Category: The Ramble (page 122 of 464)

Last year, the resolution for 2017 could easily be the same as 2018 — I told you to WRITE DESPITE, meaning, no matter how deep the world is buried beneath an endlessly burning pile of horseshit, carve out some time and some space and create something anyway. Because writing is a form of resistance. That one still works, should you so require it.

This year, the writing resolution is for me less political and more personal:

Write with intentionality.

What it means, is this: you can write a story by simply wanting to tell it, and then telling it. You can let the story be, if you will, a river into which you have been tossed. And this can feel right and proper, because a story feels like a winding, animated thing. It pulls you along, and ideally, pulls the reader along, too. A lot of storytelling comprises, as Bob Ross calls them, “happy accidents.” Meaning, moments and pieces that seem serendipitous, that seem born of some strange narrative alchemy that is not precisely in your control — you just slapped together a couple of elements and it made, I dunno, a new element, or a lightning strike, or a rainy day, or a magic wish-granting bear. (What, you don’t have a magic wish-granting bear? WRITE HARDER.)

Happy accidents are good. Storytelling should be that way, sometimes.

But it isn’t always that way, either.

In writing comics, I’ve learned the power of really taking the time to — for lack of a better term — practice your aim. Writing a novel often feels like spraying the pages down with machine gun bullets, just chewing prose until you rat-a-tat a story into the fucking wall. But comics, man, you have a narrative economy to deal with. You have so much of a page, and only so many ways to frame out what happens. It’s fucking hard. It’s like writing a kid’s picture book. You ever try writing one of those? Haha, you think they’re gonna be easy, because it’s like, 100 words. But turns out, making 100,000 words work is easier than making 100 work. Because in a hundred-thousand-words, you can spackle over a lot of dents. In a hundred, every tiny ding, every off-angle, every bit of dirt on the lens — it is keenly seen, diminishing the potency of the tale told.

Film, too, works this way: you only have two hours-ish, and you have to make each moment on the screen, with image and dialogue and music, a goddamn triumph. (Might I recommend EVERY FRAME A PAINTING? It is now retired, but the archive exists, and go right now to check out “Edgar Wright, How To Do Visual Comedy.”)

This year I wrote a monster-sized book. I’ve gone on about it (sorry!) because holy shit, I have never done this before. Before this year, the longest book I’d ever written was Zer0es, which was 125,000 words (and is on sale, along with Invasive, for $3.99 right now, prod, prod). The average Miriam Black novel is around 70-80,000 words. This book, Wanderers, ended up at 260,000 words, more than twice my longest book.

I have no idea what the final word count will be. I await edits from the (truly spectacular) editor, who I trust will help me shape this thing into the massive epic horror-ish siege weapon I need it to become. But in writing this thing, I tried to take it slow, even as I wrote it fast. I tried to pause with scenes and chapters and ask myself along the way: why is this here? Not only that, but what do I want this scene, this chapter, to do? Specifically, what do I want it to do to the reader? I want them to feel a certain way, so how do I engineer that feeling with story and character? Often, first drafts involve me rolling myself into a ball-shape and then pitching myself down the side of a mountain, screaming as I tumble unstoppably forward… but this time I tried to be more deliberate, more aware, of what I was doing, and how, and why. I tried to feel every step of the thing. That doesn’t mean I was successful, mind you. But it does mean that I tried to develop a keener, more highly-tuned sense of what the story was as I was writing it.

I tried to treat every page like a frame in a comic book.

What’s happening?

What’s the economy?

What’s the point? What am I saying? What should you be feeling?

And I would engineer it ahead, too — I would think, okay, this is a downbeat, I need an upbeat soon. This is some dark shit, how do I intersperse with humor for contrast? This next bit, I want to hurt the reader, I want to hurt ’em so damn bad, so how do I reach through the page, grab the reader by the heart, rip out the heart, then force them to re-eat their own heart again?

It was difficult.

Again, no idea if I was successful.

It’s like playing chess instead of checkers. It’s not chopping onions; it’s filleting a fish.

It helped me understand the story better, that intentionality. Usually it’s a thing I tend to in subsequent drafts, but now I try (key word: try) to get my hands around its throat on the first draft. I want a firm grip from the first page. Hell, the first line.

That’s not to say there are not, contained within, a number of happy accidents — there are, and ideally, always will be. (In Vultures right now I wrote a random Uber-driver character who I liked so much he has become a primary supporting character with agency to push and pull on the plot. He was an extra, but now he’s got a supporting role.) And it’s not to say it made a cleaner first draft; arguably, I think it made it messier, because if things didn’t quite fit for my vision of how a chapter or scene needed to go, I’d just scrap them, leaving the floor littered with plot scraps and swatches of ill-fitting narrative. But it helped me get a larger sense of the thing. And it helped me focus up what I’m trying to do, not just in the macro, but in the micro, too.

So, for me, and maybe for you, there’s power in writing with intentionality.

Decide how you want the reader to feel, and write that way.

Decide what you’re trying to say, and why, and then fucking say it.

Know the purpose, aim your voice, write with vigor and deliberation.

Take command. Be confident. Be willful.

And play, too, to find out how to make it work. Compose and recompose a scene. Go one way with it, then rewrite it another way. Learn to see how intentional changes make for a butterfly effect in the work. Learn the weave and the weft of it. Don’t just go down the river. Put objects in the water, see how fast they move. See if they block the flow or speed it up or break the river in twain.

Write with intentionality.

Try it out.

Let me know how it goes, how it feels, how it works.

And I’ll see you in 2018.

* * *

DAMN FINE STORY: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

What do Luke Skywalker, John McClane, and a lonely dog on Ho’okipa Beach have in common? Simply put, we care about them.

Great storytelling is making readers care about your characters, the choices they make, and what happens to them. It’s making your audience feel the tension and emotion of a situation right alongside your protagonist. And to tell a damn fine story, you need to understand why and how that caring happens.

Whether you’re writing a novel, screenplay, video game, or comic, this funny and informative guide is chock-full of examples about the art and craft of storytelling–and how to write a damn fine story of your own.

Out now!

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

A week or so before Christmas, I had the following thought:

What if we’ve ended the world and just haven’t realized it yet? What if we’ve entered the walking ghost phase of Humanity Poisoning, and we’re all walking around, toodling about on our social media and taking selfies with dogs, but we haven’t yet realized that the world has already gone beyond the brink and no part of it can be saved — but we just haven’t caught up to the reality yet? Meaning, we’ve flipped all the switches, spun all the dials, then caved in the control panel with a crowbar to make sure you can’t undo any of the settings. Electing the Fucking Asshole to the highest office of the land was like setting off a chain of dominoes, except the lead domino is actually just a giant concrete slab that crushes the entire domino chain before they can clickity-click-click together, one after the other. We careen toward economic depression and climate catastrophe and each mass shooting bigger than the last. And now we wait as this unfixable machine slowly rattles itself to pieces, largely unaware and at least vaguely, foolishly, spitefully optimistic even as we watch the pieces fall off or burn up.

I don’t believe it’s true, to be clear.

But I had the thought, and it’s a pretty good indicator of where my head is at in this, the Year That Took Ten Years, 2017.

I’ve been ping-ponging between optimism and pessimism in a nearly manic fashion. I began this year fearing the worst, but then took some comfort that the monsters that grabbed the wheel of our democracy are actually very, very stupid. My evaluation: they’re not good at it. They are comically inept, in fact, and it feels less like watching the Wehrmacht and more like watching ten clowns fuck each other in an over-inflated bouncy-house. Less like watching a finely-tuned military operation, and more like watching a drunk guy running around Disneyworld hitting people with a hammer. Less like pure evil and more like weaponized dipshittery.

On the other hand, the clown orgy, the hammer-smacking, the rampant dipshitty — well, like I said, it’s fucking rampant, isn’t it? It’s ceaseless. And that’s where my optimism suddenly rides the roller coaster into a deep valley — these people are stupid fucking assholes, yes, but they are tireless at it, and there are many of them, and though they are not efficient, they are still doing damage left and right, en masse. You let one guy with a hammer run around Disneyworld all day, he’s gonna brain a lot of people. And the news is just like, ohh, goddamnit. You open social media and it’s like, the Thing That Should’ve Been A Scandal Yesterday has now been replaced by seven more, and that last Shoulda Been A Scandal feels like it happened six years ago even though it happened six hours ago. And it’s so ceaseless I fear we’re becoming inured to it. “Ahh, I see President Asshole has changed the law so now it’s okay to enslave children at factories, that’s cool. And he personally killed the last bald eagle before tweeting his 3,412th tweet this week about how Hillary Clinton is the head of ISIS and how she and the FBI should be sent to a Moon Prison, except he misspelled Moon, which is a thing I didn’t know you could do. Cool. Everything’s cool. This is normal.”

(The last bald eagle’s dying whisper: “This is not normal.”)

Then I feel optimism again because despite the gerrymandering and suppression and winnowing of our voting laws, we’ve made some real strides there. I mean, Virginia? Alabama? (Yeah, know Doug Jones is a Milkshake Duck, but he’s a Democrat in Alabama, who’d you think he was gonna be?) But then it goes back to pessimism again because dear god how did the GOP ever support Roy Moore and wait how the fuck did they ever support President Asshole and god if I have to see Paul Ryan’s smug, gormless face anymore I think I’ll literally take a shit on the Constitution, and don’t even get me started on the melting candle that is Mitch McConnell and —

See what I’m saying? Back and forth, back and forth.

I guess that’s the best thing I can say about 2017, in terms of all that out there *gesticulates in the general direction of the real world* — at least it coulda been worse. That’s 2017, to me: it coulda, maybe shoulda, been worse.

Personally and professionally, I’m doing pretty all right.

I released Empire’s End, aka the last of the Star Wars: Aftermath trilogy (Print | eBook). It hit list, landing at number three on the NYT Bestsellers list, which truly proves the hater’s narrative that these books are terrible and don’t sell any copies. (Which I see is also the narrative now somehow surrounding The Last Jedi — the very bad movie that no one saw, and is so bad and is performing so poorly that it has buried Disney in piles of money, oh well, guess they won’t make Episode IX after all.) I think we’re supposed to do AWARDS ELIGIBILITY POSTS, and I’ll casually note that I’d love for the Aftermath trilogy to get an award nod somewhere, just to put a burr in the bigots’ panties. Sidenote: the Aftermath trilogy continues to pop up at the Locus Bestsellers List.

Also out: the fourth Miriam Black book, Thunderbird (Print | eBook). This did not sell as well as I’d hoped, and continues to kinda… poke along. As to why that is, I have some ideas, but I’ll unpack them at the close of the series in a year’s time. I’m proud of the book, regardless. I hope that over time it finds its audience. If you’re a Miriam Black fan, please: proselytize the books as you can! Books like that do well with word-of-mouth. So. OPEN MOUTH, SHOOT OUT WORDS.

Damn Fine Story (Print | eBook) also came out this fall, and has had sales that surpassed my wildest dreams — people seem to be responding to it very well, I think, and they seem to dig that it’s like Stephen King’s On Writing, if Stephen King were instead a drunken, lusty elk who had learned the Ways of Man and how to tell stories to his fellow elkfolk. The greatest compliment I get on this book is that people have read it and emailed me or tweeted at me to say that it helped them figure out a problem in their work, which is ideal. It’s the whole point!

Had a short story in From A Certain Point-of-View about Wuher, the cantina barkeep on Tatooine, and why he hates droids so damn bad. Very proud of it, even though it clearly proves that Lucasfilm would never hire me again after the dismal failure that was Aftermath (*snerk*).

I wrote some more comics: in this case, a relaunch and reboot of the Turok character for Dynamite. The last issue, number five, comes out this Wednesday, so if you want a dude kicking the ass of fascist dinosaurs, I got you covered. Lot of fun to write, and working for Dynamite has been a blast, so: woo and hoo.

Invasive was optioned for TV with David Slack and Jerry Bruckheimer, imagined as a show called Unthinkable — technically, it was optioned in 2016, but only this year did it start to get some power behind it. I’ve read the script this past week and it’s amazing, and I’m hopeful it lands on your television sets this next year if only because the script is so good I want to see it myself. (Slack is a fucking master.)

I wrote a 260,000-word book this year. That book is Wanderers.

I’m also currently finishing up the final Miriam book, Vultures.

And personally, family has been great — B-Dub continues to grow up and be an amazing little dude. He’s eager and engaged and he reads and writes, and he sits every day at his drawing table and draws amazing things. He plays guitar and can read music. We’re good here. I traveled a lot. California. Vegas. Utah. Colorado, NYC, Florida.

Unsure exactly what 2018 will bring.

Politically, probably more manure.

Though hopefully elections in 2018 will be decisive.

Professionally, well.

In January, The Raptor & The Wren lands (Print | eBook), and it’s a book I’m particularly proud of — Miriam Black’s penultimate adventure is an unholy ride, I hope. I wrote it in the midst of some serious insomnia last year, but honestly, I think that helped produce the book that it became.

In fact, hey, look, I just found the Publisher’s Weekly review:

“Wendig is in top form for his fifth horror-thriller (after 2017’s Thunderbird) featuring sharp-edged psychic Miriam Black, who has the power to learn how and when people will die. Miriam has discovered a new ability: she can control birds with her mind. It’s a neat trick, and one that will come in handy in the days ahead while she helps former FBI agent Thomas Grosky track down a killer who looks just like her and is a blast from her very messy past. Miriam’s search takes her into the darkest, most vicious depths of her talents, and back into the arms of former lover Louis Darling, whose eventual fate Miriam has already glimpsed. She knows fighting her destiny is a losing proposition, but she tries anyway, all while dodging a horrifying entity that wants to annihilate her. Wendig expertly splashes Miriam’s considerable emotional pain across the page, never sparing her the price of her gut-wrenching circumstances, and closes with a shocking twist that is a true game-changer.”

And then after that —

Then after that —

*checks notes*

*shakes notes*

*stares at them for a while*

I got nothing.

That’s it for 2017.

One book.

That’s because Wanderers, my Very Big Epic Horror-ish Novel, is now publishing in 2019.

This is a very new phenomenon for me.

One book? In one year? WHO AM I AND WHAT HAVE I BECOME

Real-talk, though: this is essential, because when I publish too many books traditionally, I end up competing with myself on bookshelves. That’s a hard, weird reality to being an over-productive writer. Bookstores can only carry so many of my books, and so — I make it harder for them to do this. That’s just the reality of physical shelf-space, sadly.

So, I’ll take 2017 and just write more fucking books, I guess. Comics, too, I hope.

As is my way.

Anyway.

That’s it for me. I’ll be some places, if you care to find me.

I hope you’re well.

Let’s kick 2017 to the fucking curb and let’s make 2018 better than the last. Which means we have to be invested and involved. It means we gotta work toward the light and fight the dark. It means we have to champion causes and our principles even when it hurts, even when it’s hard. It means we have to vote. It means we have to create, not destroy. It means we have to share love, even if we have to do so aggressively and in the face of danger and oppression. We have to see our privilege and demand restitution. We gotta do better. So let’s do better, together.

Fuck off, 2017.

Hello, 2018.

See you on the other side, my precious muffins.

P.S. no matter what happens, at least we still have dogs, btw

P.P.S. me and drunken bad-ass Kameron Hurley show up on the Ditch Diggers End-of-Year podcast with Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace, so give that shit a listen, you silly little wizards, you

I WILL SHOW UP IN PLACES IN 2018, and I figure it’s best I don’t do this randomly, without warning, like some kind of ghost or gopher.

Or gopherghost.

I figure to maximize my appearances, I should actually…

…well, tell you about them? It’s a radical idea, and I’m running with it.

Let us begin:

January 23rd

Book launch, The Raptor & The Wren, Let’s Play Books, 6:30PM, Emmaus, PA. Details here on the bookstore’s Facebook page. Come by, I’ll sign books, we’ll have a few laughs, we’ll talk about life and death and fate and free will and also porgs.

January 27th – 28th

Elgin Literary Festival, near Chicago, IL! I’m one of the guests, I’ll say stuff, we can talk about writing. It’ll be nice. Details here.

March 1st – 4th

Emerald City ComicCon! Very excited for this. Not sure of my schedule as yet but I hope it’ll be cool. Seattle is awesome and I’ve heard only aaaamaaaazing things about this con. ECCC Website.

March 24th

RWA Workshop (“Characters as Architects, Not Architecture”) in Austin, TX! 9AM to 2PM. Details here. Come say hi! Bring me a taco!

April 20-22nd

RavenCon in Williamsburg, VA! I’m the Author Guest of Honor, yay. You should go and it will be grand. Ravencon Website.

May 24th – 27th

Phoenix ComicCon! I again return to the scorching dry demon’s mouth that is Arizona — always a great time, let’s eat tacos and drink Cartel Coffee together and I mean, sure, something about books? PHXCC Website.

And I think that’s it for now, though I’m probably missing something.

SEE YOU IN THESE PLACES, hopefully.

[Warning: deeper into this review, you will be walking onto the muddy streets of lawless SPOILERTOWN. Ye have been warned.]

This will be less a review of The Last Jedi (Episode VIII) than it will be… my thoughts? An analysis? Me opening my head like a flip-top Pac-Men and seeing what globs of brain-goo I can grab and hastily smack into the screen?

If you want my review, it’s this:

WOOOOOO

YAAAAAAY

OH WHOA

WAIT

WOW

AHHHHHH

*pant pant pant*

NO WAY DID THEY JUST

THEY DID

AND NOW

BUT THEN

OH HOLY SHIT

WAIT BUT THAT MEANS

*gesticulates wildly*

And, close.

I fucking loved it.

That’s it. That’s my review. It’s mostly just a series of excitable sounds with the occasional twirling around until I’m dizzy. But I’d rather look past my gibbon-like hoots and my strange, erotic dances and see what lies within. What lurks deeper. What do I see when I enter the DARK SIDE CAVE to have the truth revealed to me?

Your Expectations Will Not Be Met

Fandom is a tricky bear to wrestle. We love a thing so deeply, we entwine ourselves within it. We thread a little bit — sometimes a lot — of our identity into the thing. And we come to believe we own that thing, and further, we join a tribe of fellow owners who all have threaded themselves into it both intellectually and emotionally. We feel excited by what this thing can bring us. We develop pet theories. We craft and conjure the path we would take if we were ever handed the keys to the Thing We Love. We become excited and obsessive, a little bit. Sometimes a lotta bit.

But here’s the thing:

Stories can never be written for the fans.

Fan service isn’t a bad thing, per se, but it is sometimes a fairly lazy thing — it’s a comfortable signal, a soft chair, it’s Norm from Cheers where everybody knows his name. It’s to say, “You’re lost here, but look, here is a familiar friend to help you through. It’s to let you know that despite all the strange flora and the eyes glowing in the dark, you’re still a known quantity in a known land. This is a safe place.” When done overmuch, fan service does more than just introduce a few friendly faces. It burns down the trees. It lights up the dark. It slides a jukebox over and slams the top of it like it’s fucking Fonzie and suddenly, the Greatest Hits begin to play, just as you love them. Maybe in an order you don’t know, but still the songs you know and you adore.

The Last Jedi is not without its fan service moments, but they are few and far-between, and even when they exist, they exist to challenge you more than they do to bring you succor.

The Last Jedi will not meet your expectations.

Oh, it knows them.

It is well-aware of them, in fact, and is well-aware that you have them. And it willfully… I don’t want to say disregards them, precisely, but in a sense, it has weaponized them against you. It knows you’ve seen all the movies. It knows you know the narrative beats, the tropes, the rhyming couplets of George Lucas, and then it gently puts them all in a magician’s hat, and then it reaches into the hat, and instead of pulling them back out, it pulls out a porg.

And then the movie hits you with the porg.

Whap.

That metaphor may have gotten a little out of hand, but I think you grok me.

The Last Jedi cares very much about your expectations.

It’s just not going to meet them.

You, a fan, have explicit ideas about what a Star Wars movie can and should do, and it’s going to use that against you. And it’s going to play for a larger audience, as it must. It can’t work just for you, dear fan — never mind the fact that fandom is not a singular, globular entity, like a giant amoeba with one set of desires to be met. It has to go bigger. It has to please a wide variety of viewers while trying to make new fans along the way.

This message is clear within the first 20 minutes of the movie.

[Once again, turn back, for HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.]

We expect Luke to take his old lightsaber — really, Anakin’s old lightsaber — and regard it as the way one should regard something that was last seen in your pre-severed hand. I mean, if last time I saw a Hummel figurine was in my hand that got lopped off, and then decades later you traipsed up to me on my creepy hermit island and handed me that very Hummel figurine, I’d look at you like you were Jesus Christ Himself, because, what the fuck. But that’s not what Luke does. He regards the lightsaber and instead, chucks it behind him, where a couple of porgs try to murder each other with it.

We expect Poe’s half-wit fly-boy hero plan to work, because in these movies, the dimwit hero plan always works — Han Solo always gets them out of a scrape by doing something very Han Solo, for instance, and so we trust that Poe is living by his instincts, and those will save the day. Except that’s not what happens. His efforts fuck it all up. Arguably, much of the film is based on his gigantic fuck-up. Lives are lost because of Poe Dameron.

We expect Vice Admiral Holdo doesn’t know what she’s doing, and that the snappy man who demands the plan is in the right. But he’s not. We expect incorrectly. She’s right. He’s wrong. She doesn’t owe him shit. And yet he, the demanding man, is assured that he is right and must be told the plan, and his Sexist Hero Man routine gets people killed.

We expect Rey to turn. Or Kylo to turn. They don’t.

We expect Snoke to be a grand puppetmaster, the Emperor Palpatine of the trilogy, and that he’ll — ooh, oops, he’s now cut in half? Or more than half? Was that a hand still sitting on the arm of his throne room chair? Somebody get some antibacterial ointment in that joint, post-haste.

We expect that our heroes must be chosen ones, that they come from special families, that they have been born of destiny — not that they are the children of drunken junkers, not that they once mopped a star destroyer, not that they are a lone mechanic weeping over the loss of a sister.

Often, our expectations are based on what we know of the former films — we know that the big AT-AT battle means a scrappy band will take some of those AT-ATs down and they’ll escape, but this escape is not so plucky, nor does it begin the film. It ends it. And it nearly ends the resistance. The heroic sacrifice of Finn — an expected moment — is thwarted by Rose, who kisses him. (We expected that to be Rey, didn’t we?)

In the throne room, we expect it will go like it did in Return of the Jedi — and it does, a little. Snoke is ultimately the Emperor, in that he’s a Sinister Puppetmaster with a lot of buildup but not a lot of meat on those bones. (Remember: Palpatine/Sidious only gets those deeper character beats much, much later, long after ROTJ left theaters.) The dark apprentice does turn on his master to save another, but Kylo’s turn is not the sacrifice of Vader but rather, a Sith-like move to eradicate the master and take on a new apprentice: Rey. Kylo does not turn to the light-side. He simply turns against Snoke. He fulfills the Dark Side’s wishes. (And then promptly begs and negs Rey when she won’t take his hand. “You’re nobody,” he tells her. “Please.”) And all of this happens in the second film of the trilogy, not the third — another subversion.

And that’s the word to note.

Subversion.

Another word:

Mutation.

Chaos theory.

Butterfly effect.

Ripples from thrown stones.

Or —

A Mirror, Slowly Cracking

It goes like this:

The Force Awakens was a little bit comfort food. It needed to be. It needed to play off our nostalgia. It needed to have the cut of A New Hope’s jib. We needed a reminder that we know this thing, that we love this thing.

But to go back to the jukebox metaphor, it didn’t play The Greatest Hits only. Or rather, it played them, but they were played by a new band, or performed live, or remixed, or played in a different key. The Force Awakens was comfort food, but with a few odd ingredients thrown in — “Wait, what the fuck is shiso? Is this bison? Are persimmons a real thing? Is this a persimmon or are those fruits you get in Narnia?”

The Force Awakens birthed mutations into the narrative code of Star Wars. It threw rocks into water. It chipped the mirror into which we were all staring — introducing just a few small cracks in the reflective glass. When Kylo Ren faces down Finn and Rey at the end of that film, he tells them, “It’s just us, now.” He’s telling us that the baton has been passed. “It’s not their story anymore. It’s our story.”

And then, The Last Jedi continues that.

The mutations are passed down, and the monster evolves.

The rocks in water created ripples, and now we’re seeing those ripples move toward the shoreline, some of them becoming waves.

The cracks in the mirror are growing bigger, distorting the image we expect to see reflected back at us, ruining the comfort of a mirrored image and breaking our assumptions into shards and islands of glass.

Every time we, as viewers, reach out to touch the mirror — as Rey does, in the cave — we only make more cracks. We don’t resolve the image. We don’t save the mirror. We further the breaking of the glass through our clumsy, monkey-handed expectations.

The comfort food of the Episode VII has become the molecular gastronomy of Episode VIII — ingredients we thought we knew, resolved into new forms: foams and suspensions, gelees and pancakes and cocktails, a thing we expect to be sweet is suddenly sour and salty, another thing is disassembled and deconstructed, a third thing isn’t supposed to be edible but somehow, it is.

The Last Jedi is not our comfort food.

It is not going to let your nostalgia be enough.

It’s A Fucking Mess, This Movie

The movie’s a mess.

And it needs to be.

I love that it’s a mess.

It’s not a formless mess. It’s not without purpose or shape.

But it’s a mess.

Let’s switch gears for a second.

Go to this link and watch the video — no, it’s not porn, it’s a brief clip from A Chef’s Table, featuring chef Grant Achatz talking about — well, you’ll see.

I, as a writer, take a lot of inspiration from this show, A Chef’s Table, not just because I like to watch pretentious chefs plate pretentious food pretentiously (though my word, I do love it!), but rather because I really appreciate seeing how each chef comes to the kitchen and to the plate and to the very idea of food differently. They are each singularly obsessed with their craft, but each in a wildly different direction — how they do it, why they do it, their ethos behind doing it, how they treat their staff, how they frame a plate, how they invent and reinvent themselves and their work? It fascinates me. And it inspires me.

Achatz in that clip says, to paraphrase, that he doesn’t want to be defined by the traditional margins of… well, preparing and serving food. He takes inspiration from modern art and for a dessert, removes the plate from the equation and lets the tablecloth serve as canvas:

That, an image of said dessert at Alinea, his restaurant.

That dish is a mess, in the literal sense of the word.

A wonderful mess. An elegant, articulate mess.

But a mess, just the same.

Now, I don’t want to give the wrong impression that The Last Jedi is quite so avant-garde — it’s not a shattering of the mold, it’s not giving us some David Lynchian view of the Star Wars franchise, but it is giving us a Rian Johnson view. And I’d argue, without knowing Rian Johnson’s precious and weird and wonderful heart, that he — like Achatz — did not want to be bound by the rigors of the plate. Because he did not make a film that followed the bouncing ball. It does not follow the classic narrative Hollywood blockbuster beats. (Nor, for the record, does Empire Strikes Back, by the way. I talk about how that film subverts the pattern in my book — plug alert — Damn Fine Story.) Johnson does not make a film pinned to the corkboard by the tropes of the Star Wars universe. It sees them. It uses them. And then it willfully discards them, locking eyes with you so you see that it’s doing it. And it results in a messy, bumpy, strange film.

One that needs to be messy, bumpy, and strange.

Because then, only then, are we truly free from the pattern.

I explained to my wife that The Last Jedi is like The Matrix Reloaded, if The Matrix Reloaded was actually good. That second film of the Matrix trilogy is a fucking mess, and it tries very hard to look into its own heart and challenge the assumptions you have about it — but it was too soon, and it too easily betrayed what the first film was without understanding why it was doing it. And it did it all in a haughty, nose-in-the-air, intellectually-elite way. (As with all things here and everywhere, YMMV.)

This film tries and messily succeeds.

And the resultant mess — the splatters, the ripples, the broken glass, the unfolding mutations — changes our understanding. It frees Episode IX from fitting a known pattern. It frees us from knowing what’s to come — we are gloriously, wonderfully lost. Just as the characters are themselves lost. I pondered that this film could’ve just as easily been called The Lost Jedi, because that’s how it feels. Luke is wayward. Rey is lost to her own powers and place in the world. Kylo is lost in his rage, fallen into the chasm of his heart and spirit. Poe is unmoored from his heroism. Finn is pinballing between his cowardice and his own heroism. Rose is lost without her sister. Leia is lost without Han and the Republic. The Resistance is lost under the might of the First Order. Everyone is lost. Everyone is failing. The entire movie presents us with failure after failure: characters trying to do the right thing and missing a step, every damn time.

But it presents failure in the way that the dessert table of Grant Achatz is a failure: it’s broken, yes, but into new shapes, new tastes. It’s failure in the way a mirror is broken: one image becomes many, distorted and new and beautiful in its way. It’s failure as the butterfly effect. It’s failure as Yoda tells it: the greatest teacher, failure is.

This failure of Luke, of Rey, of the Resistance, of all the characters, leads to a resurrection — the Phoenix Firebird of the Rebellion — rising anew.

This failure of these characters is a success for the film.

It’s a mess in the best way. Because in that mess, the patterns are lost, the expectations are destroyed, the tropes are broken and bent. For the first time in a long time, I had literally no idea what was going to happen, and that felt like madness in the best way.

This is a mythic remix. A resetting of the game board.

In being lost, we have become found.

That Coda, At The Ending

At the end of the film, we see the fathier stable-boy gently summon a broom to his hand and look to the night sky, a Resistance ring on his finger, the music of Luke Skywalker rising. It’s an odd coda in that none of the Star Wars films give us anything like that — but it’s beautiful to me in several ways. It’s beautiful because:

a) It continues the theme of Rey, Finn, Rose, where power and rebellion and heroism needn’t come from special bloodlines — it’s in all of us, all the way down to this one stable-boy.

b) It serves as a refutation, in fact, of the wealth and spectacle of Canto Bight, full of people who think they’re special but who are decidedly not.

c) It continues what for me is one of the chief themes of Star Wars, in that the actions of a small group can change the galaxy — Rose and Finn meet a boy who one day may become the face of the new Resistance; they have inspired him, they were the spark.

d) It makes me think of our own time, and the need for resistance against a rising autocratic regime, and it tells me that there’s a whole other take waiting on The Last Jedi, showing how it (and Episode VII) are telling us a lot more about our current political climate than we’d like. The film flirts for a while with an angle of Whataboutism, with Bothsidesism, where Kylo tells us that he wants to kill the past, where DJ the slicer tells us that all sides are bad, Luke hates the Jedi — but the movie concertedly, decidedly tells us that’s not true by the end. Rey picks her side, as does Kylo. Finn refutes DJ’s assertion. No Grey Jedi exist. Evil is evil, oppression is oppression, and the light will rise to meet it — here, now, with this young boy and his FORCE-BROOM.

and finally

e) Because my son loved that part. My son is six years old and responded to that kid by wanting to be that kid. HE HAS THE FORCE, my son said immediately after leaving the theater, DID YOU SEE THE BROOM OMG THE BROOM. This storyworld has long been generational: each generation now getting a trilogy for them, unique to them, and this is that, here. I love that. I love that this trilogy is more for him than it is for me. It doesn’t kill all the old stuff, it doesn’t shutter the past entirely, but it does break it apart, and remake it for kids my son’s age — and kids who aren’t just my son, either, kids who don’t look like him, kids who don’t have to look like Luke Skywalker but can instead look like Rose or Finn or Poe or Rey.

The Challenge

The challenge comes for the viewer is this:

Do you need need your Star Wars to be comfort food? No harm, no foul if you do. Some look to Star Wars and need it to be the perfect mirror it has been — they don’t want that mirror broken so that other stories can be told, so that other people can see themselves in the shared shards. Some want the tropes. They want the familiarity. They need nostalgia.

And this movie burns it all down.

A lightning strike setting fire to a sacred tree.

It’s okay if you didn’t like it.

But it’s worth appreciating what it did, and why, even if you don’t.

Me, I loved it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to return to my wild gesticulations of joy.

See you around, kid.

(A few complaints and concerns about the film will be in the comments.)

Since Election Day 2016, there’s been a steady stream of comments and memes on social media comparing the United States to [fill in your favorite/popular/overhyped dystopian fiction]. From Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu to cracks about the Hunger Games, just when we thought dystopian fiction had worn out its welcome and it’s finally time for sexy yetis or magical narwhals or whatever to be the Next Big Thing, the world changed dramatically almost overnight, and now we cling to those dystopian books as more than escapist fantasies—they’re primers for dealing with daily life and planning the revolution.

2016: Trump won’t win.

2017: President Trump can’t do that, can he?

2018: You watching The Hunger Games tonight? I hope my District wins.

— Eric Smith (@ericsmithrocks) March 2, 2016

Or maybe people are just reaching for the easy jokes. But good comedy is usually based at least partly in truth, and humor is a longstanding coping strategy when things get completely awful. All kidding aside, for an increasing number of people living in America, things are getting pretty bad. The worst. People are literally dying as a result of the choices our current administration is making every day. If a self-interested, likely corrupt and compromised government hell-bent on disenfranchising, deporting, discrediting, dehumanizing, and outright killing its own citizens isn’t a dystopia, then I don’t know what is. So, perhaps we cling to dystopian stories now because as bad as things are, at least it isn’t quite that bad yet—or to help us prepare for what’s coming—just as children and teens read young adult fiction to get a preview of the embarrassment, relationships, and challenges that lie ahead for them.

These days, for many years now, dystopian fiction and YA go hand in hand. There are lots of reasons for that—high school is a kind of dystopia, adults are the establishment, and so on—and consequently in the early days of 2017, many people, including myself, made references to waiting for teenagers to save the world.

Contrary to some comments I’ve seen: I’m glad my friends and I have kids. We’re gonna need teen protagonists to fix this dystopia we built.

— E. C. Myers (@ecmyers) November 9, 2016

Again, going for the easy punchline, but with an underlying flavor of truth. It makes sense that young adults would gravitate towards stories where teens tackle gross social injustice and change the world for the better, while picking up a boyfriend or girlfriend or two along the way. But a tremendous number of not-so-young adults are also reading this stuff, and always have been. Depending on who you ask on a given day, upwards of fifty percent of YA sales are to grownups. What’s up with that? What could possibly be of interest in these books for people on the wrong side of high school graduation?

The heart of good YA fiction is a character learning about their world and figuring out how they fit into it, and that doesn’t stop once you become an adult with student loans and mortgages, jobs and children of your own—and a world filled with big, seemingly impossible problems to solve like climate change and expensive healthcare and rampant sexual harassment and too many subscription services for streaming video. Back in the golden, olden days, when the world lived on the brink of nuclear war, people tended to stay in the same job for their whole lives. But these days, it’s more common for people to change jobs every few years, maybe go back to school for a graduate degree, live on unemployment for a while, start their own business, and so on. We are all constantly reinventing ourselves as we find new places for ourselves in a changing world. Newsflash: adults don’t have their acts together any more than teens do, and we’re desperately searching for meaning and purpose in our lives. Yeah, we can still relate to YA fiction, and we need escapism more than ever.

But another key element of YA fiction, especially dystopian YA fiction, is that one person—or perhaps a band of preternaturally beautiful, scrappy, snarky teens—can make a difference, albeit often at great personal sacrifice. They can change the world. They can save the whole damn world. And that’s what all those jokes are about. We need that kind of optimism right now. Only just as your average YA protagonist can’t wait for adults to come along to make everything better, it turns out that we can’t wait for our kids to grow up and fix our mistakes.

Okay, so what does all this have to do with ReMade? Fortunately, the teens in our series were killed before the 2016 presidential election, though they awakened in a distant future that clearly has seen its share of dystopias and is deadly in its own right, what with the lack of food and a surplus of killer robots. They have literally been remade—faster, better, stronger—and now, with the entire future they had planned lost to them forever, along with their friends, family, iPhones, and Instagram, most of them seize the rare opportunity to change their identity. Realizing that no one is coming to save them and there’s no going back to the way things were, they rise to the challenge of surviving and saving the world.

And I’m seeing that happening now in America. A year after the election, people have stepped up in surprising, inspiring ways. Many who hate talking on the phone and to strangers have called their representatives, sent e-mails and letters, marched around the country for what they believe in. People who never had any interest in politics are running for office—and winning! People are subscribing to and reading freaking newspapers again, which has to be a sign of the apocalypse. People are speaking up and speaking out against institutional racism and harassment, raising funds for human rights organizations and disaster relief. People are voting, even for local elections. If the America we know died on the night of January 20, 2017, then we have the opportunity to remake it, and ourselves and decide what kind of a nation we want to be.

So imagine this farfetched scenario. Your parents are absent or dead. You’ve just realized or accepted that the world is an ugly place and you can’t trust your own leaders. You’re under constant surveillance, manipulated by social media, and more people are suffering and dying every day. The polar ice caps are melting. What are you going to do?

We are each the protagonist of this dystopian nonfiction. Forget about making America great again, whatever that means. It’s always had room for improvement. Let’s work together to remake it better than ever. No one is coming to save us, and it’s up to us the save the damn world.

* * *

E.C. Myers: assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and the public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published numerous short stories and four young adult books: the Andre Norton Award–winning Fair Coin, Quantum Coin, The Silence of Six, and Against All Silence.

His most recent work includes contributions to anthologies Feral Youth, Behind the Song, Where the Stars Rise, and A Thousand Beginnings and Endings(forthcoming). He is also co-writing the YA science fiction serial ReMade for Serial Box Publishing, which begins its second season on 11/15/17. You can find traces of him all over the internet, but especially at http://ecmyers.net and on Twitter: @ecmyers.

E.C. Myers: Website | Twitter

ReMade: Read @ Serial Box

I was a teenager in New York City in the 1980s. My parents were artists, and I was queer. Which meant that, by the time I was 15 years old, almost everything in my world – from school reading assignments to dinner conversations — was about AIDS. AIDS and my bisexuality didn’t feel separable any more than AIDS and art did. I spent a lot of those years, and the ones that followed in university, lying to my parents and fighting our government. And in all the books I read, everyone always died.

When I first encountered Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint in the 1990s, it was lent to me by a suitor with little explanation. I read it, somewhat dutifully (I love when people recommend books to me, I less enjoy the time pressure of having them lent to me), with a constant startlement.  Wait, I’d ask, are those guys dating?!? I had to keep flipping backwards and starting scenes over to be sure I was reading what I thought I was reading.

Some of that disbelief in my own comprehension was a product of the time; I was not familiar with queer narratives that weren’t about AIDS. I hadn’t read any, I hadn’t seen any, and, to a large extent, I hadn’t experienced any either. But Swordspoint, of course, isn’t set in our world. And Ellen’s deftness as a writer means that the world she created was saturated with a constant overt queerness that was always never announced. In the neighborhoods of her unnamed city in an unnamed land, same-sex attraction is so normalized and bisexuality is so ubiquitous, terms for them don’t even seem to exist.

But this queerness has not been, in many ways, what makes the world of Riverside (the city may not get a name, but its most infamous neighborhood certainly does), so remarkable. More, for me, it is the amalgam of time periods and class-related dilemmas that so reflect the New York I grew up in. In the world of Riverside everyone is brash, everyone is proud, and everyone is just trying to survive their particular and peculiar dilemmas.

These days, Swordspoint is anything but a historical artifact of when I first saw queerness without loss in fiction. Tremontaine, Serial Box Publishing’s serialized prequel to the World of Riverside books is now in its third season. Created and led by Ellen Kushner and with a team of writers, Tremontaine explores the City fifteen years before readers first found it.

While all of us are working within a set of existing rules created by the Riverside books and stories – Tremontaine represents a number of peculiar freedoms for each of us on the team. The collaborative nature of the process, based on a TV writers room, means we never have to suffer in solitude with challenging first draft, an abrupt case of writer’s block, or a sudden inability to find just the right word. But because of the source material — and Serial Box’s commitment to underserved voices — Tremontaine also means we never, ever have to worry about having too many queer characters.

In fact, queerness is so the overwhelming default in Tremontaine that the writing team (which is also significantly skewed towards queerness) occasionally has to be reminded to let a character or two be straight.

Freed from the constraints of our world, we don’t have to note that a character enjoys relationships with multiple genders before portraying those relationships. No one ever has to write a coming out scene. Our villains can be queer because our heroes can be queer. And, perhaps most importantly for our proclivities as writers, we can be as tragic and murderous as we want, because none of our characters ever die for being queer. In the world of Riverside, that’s just not possible.

Growing up as I did, the legacy of the AIDS era as reflected both implicitly and explicitly in queer creative work is incredibly important to me. I often argue with younger people about the need for both a freedom from our tragic stories as well as an ongoing acceptance of their necessary reality. It is 100% true that people – of all identities – need to see queer heroes and queer victories. It is also 100% true that the history of villains and tragedy in queer art created by queer people is not one that should be excised from the cultural narrative.

People who have lived those losses, and those fears, remain right here among us. I’m even one of them. Several people on the Tremontaine team are. While those stories are largely long ago and far away both personally and from the world of Tremontaine, they are not absent.

When I first read Swordspoint in my early-20s, it was revolutionary for me. While queer characters now abound in the books I read and the books I write, the world of Riverside as it has been expanded through Tremontaine remains special. For we have always been there just as we have always been here.

But in there, in that unnamed City, in our queernesses we are also always safe and never sick. We hope you’ll join us there in ambition and adventure.

* * *

Racheline Maltese can fly a plane, sail a boat, and ride a horse, but has no idea how to drive a car. With Erin McRae she writes romance about fame and public life. She is also a producer and writer on Tremontaine, Serial Box Publishing’s adventure of manners, swordplay, and chocolate that’s a prequel to Ellen Kushner’s gay lit classic, Swordspoint. 

Racheline Maltese: Website | Twitter

Tremontaine: Read @ Serial Box