Landing

Day 208 of Writing

Figuring out which books I am going to work on is always challenging. My books are like planes stacked up at LaGuardia. I want an orderly landing. Some will have to circle for awhile, and hopefully they will arrive at the right gate and not explode on landing. The important thing is to have enough up in the air that you can keep bringing them in.

I took a week off from the novel to try and figure out what comes next. I know the next fiction book I want to write, which is part parody, part comedy, and part horror, plus at its core it is a romance. I am really looking forward to writing that one.

My real wheelhouse is non-fiction, and I have enough of those planned out to last me the rest of my life, assuming I live a long time. I spent the previous weekend assessing where things were at. I had a tremendous amount of material for what I wanted to work on next, too much in fact. I had to split it into two separate books. Since they will be written under a different name, I won’t go into more detail here.

Coming up with a catchy title is always important, and I came up with great ones for both. Amusingly, one of those titles I came up with was when I was really high on marijuana. Most of the stuff I come up with when high does not look as good the next day, but this one still held up. I realized the next morning that my great idea to create a mask you could safely eat in would actually act as a covid cannon if the wearer were infected. That is more typical of my creativity under the influence.

The pain has been so bad lately I have to self-medicate most nights, as marijuana is the only thing that helps. I never thought that I would wind up a habitual user, since before my illness I had never touched recreational drugs of any type. I don’t even drink. I have found that predicting my own personal future seldom turns out to be very accurate. Hopefully I will do better at predicting the future in my novel.

Writing books is so different from writing for magazines and the Internet. Writing an article typically has a really quick turnaround. It is more of a sprint. Writing a book is more of a marathon. The longest I have ever spent writing a book is 15 years, and in many ways, I consider it one of the more significant things I have written. It is a history book that covers a specific topic over the course of 500 years, and comes in at around 1200 pages. It took years of research. The week before last I finished another book which I spent just a couple of months writing, although I did have extensive notes to work from. Books are just a more leisurely endeavor, where you get to spend a lot of time on them. You don’t have to rush like you normally must with articles where editors often have semi-unrealistic expectations about how fast you can turn something around.

Even when I take time off from a book, I still think about it. Last week when I was assessing things and doing the stuff that has to happen to get my latest book through the publication process, I also came across something I did not know I was looking for. In one scene I send my characters into what is one of the most dangerous places on earth. They have to march into this area with backpacks filled with C4, very reminiscent of the march through the jungle in the television series Lost, in which a friend of ours exploded. It is a bit of a nod to that, but I take it further by adding constant lightning and other deadly things to avoid.

What I accidentally came across is a tree that is actually the most dangerous plant there is. Touch it anywhere and the sting is worse than that of a scorpion. I read an account about a sailor who used one of the leaves as toilet paper. The pain was so bad, he committed suicide. You don’t actually recover in the normal way, with pain lingering for years and it can come back many years later. That adds one more element to what I will make into the most hellish place imaginable.

What’s Up with Us

My wife Belle, who is a live performer, has been in the doldrums because there are no live audiences to perform for these days. That was her life blood. She is now getting back to writing.

She is now doing product reviews on a fairly regular basis. That is new to her, but I have done hundreds of them over the years, so I can be helpful as there is a lot you need to know to write effective reviews, and I used to make a living doing it. She can learn from my many mistakes without having to make them herself. The hardest lesson I learned was that you don’t give a negative review to the magazine’s biggest advertiser. You have to find positive ways to describe how bad the product actually is.

We had a big surprise in our garden. We live in a gated community with many people of Filipino descent. One of them gave us cuttings from their Dragon Fruit plants. There are lots of them grown in our community. It is native to Mexico and Central and South America.

We had no idea what to do with it so we just planted it. It is a member of the cactus family and it is also a climber. One of them grew up the wall to a height of at least fifteen feet. We never expected to get fruit from any of them, but way up high suddenly there was a large showy flower. The flower was gone after a couple of days, replaced by the rapidly growing fruit.

As you can see from the picture, it is a strange looking fruit. In some places each fruit can sell for as much as $10. We got out the ladder and made the climb up to pick it. There is another variety that has red flesh, which is supposedly more flavorful, but ours has the white somewhat translucent flesh dotted with tiny black edible seeds.

I found the taste subtle but refreshing. It did not taste like anything else to me other than Dragon Fruit. The most frequent description I found online was a cross between a kiwi and a pear, but I did not get that at all. It was reminiscent to me of watermelon in texture but just a bit softer. We used it in fruit salad where it blended well and did not dominate. I just saw that Taco Bell offered a Dragonfruit Freeze. It is still the weirdest fruit I ever ate that I liked (in contrast to the part fruit, part murder weapon Durian, where I could not get past the smell).

In the course of doing a little research on Dragon Fruit, I discovered YouTuber Emmy Cho (EmmyMadeinJapan). If you are a foodie and love strange and unusual food, you need to check her out. She does some cooking, but mostly she tastes interesting foods from all over the world and regionally across the country. She may be the most popular foodie blogger on YouTube. She is an excellent explainer, and is able to give very clear descriptions of what she is tasting. She has an expressive face and a joyful personality, so she is very fun to watch. She has been doing this for a decade and has a huge amount of content on a wide variety of subjects, although the main emphasis is food.  Belle and I were watching some of her episodes and had to force ourselves to stop, otherwise we’d spend the entire day watching. She is funny, smart, charming, and is always knowledgeable about what she is presenting. On the subjects we knew well she was always well-informed and spot on. The subjects we did not know (most of them) were fascinating learning experiences. She is quite a find. I may be late to the party, but I think I’ll stay awhile.

Three Little Pigs and a Knife Fight

Day 193 of Writing

In the last entry I wrote about writing the chapter that has since been titled Maggie’s Dance. It took me over two weeks to write this one chapter, which is much much more time than usual. It presented its own unique challenges.

This is the first hand to hand combat scene I have ever written. In my acting days, I have done a couple of choreographed fight sequences. I was thrown over a hitching post in one, and I got to do a fight with broadswords (very fun). I have never had to choreograph a fight sequence, though.

This scene is essentially a knife fight. I do not know anything about knife fights, or at least I didn’t until I did the research. Watching television and movies is not your best guide if you are striving for some level of authenticity. Fortunately, there are tons of resources on the Internet, from descriptions of the best techniques and approaches to collections of CCTV videos depicting actual knife fights, with analysis. The main thing I learned is that I do not want to be in a knife fight.

One of the rules I had with the novel is that fight sequences would not go on and on. In the real world, they tend to be fairly short. No one can take the many repeated body blows and still keep going like they do in the greatly exaggerated fights you typically see on the screen. Knife fights in particular tend to be quite short. You start to take serious damage right away. Unlike in a fist fight, each blow has the potential to be fatal and will cause serious physical harm.

My main character in this scene has no weapons at all. She faces four opponents, two of whom have knives and one of whom has a bag of torture instruments. It takes place inside a locked cell. This is not a situation you normally walk away from, but I have to figure out how she can win the fight in a way that is believable, entertaining, and makes sense.

It finally came down to doing some rough storyboards so that I could map out the action. In a series of drawings you draw the key action in each key moment. You can add arrows to show the direction of movement of different elements. This lets you visualize how the entire scene flows, and helps you catch things that don’t work. I have to be able to see a scene in my mind to describe it, and this helps me to actually see it.

Storyboards have been used in movies and animations for nearly 90 years. Georges Méliès, magician and the great pioneer of special effects on film, was one of the first filmmakers to use pre-production art to plan out the magical and science fiction sequences in his films. Beginning at the tail end of the 1800s, Melies essentially developed most of the early basic techniques for in-camera special effects.

Storyboards as we know them today go back to a specific cartoon- Walt Disney’s 1933 The Three Little Pigs, one of the most successful animated shorts ever made. Storyboards became an essential part of animation throughout the animation industry in the 30s. In 1939, Gone with the Wind became the first live action movie to be fully storyboarded. Now it is almost inconceivable to create a movie without storyboarding it.

Storyboarding evolved naturally from cartoons, inspired by comic book panels and the process by which cartoons were made. Animation uses a process of key framing known as in-betweening or more commonly tweening. A senior artist draws the main poses that show the action, and other artists copy his style and create the in between frames for animating it. This process was developed by long time Disney artist Dick Huemer in the 1920s. Disney gives credit for inspiring the first modern storyboard to Disney animator Webb Smith.

In modern computer animation, the computer does the tweening. Computers also really up the game for storyboarding. There are a number of software programs for storyboarding, typically in the $300 range.

I don’t do traditional storyboarding often, so it is not worth the investment for me. This time, though, I used the open source Storyboarder. It is an amazing piece of software, especially considering it is free, and does everything I need. I have more powerful tools, up to full photorealistic 3D previsualization, but for the basics this does the job. It also integrates with a lot of other software.

I was having problems with the end of the fight scene when it is down to just two characters. I opened up Storyboarder and in a couple of minutes had my jail cell space and my two characters. You can draw everything freehand, but the preset mannequins make it much easier. I loaded in a male and female character and posed them, using simple control points. I have used the 3D software Poser a lot, and this is not that. In general, almost any 3D software has a significant learning curve, and I turn to it when I need a fully realized scene. Here I just need a sketch that lets me see how things flow. This is more than adequate for that job, has a fairly short learning curve (made even simpler if you know anything about storyboarding and 3D software) and has tons of features for working pros.

I read that an increasing number of novelists are turning to storyboarding. I believe it should be in the tool chest of anyone who writes action sequences or has complex scenes with many moving parts. For many years I wrote software reviews for magazines like PC Computing, and I want to write a full review here, but that is not appropriate. Instead, I urge you to check it out yourself.

What’s Up with Us

Things are a bit nightmarish here in California. As I write this, there are 42 active fires. California has lost nearly 4,000 structures and 12 people have lost their lives. One of the fires is the largest in state history. From one fire alone, we lost 1.3 million Joshua trees. Many believe they should be on the endangered species list, and now their prospects look even worse. San Francisco had to keep their street lights on all day yesterday in the dim red glow that was all the light they got from the sun. Smoke choked the air.

We are about 350 miles from San Francisco, and our skies have darkened here from different fires. Hard to tell what might be overcast and what is just smoke. Everything has a red tinge to it, and what little of the sun you can see through the clouds is red. It makes it look very eerie outside.

These fires are one of the worst disasters in state history, made even worse by the fact that we are also battling a pandemic, which makes evacuating people that much more complicated. Our state covid numbers have been dropping, and we are at around 750,000 cases and over 14,000 dead.

It has been hellishly hot here in the San Fernando Valley. It hit 121 degrees last Sunday, an all time record for Los Angeles County. I can tell you, that is unbearably hot. It burns just to go outside.

We lived in the Valley the last time it hit a record setting temperature at a balmy 120 degrees, which was several years ago. We had not been paying attention to the weather and had been driving for awhile and the thermometer on our brand new car read 120 degrees. We thought we would need to get it reset, but we realized that was not the case the moment we stepped outside.

The heat caused many transformers to blow, including the one to our house, and we were without electricity for days during one of the worst hot spells ever. We and our two cats wound up in a motel. One of our cats was as new as our car, and they did not yet get along. They finally bonded at the motel, hiding together under the bed.

Trips back to the house at night (unthinkable to go there during the day) were really strange. It was pitch black as there was no moon, and the entire neighborhood was without power. It was stiflingly hot inside. You could barely breath. It was a quick in and out, grabbing what we needed, and we were out the door and back to the air conditioned car.

We have a break in the heat for now, down into the high 80s. Going outside is still a problem as you can really smell the smoke. You don’t want to breath a lot of that air. The combination of fires, climate change, and deregulatory actions has led to Los Angeles now having the worst smog in 30 years. In the early days of corona we had some of our best air quality, as so many fewer people were driving.

Even in the last couple of hours (it is not yet 3 pm) it has gotten darker and redder outside. The entire sky is a reddish gray and you can just barely see the sun. There is no ash raining down on us currently.

(Update) This is the day after I wrote most of the above. The loss of life is up to 20 and there was a light dusting of ash on our cars. The air remains unhealthy to breathe. There are apocalyptic scenes from all over the Western United States. This is the anniversary of the 9-11 attack, and today, things seem much worse even than that.