Day 595
I finally finished my three chapter jungle sequence. It was not in the original outline of the book and just sort of happened organically. After some additional tweaking, I am every happy with it. It is basically part of the characters’ first mission together, and things go very badly for them very quickly.
I thought initially that the first mission would take just be a couple of chapters, but the story went in a different direction. Sometimes you just have to follow the story’s lead. The entire first mission takes up 9 chapters, which I did not anticipate. It is also non-stop action, so the next chapter needs to give the reader a chance to catch their breath, the characters a chance to catch their breath, and me a chance to catch my breath.
The jungle sequence is set in Venezuela, one of the most beautiful countries in the world. It is also one of the most dangerous, and not just from the alligators, piranhas, and anacondas. Crime and corruption are so out of control that the State Department recommends that Americans not go there. In my research, I read countless stories of the horrors that tourists face. In my future world, things are not better there and perhaps a bit worse.
I wrote previously about mapping out part of the story that takes place on the streets of San Francisco. I could not go there to map it out, because of Covid, and used Google street view to work out my car chase. I was able to do the same for Venezuela.
I have never been to Venezuela, and I suspect I never will. I would love to go, as it has places like the tallest water fall (Angel Falls), and of course, the endless lightning of Catatumbo. This is where Youtube was so amazingly helpful. I found videos of people hiking there through the jungle, and got a better sense of the type of foliage their jungles have. I could also use Google maps to get a better sense of the terrain and elevation that my characters would be hiking through. There were also tons of videos of the lightning. It was enough to give me a sense of the place and write about it. I could not have done it without these resources. Actually seeing a place is always better as you get much more of a feel for it, but this at least made it possible.
What’s Up With Us
At night, due to my illness, I am limited in what I can do. That makes it a good time to watch really bad action movies, looking for cliches I can give twists to in my story. I also watch a lot of science fiction, because I enjoy it. I checked out the new NBC series La Brea, and like so many others, I was left wondering how the heck the thing got greenlit. It is basically a really bad bigger budget remake of the Saturday morning children’s show Land of the Lost. It is not exactly the same plot- instead of traveling into a land of long extinct creatures deep underground, they fall deep underground and then through a dimensional portal into a land of long extinct creatures. In the publicity it has been compared to Lost, and it would be interesting to watch the pilots for the two back to back. The Lost pilot is one of the best I have ever seen. The La Brea pilot is one of the worst.
It drives me crazy when science fiction gets basic science completely wrong. Manifest waited until the final season to reveal their religious agenda and at that point they started adding some scientists to the cast. There are few real world scientists who would immediately jump to the conclusion that the only possible explanation just had to be the magic powers of Noah’s Ark. Their take on science was hilarious, but it was not really an issue until the final season.
La Brea goes immediately to the hilariously laughable science. One of the characters drops a ring 10,000 years in the past and another character is immediately able to find it in the present, despite sitting on the ground for a thousand decades. I laughed out loud when one of the men now in the past claims to be a museum preparator and he saves several animals from going into the tar. He recognizes them as ones he worked on in the future. That is absolutely ridiculous. They have been pulling fossils out of La Brea for one hundred years, including some 70 camels out of 3.5 million fossils. Amazingly, the very camels he spots turn out to be the ones he worked on, and somehow he is able to recognize them. “Hey Binky, nice to see you with skin on and all in one piece.”
Okay, he did not actually say that, but one of the characters does make a Lost reference. I make a Lost reference in my novel, but it makes sense in context, and it references something that happens to a character who was played by a friend of ours, so it also has the added benefit of being an inside joke.
Both my wife and I went many times to the La Brea tar pits as kids, and her father knew one of the museum preparators, so she got to go behind the scenes there. She grew up digging up fossils in the Mojave desert. That is how she spent many of her summers, as her Dad was a museum preparator for the University of Riverside. Hand Belle a fossilized tooth and she could tell you whether it came from a horse or a camel. She could not go back in time and identify the animal it came from, though.
I’ve been watching a number of Youtube videos on visual effects where they critique the good and the bad. This has been helpful as I try to get up to speed on the pile of new 3D software I have to learn. The special effects on La Brea may wind up on a segment on bad special effects. By the way, dire wolves hunted in packs. Did anyone on this show bother to do any research? It took awhile for Belle to even recognize what they were supposed to be, and she knows her dire wolves. The animal character design is awful.
Add all of that to the ridiculous premise, the cardboard cut out and stereotyped characters that are poorly defined and yet still manage to be annoying, and the atrocious dialogue, and you have La Brea. As the only science fiction series on network television right now, it does not bode well for the future. Can’t wait for the next season of Upload on Amazon. Those people understand science fiction.