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090: Solstice

Summer solstice today. Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, we've got the Long Day to suffer through. I don't know about the rest of you, but it's already too warm for rational thought. Fever dreams are the currency of the nighttime hours, bed sweats where you lie like a drying fish and gasp out tiny pleas for any sort of breeze. You sleep with the windows wide open and, all night long, the outside world gets to creep in and whisper in your ear.

I used to be a night person; used to love the winter months with their eternal darkness. While I still are partial to those months, I have started to appreciate the hour before dawn, that last hour when the night has finally cooled the earth and the fog is just starting to creep across the water. Dawn will be drawing a pink line across the horizon but not for another thirty minutes yet. Everything is still and crisp.

You can get some good thinking done at this hour. If you're awake. This is like the first moment of birth when your brain hasn't started shuffling through all the things you didn't accomplish yesterday and probably won't get to today. This is the hour when you can be your own man and think your own thoughts. "We murder to create." You can imagine an entire universe in twenty minutes, revel in its complexities and Mandelbrotian edges for fifteen, and then spend ten destroying it with giant cyborg sharks or mutant space funguses or a single pissed off clown hopped up on adrenochrome and goofballs.

And still have fifteen minutes to make yourself a piece of wheat toast and eat it quietly, listening to the sound of your jaws working on the crackling bread.

The longest day has been long for me. I was too close to its beginning when I went to bed last night and too close to its arrival when I got up this morning. I'm still on the cusp of Chapter XIV. I know what Markham is going to do with the fork and I'm kind of tickled by the image. But I'm hung on the edge; too many distractions and deadlines keeping me from the book.

This soap bubble will pop soon and I'll fall back into the book. But, in the meantime, I entertain myself by creating and un-creating the world in forty-five minutes.

Posted by Teppo at 09:32 PM | Comments (0) June 16, 2004

089: They'll Never Survive

I've just hit the first THEY'LL NEVER SURVIVE moment in the BOOK OF LIES. It's only marginally threatening, but it should wake up all those who've been lulled into slumber by the talking heads of the last few hundred chapters. (Which isn't true. It just feels that way to me since I've been busy enough that it takes me a few days -- or weeks -- to find the time to finish any given chapter.) I'm hung on the cusp of THINGS BLOW UP.

Which, technically, isn't a structural part of the mythology of the Apocalpytic Thriller. But, come on, we're talking about the end of the world here. A little wanton property damage is just a snack in comparsion to the full course meal of the approaching apocalypse. And, if you are like me, you don't mind a snack now and then.

Anyway, in the past I've really looked forward to the THINGS BLOW UP moments because, well, things blow up. I have a blatant disregard for the sanctity of objects and the health of my characters. It's part of the law of maximum capacity. Someone -- and it may have been James Frey in How to Write A Damn Good Novel -- once posited the rule that, regardless of the intelligence or wisdom of your characters, they must operate at THEIR maximum capacity. Anything less and the audience will find them foolish and unbelievable. It's a short hop from that point to THEY'LL NEVER SURVIVE.

I don't know why I've been reticent to start this next bit. It may have something to do with a number of other writing things which have intruded over the last week that have demanded my attention. The chapter may just be waiting until I can devote my full attention to the property destruction before I get to it. Maybe. Regardless, I've left them hanging and need to get back to them soon.

I've got three guys on motorcycles with machine pistols and Markham only has a fork. The odds are more even than they sound.

Posted by Teppo at 08:17 AM | Comments (0) June 10, 2004

088: The Apocalyptic Hero

The Hero, as outlined by Campbell, must reconcile the doubt within himself when he returns from the other side. Even though he might fear that society is not yet ready for his insight and illumination, he must give it to them. He must trust that they will not abuse the knowledge, that they are ready to consider enlightenment.

The Apocalpytic Hero is the guy who has been burned by this trust. He has come back from the other side, having seen the wonders of the universe, and has been spurned by the very group whom he attempted to love. And it is a matter of the heart. They didn't love him back and now he's sulking -- bitter and distrustful of those who have abandoned him.

John Creasy -- Denzel Washington's character in the recent (and superb) Man on Fire -- is an Apocalpytic Hero. It's only after someone extends him love that he remembers what it is like to be enlightened AND a member of society. In the end his gift to the world is accepted and he is able to achieve some semblance of peace.

In the Apocalpytic Thriller, the hero must be coerced back from his exile. He differs from the normal hero in that he has already gone to the other side; he knows that THE WORLD IS NOT AS IT SEEMS. And, because he has gone to the Abyss and stared Khoronzon in the face and not gone insane, he is the perfect candidate to do so again. He is the hero of the last generation and the next generation seeks him out again because the new candidate for Hero didn't make the cut.

In Campbell's cycle, the Apocalpytic Hero is the Magus -- the wise old man who teaches the young hero how to survive on the other side. Think Obiwan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker. If the story had been slightly different (and the initial events were on this path until the young hero intervened and wasn't killed by Tuscan Raiders out in the desert -- pity that), then it would have been Ben Kenobi who was asked to come out his exile to save the universe. But, as it was, whiny boy Luke Skywalker survived to find Kenobi and get his father's lightsaber...yada yada yada.

It is the task of the Magus, by the way, to demonstrate HOW THE MONSTER WORKS as well as make the hero's conflict personal. It isn't enough to be tasked with saving the world; the hero must also be saddled with the fact that he isn't enlightened enough. Sure, he's got the secret knowledge that powers the universe but because he doesn't understand it -- because he hasn't synthesized it with his own human experience -- he isn't able to save the Magus. By sacrificing himself, the Magus knows that his efforts will not be lost. Even though society at large has failed to accept his gift of enlightenment, he has managed to pass that knowledge onto another. The chain isn't broken. Not yet.

Which is another facet of the Apocalpytic Hero's bitterness. He knows that, until another hero comes along, he is THE ONE. Even though society doesn't want his knowledge, he is its keeper. It is his sole task to survive and wait and, when you're fighting a one man war against malignant entropy and hedonistic materialism, you tend to get a little lonely and angry.

Posted by Teppo at 12:42 AM | Comments (0) June 08, 2004

Interstitial Quotation

Following Travis and my comments in the previous entry, I was forced back to the primary texts to get my story straight.

"The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there he accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless -- and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol -- the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness...The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obsenities of life. Why re-enter such a world?...The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive his impact with the world." (Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 217-226)

This leads to some observations about the Apocalpytic Hero, which will be forthcoming.

Posted by Teppo at 12:17 AM | Comments (0) June 07, 2004

087: Apocalyptic Thrillers

I'm putting off work on Chapter 14. It's staring me in the face a bit only because it's supposed to divulge a good amount of Grandpa's history and I haven't really thought it all the way through yet. At least not so far as matching it up to the history of clandestine organizations in the US following WWII. I suppose it can all be dealt with later in research, but, oddly enough, I still have some reticence about inventing material that may have to be later reconciled with fact. Though, as Robert Anton Wilson continually points out about Illuminatus: regardless of how far-fetched he and Robert Shea extrapolated the conspiracy, it was never far out enough and bits of it kept coming true. So, yeah, one should never invent with the fear of being wrong; you should invent with the possibility that you may be right.

And then be ready to laugh it off when you turn out to be wrong in twenty years or so. It's good to have a sense of humor about these things.

So, as a mental exercise and as something that we can laugh about later, I thought I'd circle back and expand on the idea of Apocalyptic Thrillers. You can't talk about these sorts of books these days without at least touching on the Left Behind series, a multi-volume examination of the Biblical End of Time. Not my cup of tea, personally, and not the least because (1) they are written in a style which has no style and the characters are not much more than tissue paper cutouts of single-dimensional characterizations; and, (2) they are so fundamentally dogmatic about their vision of Christianity and, frankly, it's a supremely essential facet of their world-building and, since I don't buy it in the slightest, I'm at odds with the premise before I even start. I'm sure, however, that they do adhere to the basic structure of the Apocalyptic Thriller. Naturally. [insert wink and nudge here]

The Apocalyptic Thriller concerns itself with the END OF THE WORLD, or at least, the END OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION. It may be literal (as in the Left Behind books) or it may a logical conclusion following the localized catastrophe which is the core threat of the book. If it is of a global nature, then it will most likely require a cast of several hundred characters. It all depends on how widescreen you want the action to be. The bottom line, however, is that HUMANITY IS AT RISK. Whether this risk is one monkey with a nasty attitude and the Ebola virus, Nature taking back the planet via global warming, a deranged lunatic with a stockpile of nuclear warheads or some secret society bent on invoking a demonic presence which will devour the world is entirely up to the writer.

Joseph Campbell's heroic cycle ends with the hero leaving or remaining separate from the culture he has rescued because the events of the quest; the hero goes to THE OTHER SIDE as part of his adventure and becomes transformed, thereby making him "different" from everyone else. In the Apocalyptic Thriller, our hero will have been TOUCHED BY THE OTHER SIDE which makes him uniquely qualified to be the guy who saves the world. This mark of Otherness makes him an Outsider (capital "O" in Colin Wilson's sense) which means that he'll be a reject and a loner. He will have to be coerced into saving the world, either through an appeal by the elders of the society which he has left or by circumstance. The elders will appeal to his desire to return to the community or his sense of honor and duty to what is RIGHT. Circumstances will be some event which will have an personal impact on him, usually the death of someone he cares about or feels some duty towards. His course of action in the beginning is simply one of revenge and, from there, it grows into a larger awareness of his essential duty to right wrong and to preserve humanity's basic liberties. Or some such crap like that. Basically he gets roped into saving the world because -- as much as he might feel maligned or cast aside by society at large -- he's still a good egg and, frankly, evil pisses him off.

There has to be a MONSTER of some sort and, very early on, the audience must be given the opportunity to see HOW THE MONSTER WORKS. Evil must be quantified in a way that the readers can say, "Wow. That is really awful. Too bad that bus load of children had to die so horribly, but now I understand how terrible this evil threatening the world is. Gosh, I hope the hero gets his head out of his ass soon." Not all MONSTERS are the OLD ONES, but, yeah, in most cases, there's some thread going back to them. They're out there, you know, pulling strings.

As an aside, one of the joys about Mike Mignola's Hellboy is his glee in using the Nazis as the continued agents of the Old Ones. It's not a cliche in his hands, but rather a sly wink and nudge to his audience. Of course, it would have to be Nazis and, of course, it would have to be the Old Ones whom they are trying to contact and bring into this world. Go with what works, you know?

There has to be a WOMAN, usually two. One is the agent of LIGHT (the hooker with a heart of gold or some such) and the other is the agent of DARKNESS. Our hero will be torn between the two because, well, there's always the allure of the bad girl. The writers of Goldeneye really nailed this with Xenia Onatopp and Natalya Simonova. Come on, guys, let's see a show of hands: who was kinda bummed out when Onatopp finally bit it in the end?

The woman of light will be in danger by the climax, probably in a very Jim Silke inked and airbrushed sort of way. Rescuing the girl will allow the hero to remain aloof to the threat facing the world even though, as a result of saving the girl, he also saves the world. Her gratitude is his only reward because, even though he prevented the Apocalypse, he will still be touched by OTHERNESS (and possibly even more so now) which will make the elders of the world fear him and they will undoubtedly FUCK HIM OUT OF HIS DUE REWARD.

Reading back over this, I think my influences may be showing slightly. This is what happens when you are raised on comic books, pulp fiction, noir crime novels, and too much mythology.

Posted by Teppo at 09:21 AM | Comments (4) June 02, 2004

086: Landmark

Somehow I just finished Chapter XIII, crossing the 50 page/25,000 word mark. If I was breaking things up into digestable chunks, this would be the first quarter of the book. This section would be known as THE WORLD IS NOT AS IT SEEMS, and would be the introduction of the characters and the core concepts which will be thrashed upon by the author over the next 75,000 words. And I'm realizing that I've accomplished that goal pretty well -- I've introduced the main players and gotten them into trouble. The next quarter will be THINGS GETTING WORSE and DEFINING HOW THE MONSTER WORKS -- important pieces to have so that the audience will be ready for the third section -- OH CRAP, THEY'LL NEVER SURVIVE. Which becomes a page-turning necessity on their part as they must discover HOW THE WORLD IS SAVED in part four.

Or something like that. I can probably turn this into a Robin Cook style equation for churning out Apocalyptic Thrillers.

Posted by Teppo at 08:34 AM | Comments (0)