seems strangely like the direction they are going in. That is also probably why it became such a hit on Netflix after it was cancelled by NBC. It would have appealed to the Touched by an Angel and God Friended Me crowd who finally caught on to what it seemed to be about. At least those shows never claimed to be anything other than what they were.

The show is not coming from a fundamentalist Christian viewpoint, though. The Manifest creator is Jewish. It could be argued that he is incorporating symbolism from many religions for a more generic divinity, but there are a couple of tells. They discover a “piece” of Noah’s Ark and everyone including the scientists instantly accept the reality of the mythical tale about Noah, perhaps the least likely story in the Bible to be literally true. Only a Biblical literalist would just assume that Noah’s Ark was a true story. Here they do it with no questioning and no attempt to come up with alternate explanations.

The second tell that we are dealing with a more fundamentalist, albeit Jewish view, is that people in the narrative do what fundamentalists always do with science. If they can’t explain something, they jump to the conclusion that God must have intervened. Here the characters come to the God explanation without considering other alternatives. It could be aliens. It could be scientists from the future, sending them back in time striving to put right what once went wrong, ala Quantum Leap. Maybe it is actually being done by the Quantum Leap project itself. Those are all better explanations, and more interesting ones, than God did it and Noah’s Ark is real.

I will take back everything negative I have said about the show if they have Dr. Ben Song leap into the now much older Cal and explain that the callings are coming from scientists from the future trying to restore the original timeline. Then he and the entire Stone family leap to go find Sam Beckett.

The show feels like bait and switch. Lost, which it has been compared to, also had a mythology, but they created their own, they did not just try to tag on their own personal religious views. Manifest was never particularly good, but there were glimmers of potential. I suspect that the final season will not rise up to that potential and reveal a fairly hollow and more openly religious narrative.

Network television remains mostly a wasteland for good science fiction, but cable has an overwhelming wealth of it. I certainly can’t complain. Oh wait, I can. The Discovery channel, which gave us shows like the incredible Mythbusters and then went way downhill with a renewed focus on super cheap staged  “reality” shows, now pumps out crap like Moonshiners and Naked and Afraid. It has gobbled up a bunch of channels, most recently HBO. That was a horrible fit, as Discovery’s focus is on low-cost schlock aimed at older white people. HBO was more popular with a younger and diversity supportive crowd..

One of their first actions was to cancel the highly successful and extremely well-done Westworld, along with many other shows to reduce costs. Cheap, not quality, is the hallmark of Discovery-Warner. Remember that Warner Brothers is the company that takes great DC comics characters and makes terrible movies that basically rip off Marvel concepts. Shazzam was entertaining and Wonder Woman was great, but the rest I thought I could see better done in the Marvel movies they so closely copied.

The guy now running HBO, and the entire Warner Brothers Discovery merger, is David Zaslav. He is more wrecking ball than a creative type, but at least he is getting paid hundreds of millions to do it. Zaslav killed the Batgirl movie that had already been nearly finished just to take it as a tax write-off, screwing over everyone who worked so hard on it since it can never be shown. He supports the Flash movie despite the star, Ezra Miller, being a teen groomer and credibly accused of abusing children. Ezra also has had many run-ins with the law and has serious mental health issues. It seems that they should have done the opposite and killed the Flash movie instead, but then again, this was a black version of Batgirl. As you learn more about Zaslav, it is not difficult to understand his decision.

Zaslav has massively reduced the amount of content on HBO and cut way back on original content production. HBO has had some great original and diverse science fiction, but I am betting those days are over.

He is not limited to ruining entertainment. Using his lackey and close friend Chris Licht, he is transforming CNN into a more conservative network where they have been ordered not to refer to the “Big Lie” of Trump claiming the 2020 election and every election he or his endorsees don’t win is stolen. The biggest shareholder of Time Warner is a major right-wing financier who wants CNN to be more like Fox News, and that seems to be the direction they are now going.

They have laid off a lot of their creative talent at HBO, with what appears to be an emphasis on reducing diversity. He is a right wing “anti-woke” (can we just admit that is another term for racist) Trump supporting Republican. He has specifically said that gender and racial diversity are not important to him.  That seems to be very clear already.

His reign is being dubbed the “great white male makeover.” The six new additions to the Discovery board are all white men. He fired one of the top woman executives in show business, Warner Bros chief Ann Sarnoff. All the new hires are pretty much white male executives. Can’t have wokeness in hiring, you know, or apparently, you can’t have anything but whiteness.

My advice is to watch the last season of Westworld before they take it off. Zaslav has already shown a willingness to get rid of popular content they exclusively own and throw it in a vault where no one can ever see it, especially if it does not follow his extremist political point of view.

This may be the way everything is going in America. Tomorrow is election day. We’ll soon know if the U.S.A. will remain a democracy or if the Republicans take over and do as they promised- create a permanent Republican minority to rule over the majority who will have no say. They have made it very clear that it will not be a welcoming place for women or people of color. This is one cliff-hanger I am not enjoying.

 

 

More Tech

Posted on by Geoff

 

I see light at the end of the tunnel. I am working on the last couple of chapters. It is always strange towards the end of finishing a book project to contemplate that soon I will no longer be thinking about it. It has been such a part of my mind over the last few years.

I have been working on the climactic battle with the chief villain in his lair, in this case, his corporate headquarters. I had to come up with two technologies. Nothing complicated. Just invisibility and a way to remotely deliver knockout gas to a room you can’t even get close to.

Readers of this blog know that I take the science very seriously. I am not, however, a scientist. I am a science enthusiast generalist. That means that I don’t know nearly as much about any particular area of science as I like to think. I do try, though.

So, invisibility. Actually, amazing progress has been made on being able to render things invisible, including electromagnetic cloaking, dynamic camouflage, spectral cloaking, carpet cloaking, and of course, as seen on Youtube, the amazing Chinese quantum invisibility cloak straight out of Harry Potter. That last one uses bluescreen technology, so it is only useful if you are making a fake video claiming to demonstrate invisibility. None are practical in the real world. Some require electricity.

My version requires no electricity, is easily portable, and is based on a very old technology. It uses lenticular patterns, the kind you see in Halloween portraits that change from one face to another as you pass by them. Quantum Stealth is the patented version of lenticular based invisibility. It is made by Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corporation. Mine is based on that but also adds an additional element. The surface is way too reflective. My version uses a printed nano scale pattern on the front surface that reduces the amount of light reflected off of the material to a mere .06 percent. This approach to reducing reflection and glare is fairly new but seemingly very effective.

My characters are on the 10th floor and they need to render the guard in an office on the 11th floor unconscious without raising any alarms. My solution was developed by Stanford in 2017. It is a soft robot, a type known as a vine robot. It can “grow” many times its length like a vine but is hollow inside, making it perfect for pumping through knockout gas. There are videos on Youtube if you want to see it in action. While the mechanics are quite simple, it is steerable and can have a camera and light mounted on the front so that you can see where you are going. You can navigate it through almost anything as it fits itself into almost any shape.

What’s Up with Us?

Things have changed since we lost our beloved cat, Leeloo, to cancer. We did get another cat, Lily. She was in poor health when we got her from the pound, but after multiple trips to the vet she is now doing very well. She is fully integrated into the household now. She may be the most social and affectionate cat we have ever had. While our older cat, Bastet, never got along well with Leeloo, at 16 she seems to be mellowing. Bastet and Lily are even hanging out a bit, although she is too old to be much of a playmate.

Lily managed to find her own playmate, though. A three month old kitten, along with what we assume were mom and dad, started hanging out in our backyard. They loved the Tiki lounge and could often be seen lounging on the furniture under the shade of the tent, usually sans cocktail. Lily and the kitten began playing with each other through the sliding glass door. It became a daily thing.

We had to go away for a few days, and when we got back, they were still hanging out with each other. With temperatures climbing into the 100s and a week long heat emergency declared, we finally decided it was time to trap the kitten and add her to the household. Kittens only have a 75 percent chance of making it into adulthood, and like Lily, this adorable gray kitten needed us.

We started feeding her and giving her water. Eventually, we moved the food into a cat carrier. She got comfortable enough to go into the cat carrier to eat while Belle sat a ways away. One day the kitten did not realize that the cage door was connected to a long string, which when pulled, closed the door. Her life was about to change dramatically.

She was terrified at first. As a feral cat she had never had physical interaction with humans. We read everything we could about how to socialize her. At first, all she wanted to do was find the tiniest space to hide in.

She was scheduled for a vet appointment and we had her in the toilet room that had a door into the bathroom, that had another door into the bedroom, and the bedroom door was closed as well. We went in to get her, and much to our astonishment, she was gone. It was a tiny room with just a toilet and nowhere to hide. We searched the bathroom and emptied out the hamper. We then searched the bedroom. Nothing. She would have had to get through three closed doors to get to the rest of the house. We had to give up and cancel the appointment.

I had run out of ideas. Then I noticed a stack of pillows in a corner. I had looked behind them earlier, but when I reached underneath them, they felt warm. She had been there moments before. She was moving between different spots so that when you looked she was not there. Very magician-like of her. Once I realized what she was doing, I figured out where she would move to next and there she was.

We tried moving her to Belle’s office where I thought we knew all the hidey holes, since that is where we kept Lily when we first got her. She disappeared again. This time she had crawled through a tiny cable hole in Belle’s rolltop desk. There was a back panel that looked like the back of the cabinet, but at the top was an opening she could get to to crawl behind. It was totally inaccessible. We thought about disassembling the entire desk to get to her. Belle got some tools and the sound of them scared the kitten and she ran out.

The main way we were able to find her during her many disappearances was the kitten cam. It was a 360 degree motion tracking camera that we set on the floor. We could see the last time she passed by it and where she was going. This made it a lot easier to find her when she needed to be fed or given medicine. Her inclination was just to stay hidden, and she was very good at it.

Her various disappearances made it clear she needed to have a magic related name. We chose Bess, after Bess Houdini, performing partner of Harry Houdini. Bess was a talented performer in her own right. She was doing a song and dance act when she started dating Houdini’s brother, who billed himself as Hardeen and did shows similar to Houdini’s. It was Houdini who won her heart, thou.

We finally got her to the vet, she was fixed, and she checked out as very healthy. After a few days we were able to handle her without her panicking. We just took everything very slowly.

It has been four weeks since we brought her into the inside world. Last week we just spent a lot of time holding her, getting her more used to human contact. We also had a friend over so she could meet her while she was safely in her carrier. We want Bess to be well socialized, especially since Lily is the most social cat we have ever had.

We made an initial mistake in keeping Bess in Belle’s office and feeding her there, which had been where we had kept Lily initially since Belle is there all day. Previously, Lily hung out with Belle all day while she worked. There was a little territorial dustup between Bess and Lily, so we set Bess up in my office and let Lily come visit her there. That went much better, and they played together enthusiastically.

Next we expanded Bess’s territory so she could access the two offices, the studio and a bathroom. The two can finally play together without a glass window between them. They began joyfully running around chasing and playing. Lily is thrilled, as she really wanted someone to play with and Bastet is too old. She is equivalent to being in her 80’s, and just does not have the patience for all that kitten energy. She is getting along with the other cats, and she and Lily even began sleeping on the bed together, although so far always on opposite sides.

We began moving Bess and Lily into the bedroom when we went to bed. The deal was that Bess could have full access to the house when she was brave enough to sleep an entire night with us on the bed without having to hide. Last night Lily was asleep on the bed and Bess jumped up and began biting my toes through the covers. She eventually tired of this and fell asleep between my legs.

Now they cavort all over the house together. It has been a long time since we had kitten energy in the house.

The Tower

Posted on by Geoff

 

In an action novel, you want to come up with action sequences that seem new and fresh. You want to provide your audience with something that seems original.

The sequence I just finished writing I came up with several years ago after watching YouTube videos of people climbing ridiculously tall towers. They can be taller than the tallest buildings. It seemed like the perfect place for a fight sequence.

As I was doing some additional research, I just discovered a movie released this month titled Fall. It is about two young women who on a lark decide to climb one of these super tall towers. In my story it is 2200 feet tall. In the movie it is 2000 feet tall. There is no fight sequence, and the entire movie is about the tower, rather than just one sequence in a book, but still. Now people will just think I took the idea from the movie.

That is the way it goes. Being first to come up with an idea is a very difficult task. Maybe it is time to let go of the need to make things new and just focus on giving them my own original spin. I felt like I did that with the car chase sequence and the bomb defusing (both times) and several other things. The concepts weren’t new, but the way it was handled was. Hopefully, anyway.

This is the writing stage where I don’t get much feedback. No one has read this yet (okay, my wife read a little of it), and won’t until the first draft is completed. I discuss plot details with my wife, but mostly I am on my own. I want my vision on paper first before it starts to get revised. Early critics can get in your head and get you to start questioning yourself. Later on I will listen to suggestions and possible edits, but not yet. I have been writing a long time and by this time I trust my judgment.

I am almost at the finish line. Next is the sequence in the evil villain’s lair, and then the final chapter. I have carried this story in my mind for years, thinking about it, working out ideas. It will be a little strange to finish and move on from it, but I do have other stories I want to work on and finishing this will free up some brain power.

What’s Up With Us

I am stunned. Blown away. My mind is boggled. I knew a lot about it already, but to actually use this new technology is even more amazing than hearing about it. There are some new technologies that change everything. This is one of them. Things will never be the same.

Take a look at the photo illustrating this blog entry. It depicts Maggie climbing the tower as in my story. I created it, but not directly. The woman does not exist. The tower does not exist. It is not even a photo.

Some of you in the know will realize that I must have gotten a beta invite for Dall-E 2. The image was created simply by typing “A 30 year old Iranian woman in a uniform on a tether hanging from a 2000 foot communications tower.” The AI software then presented me with four different versions to choose from. It only took a few seconds.

The version I used is just as Dall-E created it. I would tweak it a bit to get it to production quality, but it would not take much effort. It is almost as if the program read my mind and created the image I wanted. Even after seeing numerous demos, actually using it took my breath away. I have been following technology since I was old enough to solder (at 7 years old), and have been involved with many amazing developing technologies. Nothing has amazed me as much as this.

I am still trying to learn how this all works. I have a decent understanding of AI technology and the concept of deep learning. I played around with the original Dall-E and thought it was interesting but not especially game changing. In just a year they have expanded its capabilities significantly.

I thought I could give a brief explanation of how it works, but honestly, I would have to write pages and pages and there are better explanations on the Internet. If you are a computer nerd like me, you will want to read up on how it uses diffusion to turn noise into a photorealistic image.

Is every commercial artist concerned? They should be. Realistically, it takes a trained artistic eye to pick out the best image and tweak it to make it perfect, but for a lot of things, these images are good enough. This is definitely a disruptive technology that will impact copyright law, personal privacy, and the wallets of artists.

Get ready to be even more amazed. Once I pick an image, I can see variations of it, as below.

I can also have it done in any style. Below are versions done as a pop art illustration. I could also do it in the style of many famous artists.

It can do inpainting and outpainting. Inpainting lets you select any area of an image and modify it with a text description. You can take an existing portrait oriented photo and change it to landscape orientation by having new background added to fill in the edges. This is called outpainting. It can even do variations of existing photos.

Dall-E 3 will add video capabilities. The world is changing very rapidly.

Out of Nowhere

Posted on by Geoff

 

Some believe that the Big Bang Theory claims that the universe just came from nothing. There was something before the Big Bang, we just don’t know what it was or exactly how it brought about the universe we know and love. The amazing Web telescope is getting us closer to understanding, though.

It seems like the last chapter I wrote came from nothing. The book has lots of action, so every so often I have a breather chapter that lets the characters and the readers catch their breath. I sat down to write this chapter with no idea what was going to be in it.

Normally, I have everything pretty well mapped out. I know what is going to happen and I just have to fill in the details. Here I had nothing. I had used a conversation between Grace and her long-time friend and compatriot Brian for exposition earlier on. It had worked well before because these are two characters who know each other very well.

I just started writing them having a conversation. They would discuss the previous mission and what went wrong and what to do going forward. What they would say I had no idea, so I just improvised the scene.

I have found that my years of acting and improv training have proven invaluable in writing and understanding characters. Part of an actor’s job is to bring a character to life, which is also a writer’s job. Many of the skills overlap.

In this case, as in an improv scene, I just let them go. Of course, in this case I am playing both characters. I try to get into their heads. What do they want? What do they fear? What is motivating them right now? I have an advantage in having had time to learn these characters, so it is much easier for me to get into their heads now than it was in the beginning.

The scene not only seemed to write itself, I was more than happy with the results. In fact, it might even be the official excerpt.

The scene did not come out of nowhere. I knew my characters. I knew the story and what plot points needed to be moved forward. The writing seemed somewhat effortless, but it took a lot of effort to get to that point.

In acting, you spend a lot of time in preparation, learning about the character. There is a lot of intellectual work ahead of time, but what I learned as an actor is that while you need all that prep, when you are actually performing, you draw on it but also come more from the gut. You can’t be thinking about the scene as you do it. You have to know it so well that all of your focus is on being the character. I think writing scenes with characters is not that different. You prep with your mind and write with your heart.

 

What is Up With Us

Our cat is looking much healthier and is doing better. She now has full access to the house while our other cat does her best to ignore her.

We had a cat when we first moved into our current house, Nix, who was similar in disposition to Lily. She loved to run manically and was a great fetcher of balls and rubber bands. She also did something I have never seen any cat do- door surfing. She would manage to get on top of an open door and push off, stopping the door with a paw before it fully closed. Then she’s push off the wall, and ride the top of the door back and forth. She was fearless. A little too fearless, as she got out shortly after we moved in and was hit by a car.

Lily is also a natural fetcher, and we have been having great fun shooting large rubber bands that she retrieves. She also loves to chase wadded up plastic bags which she runs back with. Who says they are not a toy?

My overall health has been quite bad, giving me maybe three productive hours a day. So frustrating, but at least I feel like the writing quality has been quite good. My approach to these big projects is to just keep the ball moving. Even a little progress each day will eventually get me to the finish line.

Injury

Posted on by Geoff

 

I have been working on the final Island sequence. The Island sequence required more research than any other sequence. Fortunately, we live in a researcher’s paradise.

Towards the end of the sequence, Wall gets his hand chopped off. Not having had this happen to me or anyone I kow, I really did not know how to write about it. How far would his arterial bleed spray? How long could he stay on his feet before he passed out?

A little bit of research turned me on to this great little website called Writing Realistic Injuries. It let me calculate just what Wall’s physical condition would be as a he lost more and more blood. I also liked Writing Injuries, which has nothing to do with carpal tunnel or paper cuts. I even found a site for writers that catalogs emotional wounds in detail.

There are a tremendous number of online resources for writers. I recently came across Stack Exchange for Writers, which is a Q and A board. It is a place for writers to share their knowledge and experience. It features a wide range of questions. One appropriate to my story was “Are there situations where it makes sense to tell a character’s plan even if it is going to fail?” I do this all the time in the story, as their elaborate plans often fail in elaborately spectacular ways. Knowing how much work went into a plan makes its failure seem even bigger. One person on the site wrote that a writer mentor had told him you only tell the reader a character’s plan if it is going to fail. Watching the plan fall apart increases the dramatic tension. If a plan is going to succeed, you describe it as it happens. Otherwise, you are describing the plan twice, which is redundant. I agree completely. It goes into much deeper discussion on the topic, but you get the drift. Useful stuff.

There are a lot of very specialized resources for writers online, even on very obscure topics. Seek and ye shall find.

 

What’s Going on With Us?

Covid numbers are dropping despite this new even more contagious variation, BA.5. We still go out masked, as recent research has shown that while people with Fibromyalgia are no more susceptible to catching it than anyone else, the outcomes if you do catch it tend to be significantly worse, even if fully vaxed, which I am. I will continue to err on the side of safety.

We do movie night on Wednesdays and try and have a friend over. It is often science fiction. Last week was the truly terrible Jurassic World: Dominion. I think this week’s movie helped get the bad taste of that out of our mouths. We saw the amazing Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. It combines martial arts and science fiction and humor very effectively.

It was directed by Daniels, which is the combo of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert., who also wrote the script. It has an exceptional cast headed by the wonderful Michelle Yeoh, who first came on my radar with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and became much better known in the U.S. with her appearance in the Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. She works all the time, and pops-up frequently in science fiction, including Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, a regular role on Star Trek: Discovery, and she will be in the upcoming Avatar movie. She got her start in Hong Kong martial arts films, and she still has the moves in this movie, despite being nearly my age. She is incredible and her performance here is complex, nuanced, and award worthy.

I think describing the plot does it a disservice, other than to say it is about the metaverse and the infinity of lives every person lives, in this case, all at the same time. They pull it off, and you are in for things you have never seen before in a movie (I am looking at you, hot dog fingers). It has the kind of innovation that took me back to how I felt when I saw The Matrix for the first time, another incredibly innovative film that also took inspiration from Hong Kong martial arts films. There are also quite a few laugh out loud moments. If you are into science fiction like me, you need to see it.

We also just binge watched Severance on Apple TV. We certainly have a wealth of great science fiction movies and shows available these days! (Well, except on network television, which is a desert oasis). This series is about workers who get an implant so that their work lives and home lives are completely separate, including their memories of them. Their unremembered work life is strange and incomprehensible.

Many of the episodes are directed by Ben Stiller. The cast is amazing. Maybe beyond amazing. It stars Adam Scott, who was so fun as a demon in The Good Place, the complete opposite of his role as Ben in Parks and Recreation. The supporting cast is a dream ensemble. John Turturo and Christopher Walken play two workers seeking friendship and maybe more from each other. Patricia Arquette is the menacing boss. Dichen Lachman plays a mysterious mental health care worker. She came up on my radar with her excellent work in the science fiction series Doll House. If you have not seen it, binge watch it. It holds up and was way too prematurely canceled. It and Severance will hold up better than Jurassic World: Dominion, which Dichen is also in. Britt Lower plays the new worker. She’s done a lot of television and her work here should bring her additional positive attention. I first noticed Zack Cherry when he played the vlogger Klev in Spider-Man: Homecoming. He brings the perfect comedic touch to Dylan, another of the workers. These are the main actors but it is a top notch cast top to bottom. Also, don’t skip through the opening credits. Watch it if you can.

Our new cat Lily has a lot of problems with her health. We just got her from the pound. I am happy that we chose her, as the pound was filled with young families, many of whom I would guess would have found this cat too big a financial burden. That would have been heartbreaking for them. Happily, we are in a good financial place now and can afford her medical bills. Not that long ago during harder times we would not have been able to.

She did not look particularly healthy when we got her. We have a habit of going to get a kitten and coming home with the cat who really needs us. She was unbelievably skinny. I think the problem was that she had an infected gum and all she was fed was kibble, which was hard for her to eat. She has been on wet food for many days now, and antibiotics have knocked down the gum infection. She has some other weird infection that the drugs should knock out in another week.

Unfortunately, she also has an incurable, although not fatal, disease: Feline viral rhinotracheitis. It is more commonly known as Feline Herpes, and it uis very common in cats, much like the human form is common in humans. It is not transferable to humans. You have to watch for outbreaks that can lead to upper respiratory problems and eye infections. Can she infect the other cat? Yes, she will be infectious during outbreaks. All we can do is our best to keep a close eye on her health.

We also have to deal with her video game addiction. It started innocently enough. She has been separated from the other cat and limited to the office areas of the house. In my office I have a 43 inch 4k monitor for my computer mounted on the wall above the desk. When we played a bird video for cats, I thought she was going to leap through screen. After looking behind the TV, she sat on the desk and just watched.

She is not that interested when most things are on TV. However, when we played a walkthrough of the popular summer release of Stray, a videogame where you play a stray cat in a humanless and decaying cyber city, she sat up and watched intently. Her head followed every move of the on-screen digital cat. She was totally engrossed by it, more so than the bird videos. I got bored with it before she did. Not that the game is boring, but this was not interactive. The game itself looks pretty amazing, different, and wildly imaginative. Sales of the game also help raise money for animal shelters.

Teaching Lily to be a box jumper (magic slang for magician’s assistant).

Making friends in high places

And getting introduced to a whole new world, which, as an indoor cat, she can observe from on high.

Foreshadow

Posted on by Geoff

 

Watching Jurassic World: Dominion inspired me to write about foreshadowing. I’ll talk about that first and then I’ll share my opinion about the movie overall.

Foreshadowing is where you introduce an idea or concept earlier in your story that might not fully make sense yet but that will be more fully developed later in the story. This comes to mind with Dominion in that they seem to be foreshadowing something very strongly and multiple times, but it never pays off. I am guessing that the pay off hit the editing floor (or rather, the digital bit bucket).

The bit has something to do with Dr. Lewis Dodgson obsessively eating granola bars and other nut-based foods. They give it more importance than just him being a hungry man. Something is being hinted at, but we never find out what it is.

Novels grow rather organically. Sometimes you’ll write a scene that comes out very differently from the way you imagined it when you start writing it. You might write something that you decide should be foreshadowed earlier, somewhere. I don’t want to lose my momentum and stop and try and figure out where the foreshadowing should go, so I have a page where I track what I call Pickups, things that I will add in the next editing pass.

A good example of this is the scene I just wrote between Maggie and Barry. They have a particular type of banter between them that is key to the scene. In my Pickup notes, I have a reminder to add this type of banter between them in an earlier scene to establish that they have this sort of bantering relationship. Otherwise, it will seem artificial and that it just came out of nowhere just to add humor to the scene.

In another case, I had Grace use an expression that seemed a little off for her to use. I was going to change it, then realized that it was more like an expression Bill, her former lover, might use. In her previous scene, she visits with the hallucination of a younger version of Bill. My Pickup for that was to have Bill use that expression when talking to her, and then later she uses that same expression. It is a form of her mirroring him and shows her being impacted by that encounter.

When you hint at something and then later it pays off and makes sense, it gives the reader an ah-ha moment. They feel smart if they got the earlier clue. It also helps to keep plot developments from seeming like they came out of left field. How many times have you heard someone say that disaster could have been prevented if they had only seen the signs? When things in real life do go disastrously wrong, there are usually many indications beforehand that don’t get noticed. You can let the reader see those signs before the characters through foreshadowing.

Just like movies, novels go through a lot of editing and a lot of things wind up getting cut. By keeping this Pickup log I have a record of where one part of the book references another part. When I am cutting, I can check to make sure the scene I am cutting is not linked to an earlier or later scene.

Jurassic World: Dominion is the final film of the second trilogy of one of the greatest movies ever, Jurassic Park. When it came out in 1993, I was very into the developing world of desktop special effects and CGI, and Belle had grown up digging up fossils and hanging around geology grad students during summer field trips with her dad. As you might guess, it was a big deal for both of us.

The subsequent films disappointed in progressively greater degrees with each sequel. I thought the next to the last one, 2008’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, was one of the worst films I ever saw. Badly written with surprisingly mediocre effects work and a disregard for science and physics that was mind-boggling.

I enjoyed the characters from the first film, so I wanted to see them back together for the final film, Dominion, and I thought their interactions with the characters from the second trilogy could be fun. The director thought otherwise. I did not think that it could possibly be worse than Fallen Kingdom, but I was wrong. Very wrong. Very very wrong.

We watched it with an actor friend and there were many laugh out loud sequences that were not intended to be funny but their ridiculousness made us all laugh. I am glad we did not see it in a movie theater as we laughed in all the wrong places. If they pushed it just a tiny bit further it could have been an entertaining Jurassic Park parody.

The old saying “If its not on the page its not on the screen” is not actually true. Great actors and a great director can save a mediocre script. That did not happen here, primarily because the director who was also the co-writer, who I will not name here so as not to shame his family, seems to have done little more than make a long string of extremely bad artistic decisions. All of the main characters are already established, so he apparently felt that there was no need for further character development or exploration. What we know about them we knew from previous films.

They do introduce a couple of new characters, the hotshot pilot and the turncoat employee. The pilot has a lot of potential, perhaps in the next trilogy, which I am assuming will be Jurassic Universe: Dinosaurs in Space. Here she is just not given enough to do.

They also recast a minor character from the first movie, Dr. Lewis Dodgson (I am guessing a blend of Lewis Carroll and his real name, Charles Dodgson). He is the one who hired Nedry to steal the dinosaur embryo. Originally played by Cameron Thor, that actor was available to reprise the role, as he was just released from prison for child sexual abuse. For some reason they decided to use a different actor.

Thor was replaced by Campbell Scott. As written, this character had little more character development than the original role (a part so small I bet you don’t even remember him). Kudos to Scott for imbuing the role with personality using his voice and physicality in a way that went way beyond the paper thin development on the page. That is one advantage of screenwriting over writing novels- there are actors who can make your lazy writing appear far better than it is.

Dr. Dodgson is seen with a Barbizon shaving cream can, the same type used in the original film to transport the dinosaur embryos. Why is not revealed. It looks like the original, old and battered even, which was lost in the mud in the first movie. I suppose it could have been retrieved with metal detectors, but that would have taken quite a bit of effort. Since the embryo would not have been viable by the time they could have retrieved it, why bother?

Nods to the earlier films are constant throughout. There are even nods to other films, such as recreating the parkuor scene from one of the Jason Bourne movies, but with a dinosaur instead.

The problem is, the entire film seems more like an homage than anything original. It is as if all the best moments from the previous films have been preserved in amber, they extract it, but much of the original DNA of those scenes is missing, so they replace the missing DNA with random bits that make little sense. Every scene is far inferior from the ones they so heavily borrowed from. Instead of a knowing nod to previous films, this seems more like wholesale plagiarizing by writers out of ideas.

The thing about the original film was that we were seeing something we had never seen before on screen- realistically convincing dinosaurs. It was breathtaking. Now even the nature channels have dinosaurs. Just making them bigger doesn’t make them new or more captivating.

And, seriously, the focus on giant locusts was not a great idea. The 2005 Locusts: The 8th Plague was a cheesy movie with terrible acting, but the giant corporate engineered locusts in it are scarier despite Sharknado level effects. They ramp up the danger by making the locusts carnivorous. It has an oddly similar plot to Dominion, but no dinosaurs. There were carnivorous giant insects in the Carboniferous era. Those would be scary. While the threat from the locusts has global implications, it is not an immediate threat so it has less urgency.

I don’t really want to see locusts in a dinosaur movie. First of all, locusts/grasshoppers would not appear until the Eocene (30 million years ago), long past the time of extremely large insects in the Carboniferous period (300 million years ago). Instead, they cite an imaginary species from the Cretaceous period (145 to 66 million years ago).

They also genetically modify these imaginary large locusts to be even larger. Imagine that I told you I genetically modified a human to be 15 feet tall. We already know the many health issues someone even 7 feet tall faces. Our bodies are not structurally designed to be that large. A 2022 study showed that the very tall are more likely to suffer from peripheral neuropathy, lower extremity ulcers, chronic venous insufficiency, ruptured aortas and pulmonary embolisms. Creatures become larger due to millions of years of tinkering. They go through substantial morphological changes. You can’t just scale them up, despite that being a popular science fiction trope. An enlarging beam on almost any creature would wind up with it being crushed to death by its own weight.

And the way they save the world from locusts is dodgy at best. There is a thing called a gene drive, which is a self-propagating CRISPR-based drive system to alter DNA. It takes generations, though, and is considered extremely dangerous and apt to get out of control. They incorporate a more made-up single generation variation of that that makes little scientific sense to me. It involves a viral pathogen that alters DNA. As we know from Covid, pathogens can mutate very quickly. In the film they super speed up migration, so the locusts have somehow spread all over the very big world in an astonishingly short time. You’d have to get your pathogen spreading locusts into each and every isolated community. This seems like a slow and iffy way to stop the locusts.

All of this is in service to a badly written script. You could probably teach a semester’s long screenwriting class just on all the things they did wrong from a storytelling aspect. Mostly, it was about missed opportunities. They did little with the idea of a world now filled with prehistoric creatures. This film mostly takes place on an island and we see little of the world except in a news show and in a laugh out loud ridiculous shot at the end of dinosaurs and horses galloping together. They really don’t do much world building here in a world that would have been dramatically transformed. The characters from the first and second trilogies are mostly kept separate from each other, not meeting up until near the end. There were so many missed opportunities by choosing not to have these two different groups interact and work together. The relationship between Alan and Ellie had potential but it was handled unconvincingly. While her genes make her the lynch pin of the story, there is not much interesting about Maisie other than to add child in danger elements. She is the only one like her. Could not she have been more special? The original movie incorporated children and their relationships with adults extremely well. This, not so much.

Even the music seemed to be a faint echo of the original John Williams score, which I consider one of the great movie scores by one of the greatest of movie composers. Michael Giacchino is very talented and an award winning composer, but my wife, with a more trained musical ear than mine, also found the music just a little wanting.

I enjoyed reading Michael Crichton’s books, and I loved the movie Westworld when I was a kid. As an adult, with some formal training in directing, I rewatched it and was astounded that the directing was so terrible. It was only Crichton’s second stab at directing and his first feature film. Crichton later wrote that film directing was not a complicated craft. He said you could learn it in a month. That’s the problem when you don’t know what you don’t know. I think the director of Dominion has the same problem.

The science is pretty wonky in it. Isaac Asimov proposed that good science fiction can have one major element that goes way beyond known science, but that the rest of the science should be grounded. For Jurassic Part, that concept is that dinosaurs can be recreated using genes locked in amber. Not really possible, but we could go along with it as they did try to maintain the science in the original. In reality, the larger dinosaurs would not be able to breath as the atmosphere was a lot thicker in their time and it took a lot of oxygen just to move those massive bodies.

Dominion adds some new science- the more recent understanding that dinosaurs had feathers (although that was still beig debated when the first one was made). It looks cool, moving them away from looking like large lizards. Most of the “science” is just embarrassing, though. They swing wildly with genetics and cloning.

I disliked the editing, which of course impacted the pacing, which I also did not like. Yes, it will make well over a billion dollars and thousands of very talented people worked on it, and many people with less discriminating taste will enjoy it. For $185 million and such an extremely talented cast, I just think they should have made a better movie than this. It series truly jumped the Mosasaurus.

Relationships

Posted on by Geoff

 

After many months away from it, I am back to actively working on The Relentless. It is going well. I jumped back in as if I had never taken a break.

My latest insight has to do with dialogue, which infers that you have at least two people talking. Who you have talking together is very important. It is like at a cocktail party where people tend to gravitate around the most interesting conversations. You need to make sure that the characters you have talking with each other have a chemistry, positive or negative, that makes their conversations interesting beyond just the topic they are talking about.

Belle had a good example. She said it was like the Lost in Space (the original 1965 television series) decision to bring Dr. Smith forward as the real star, and pair him with Will Robinson and the Robot. Everyone else got less screen time. This was due largely to Jonathon Harris, who played Dr. Smith, realizing immediately that his character was so evil that they would have no choice but to kill him off after a few episodes. He began adding humorous dialogue to make him less detestable and less airlock worthy, as he was very experienced playing more light-hearted villains.

Irwin Allen liked what he was doing so much that he let him do something unprecedented. Harris was allowed to write all of the dialogue between himself and the robot and between his character and Will Robinson. Harris wrote all of the alliterative comic insults Dr. Smith used on the robot, such as “bubble headed booby”, “doddering dunderhead”, “rusty Rasputin”, and “ferrous Frankenstein.”

This changed the direction of the show and probably kept it on the air an extra couple of years. The interactions between Will, Smith and the robot are what people best remember about the show (some of it, like the Great Vegetable Rebellion episode, you try hard to forget).

The reason it worked was because Harris made sure that he took advantage of the chemistry between the characters and gave them entertaining dialogue based on those relationships. Because of the established relationships, their dialogue was always interesting and entertaining in a way a conversation between, say, John and Don, never could be. They were both straight men.

There are certainly story reasons to pair up certain characters, but if you can pair them up with another character they have developed a relationship with, that allows for interesting dialogue. It gives you more to work with and the dialogue develops more organically. I have found that once I understand the relationships between the characters, the dialogue almost writes itself.

These relationships between characters develop over the course of writing. I realized that both Wall and Maggie have gone though horrific experiences, and I have them bond over that. Hector bonds with Grace over their shared interest in programming, and he bonds with Barry as a substitute father figure. Maggie and Grace bond over a previous history and their both having been women with a long history in espionage.

Once you figure out which characters are going to become closer, you can put them in situations together where their conversations can be more meaningful than those between characters who are not as close. For me, nailing down the relationships helps the rest of the writing go much easier.

 

What’s Up with Us

They found our stolen car. Actually, it is now owned by the insurance company (Geico, by the way, and we were more than happy with the way they quickly settled the claim). We went to the tow yard to see if there was anything of ours still in it.

It was a bit of a shock seeing it. Covered in dirt, dust, tree debris, and fingerprint powder, it was barely recognizable. The front end had sustained damage from some type of collision and was missing parts. There was a big dent in the side. The inside was filled with trash. Every crevice was stuffed with cigar and joint remains. The car reeked so badly that you had to take a step back when you opened the door.

There was little left of ours of any value. The most valuable thing to us but also the least valuable to a thief was Belle’s notebook. In it were notes from all of the shows she did this year. She did a rundown on each show: things that killed, things that could be better. That, for some reason, they took out of the car.

The one thing we did retrieve, buried in the bottom of a trunk that was now filled with trash and a few obviously stolen items that were not ours, was her beloved cart that she used for shows. The wheels folded flat and she had not been able to find a replacement.

We have added more lighting to the outside perimeter, and a new alarm system just arrived. I have to set it up today. That will give us sensors on the doors, motion detection, and cameras. Belle nixed my ideas of connecting it to a fog machine so that when triggered, besides and alarm, the room would fill with fog and low wattage lasers would trace across the room with a voice announcing “Warning. Gas is toxic. Breathing it in will result in unconsciousness or death. Avoid direct contact with lasers.” For some reason she thought that was overkill.

 

Tech That Moves Me

Posted on by Geoff

 

While I have made no more progress on The Relentless, I have finished the final draft of the non-fiction book I am writing. It then goes to final edit. I stopped working on The Relentless right after my Dad died. I am sure there were and are some psychological issues around this, as my father was also a writer. Besides having to finish my non-fiction book (which was supposed to be finished in May), life got quite difficult this year. There was the gruesome death of my cat, the heart-breaking death of a very close friend, and the break-in, all within a few months. I could only concentrate on one thing- finishing the non-fiction book. It came in a bit longer than I thought it would at 175,000 words. The non-fiction book is the second book in the series, with the first one coming in at 450,000 words. There is a good possibility that the complete five part series will come in at over a million words.

This blog is primarily about the process of writing a novel, but it is also about technology, a key element of the novel. Recent events have forced me to think about a very specific and important technology.

I have noticed a lot of effort online to disparage electric cars. There are some valid arguments. We do not have a recharging grid setup fully yet. We need improved battery technology that charges faster and offers greater range. This is just a matter of time and will. What we have now works, with a little awkwardness from time to time, and the more electric cars on the road the faster the technology and infrastructure will develop.

Many of the arguments against electric cars, however, were developed with focus groups and paid for by the oil and gas industry, which has everything to lose with the development of electric cars. There are millions of Americans who believe the false information they are spreading.

One of the valid arguments is that they are too expensive. One of the main reasons the government needs to step in and help people purchase EVs is that besides dramatically reducing the amount of pollutants pumped into the air, they cost less over time than a gas powered car. All the costs are up front, whereas the cost of gas and maintenance of an internal combustion based vehicle eats away those savings and more. Tax credit incentives can really help. Over the life of the car, right now, electric vehicles are less expensive and they are going to get even less expensive as the technology improves.

Probably the major lie spread by oil and gas is that when you factor in the cost of generating electricity and manufacturing, EVs are just as dirty as internal combustion engines. A just released study from Ford and the University of Michigan disproved that entirely. Here are three of their main findings:

  • Sedan, SUV, and pickup truck battery-electric vehicles have approximately 64% lower cradle-to-grave life cycle greenhouse gas emissions than internal-combustion-engine vehicles on average across the United States.
  • Replacing an internal-combustion-engine pickup with a battery-electric pickup results in a reduction of 74 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over the lifetime of the vehicle on average.
  • While battery-electric vehicles currently have larger greenhouse gas emissions in their manufacturing than internal-combustion-engine vehicles, due to battery production, this impact is offset by savings in their operation.

That is based on right now. As we move to greater use of renewable energy to generate electricity, those savings increase dramatically. Those who now have rooftop solar to charge their car see an even greater savings and reduction of greenhouse gasses.

Another argument is that batteries require the problematic mining of lithium and cobalt. The problems here are mostly exaggerated, and the secondary problems created by oil drilling are far worse. Plus, the same arguments could be used against every device with a lithium battery, like cell phones and laptops. Fortunately, these arguments are not persuasive when you look more closely at the issues. Plus, better battery technology using materials other than lithium and the expensive cobalt are in development. Just search on Phys.org to see how close we are getting.

But what about EV batteries catching on fire? That is sure scary. And true. Sometimes they do. The rate is quite low, though. A Chinese study found that one out of every 30,000 EV vehicles on the road caught on fire. Yikes! However, if you compare that to a FEMA report on gasoline powered cars in the US, they caught on fire at a rate 30 times greater than in the China EV study, and when standard internal combustion cars catch on fire, the passengers had a significantly greater chance of dying. Better batteries will solve this problem, while the problem with gasoline powered cars is not going to get better.

Ok, but wait. Don’t the batteries wear out quickly, and aren’t they the most expensive part of the car? Won’t our landfills be filled with the batteries that constantly need replacing? Studies of the batteries used in the Tesla show that they lose about 10 percent of their storage ability over 160,000 miles. To keep a gas powered car on the road that long would have required significant investments in maintenance that electric vehicles just do not require. The newest well maintained gas powered vehicles can see 200,000 miles. EVs, with much less in the way of maintenance costs, can expect to see 300,000 miles. Many of the batteries, such as the one in the car we just bought, are fully recyclable.

There are many other arguments against EVs, all equally disprovable. The oil industry really wants to keep making billions selling their planet destroying fuel, and they know their days are numbered. EVs are the cleaner future. For now, the oil industry is happy to spend hundreds of millions to convince you otherwise. They just happen to have a lot of extra cash right now to spend, what with gas in Los Angeles being over $6.00 a gallon.

When our car was stolen last month, we were already thinking about getting a new car, and we had done the research. A gasoline powered car is a terrible investment. Unfortunately, at the time our car was stolen, there was (and still is) a national car shortage. Some popular luxury cars have doubled in price. EVs are in very short supply. None of the lots we went to had any.

We settled on a Hybrid instead, a Toyota Prius. We paid more for a 2020 model than had we purchased it new in 2020. It is a terrible time to buy a car.

It is not a luxury car, but it blows the Infiniti we had out of the water. It is hands down one of the most comfortable cars I have ever been in. It has lots of room in the back to haul around Belle’s magic equipment. As a tech guy, though, what I love most about it is all the sweet sweet technology built-in.

While a hybrid still needs gas, it is dramatically more efficient than a traditional gas engine. We are consistently getting around 55 miles to the gallon. A hybrid is a form of electric car in that it uses electric motors rather than a complex drive train. Part of the time those wheels are powered by the battery, and part of the time they are powered by the gas fueled generator.

There are many implementations of hybrid technology. I think Toyota, having been very early to the market with over 20 years of experience developing hybrids, has one of the best. The car can run some of the time just from battery, while some hybrids (known as hybrid assist) use the motor all of the time with just battery assist for more power. We live in Los Angeles, where sitting in traffic is common. Unlike a gas powered vehicle or a hybrid assist, the engine is not running when you sit in traffic, using only battery power and only when you are moving. This gets us exceptional gas mileage. It is actually more efficient in city driving than on the open road.

Frankly, after driving this car for a few weeks, I would never ever want to go back to a regular internal combustion engine. I might as well drive a horse and buggy. Everything in this car, as in hybrids and electric cars in general, is designed for efficiency. The aerodynamics on the car are amazing. It has been designed to be lightweight, with a very lightweight motor. The regenerative braking makes the brake pads last longer and charges the battery every time you press the brake pedal. They have special tires that reduce friction on the road. These types of cars tend to be filled with the latest and most efficient engineering and technology.

One big complaint I have read is performance. For example, our Prius takes a little under 10 seconds to get from 0 to 60. A $100,000 2022 Maserati Quattroporte takes 4.2 seconds to go from 0 to 60. So, the difference is a bit over 5 seconds. Other than a race car driver, who needs to accelerate that fast? Besides having no real practical utility for regular driving, very fast acceleration is simply not compatible with fuel efficiency. Smooth steady acceleration is far more fuel efficient and safer. Car and Driver loves to talk about issues like this, but it is antithetical to getting better fuel efficiency, which is what a hybrid is all about. I have all the acceleration I need.

I do love all the safety features. We have adaptive cruise control, forward-collision warning and automated emergency braking, blind spot warning, lane-departure warning, lane-keeping assist, and self-parking. There is a backup camera and cross traffic alerts when backing up.

Most important to me is that I am now putting out more than 2/3 less tailpipe emissions. I am also spending a whole lot less on gas. If you need a car I would look very closely to see if an electric and its range works with your lifestyle and your available infrastructure. Otherwise, go with the most fuel efficient hybrid you can find. The faster the internal combustion engine becomes a relic of the past, the better for us and the better for the entire planet.