I am rereading Nicholas Nickleby, and I think that it is very close to being my favorite of all Dicken’s  books. Tale of Two cities and The Pickwick Papers are at about the same level all jostling for top place. It’s because Nicholas is so assertive, clever, fast, kind, and sometimes truly wild. He’s a sort of action hero, written by a master. Several blog posts ago I wrote about re-reading Great Expectations and finding to my astonishment that I didn’t really like it any more. Well, I didn’t like Pip, and realized that in my first reading I had merely tolerated him for the sake of the great minor characters

When assaulted or those he loves are assaulted NN replies in kind, In any way he can, as fast as he can, as long as he can. So with the arrangements of a very good plot NN becomes a fast rocket through the entanglements of money and injustice and cruelty to the helpless. This makes him a hero figure. Therefore he is good to read about, and also, therefore, he is intelligent.

I wish I could find the article about Stupid Plots. At any rate, the upshot of it was, a Stupid Plot requires really stupid characters that could have solved the whole problem in a day if they hadn’t been so stupid. A moderately intelligent person could have figured their way out of the entanglements of  a Stupid Plot in even less than a day. Hours.

So writers who are poor at plots must necessarily have really dense characters and we tire of reading about really dense characters. Idiot, just get in the car and go to your friend’s house and hide in the bushes and find out what’s really happening. But nooooooo. Stupidman has to stare stupidly at a text message, call up somebody else, cry out, ‘Can there really be a killer on the loose near Tom’s house?’ And then call up the police and when the police brush him off, then check the FBI wanted files on line and then call up Susan and say ‘Susan, do you think Tom is having a psychotic episode?’ and on and on.

NN constantly surprises us with this assertiveness, his rightness. When he is with an actor’s troupe, and another actor, a bully, threatens NN and his friend the poor retarded little Smike, NN walks up to the bully and knocks him down. So that took care of that. On to other problems.

so I am enjoying it very much.

http://woodwardonwords.blogspot.com/

This is the link to my friend Caroline Woodward’s blog on writing; she and husband Jeff are lighthouse keepers off the cost of British Columbia and Jeff got the most incredible pictures of a bald eagle capturing a large, dark bird on the sea surface and then actually rowing. rowing I say, with its wings in order to drag its prey back to shore. I copied his shots and now I have lost them. They are in this computer somewhere, rowing away. Will try again.

So there they are, inexpertly done. Good way to find Woody’s writing and Jeff’s photos is just use Google or Bing images and type in her name. you get Jeff’s pictures as an extra added bonus.  A visit to their light station was one of the inspirations for Lighthouse Island. Back to my irish tin whistle practice. I sit on the front porch or pace up and down whistling away and the dog and the cat run for cover. Pam Crane and I are doing the intro to our Civil War Songs performance, she’s on the Irish tambor and me on whistle doing ‘Come To The Bower’, so look out Celtic Chieftans!

This was in north Texas during our last trip. The thing about this picture is that, before we left, June broke her wrist and didn’t know it. The dr. x-rayed it and said it was just a sprain. So we all take off for the Chism ranch up near Nocona and here is June saddling up with a wrist broken in three places. Not even wearing a brace.

When we got back June said her wrist it hurt so badly she went to a bone specialist and she x-rayed it again and…guess what. What with that and a herniated disc June can’t ride for the next month.

Great e-mail; from the Lighthouse Persons up in British Columbia, Jeff got the most amazing shots of an eagle attacking another bird of some kind on the sea surface, and then to get his prey back to the shore or the perching place where he/she could eat it, the eagles was actually ROWING with its wings through the waves! the pictures are astounding. Hope to link to it later.

It’s amazing because a.) it’s so good and b.) it got written.

The major character is inventive, physically strong, determined to stay alive and never gives up. He is funny and self-deprecating and smart. There are no interior monologues, or very few. No ruminating, depressive sadnesses, passive weeps, fixed gaze on unclean accumulations and/or stuff, long dull hopeless hours regretting things, horrible injuries that ruin one’s day and so on. It is refreshing as citrus. This astronaut is not defenseless before the might of foreign planets or objects. The plot is elementary; Mars v. Nerd.

It is a Robinson Crusoe story but very technical and for once I didn’t mind all the technical writing. The language is a little too breezy with nerd language and the end is just a bit improbable but I love writers who avoid clichés even if their orbit sends them banging into another one. Who knew the Martian atmosphere was nearly a vacuum? I thought it had some kind of an atmosphere, maybe nitrogen and something else unbreathable but it has about zero. Therefore sound does not carry. He loses his communication with earth. But earth (NASA) can see him from their satellite cameras so he Morse-codes things out with rocks, lumping around like the Michelin man in his EVA suit. Long and short rocks, I assume. He manages to raise potatoes. The way he makes water is hair-raising and explosive. He lives in a great tent-like thing called The Hab. They have to come and get him. He has to travel 3200 kilometers (about 1700 miles) across Mars to the pickup place in a rover, dragging his breathing equipment and food and water with him. Wagons Ho. Trust me, you will love it.

It started out as a self-published e-book (free) and then sold so many he was picked up by a major publisher. He has a movie option and I hope they make it. I have two options out and they never made either book into a movie. So it goes.

A strong protagonist like this can pick up the narrative and the entire story-line and carry it like a backpack without faltering.

And so I have been reminded that I need the Author’s Photograph here on the blog — me being an author. As well as riding around the vast spaces of Texas and so here are pictures of me on the Enemy women tour most of which I did by train, all over the United States. Top, reading in Tennessee with an author from East Tennessee who said ‘boooks’ for ‘books’ but then again I say ‘roof’ as if it were pronounced ‘roef’ as opposed to ‘rooof’. Bottom is cold, cold Minneapolis but it was a fabulous hotel. A big hotel. Behind me and beyond the plate glass is Minneapolis. What a place.

So if I have pictures of myself writing or playing the Irish Tin Whistle, which I am at present teaching myself, I will post those as well, it’s just that April and June have great I-phones and I ride with them and they take pictures.

Continuing work on the action novels. Years ago when I gave writing seminars or taught writing classes I asked the students to try an experiment — write nothing but action, I called it action-to-action. No dialogue, few tags. NO INTERIOR MONOLOGUES. Period. People who fell into the trap of interior monologues would be encased in detergent and shot down the laundry chute if I could find one. It is a very useful technique to learn. Few know how to do it, all too few.

But is it ever fun.

Yours truly PJ

Fun on YouTube, wandering about the online video planet. My interest has been searching out new sci-fi short films, and there have been some great discoveries. the very best is Stop, reviewed below. Most are not much more than seven or eight minutes long and so the plotting has to be very good indeed, if there is a story. In some, there’s not much story, but great visuals.  Above: from The Gift, reviewed below.

Nora —Go see it. It’s visually terrific and there’s the tiniest plot but tiny or not, it works. It works on contrasts — prim Nora the robot cleaning ‘droid and this creature on the deserted planet. The creature is male, dwarvish, bronze-colored, sensual, limber. So primness meets sexy and slightly crazy.

Seed — intriguing. So much unsaid. Again visually it is splendid.

Love like the aliens —this knocks me out. There should be a name for the visual style, or its stylishness, perhaps near-comicbook clarity, a graphic style, but very rich, drifting, dreamy. Something underwater about it. Very fast action in sharp cuts, then slow, slow, drifting. If you want to be thrown out of a flaming spaceship and rescued by an angel along with great music, this is one for you. Go.

As in pic above The Gift— is just about the top of the list for me, it is gripping. From Russia with weirdness. Straightforward shooting, no tricks, no stylishness. A robotic butler is somehow just there — the rest of the cityscape is in no way futuristic. A cold and gritty Moscow. It has a strong plot — a revenge plot. A guy who seems to be a survivor of the Gulag arrives at the wealthy apartment of somebody from the privileged nomenklatura and hands him a gift. Needs to be seen several times.

Project Shell— is okay. So much depends on the actors in the non-graphic shorts. The very worst is when some actress or voice animation actress has a stupid Valley Girl accent, it is beyond bad.  “Alpha you are now approaching Planet Bugglefutz, prepare retro rockets” or some such, said in that flattened, baby cute voice.

Anyway Shell is okay, sort of predictable, but interesting.

Closer — is good but you have to stick with it. Starts out with lots of CGI interstellar warfare, lumpy space battleships (lumpy is now very fashionable) blasting away at each other, but it deals with heroism, when one commander, a very attractive blonde woman lands on earth and dragoons a young couple making out in a park into the war, on the side of all that is right and good. The idea of being ‘A hero’ hits the young man and he likes it and so is. Loved it.

At the very top is Stop— is so strange and so good it is almost beyond description. I actually got physical chills crawling up my back watching this. It was shot with an old Bell&Howell film camera. No kidding. There is only one actor, and only one CGI effect and I am not even sure it is CGI or just some old ancient trick of superimposition of a ghost image. Just shows you what it means when something is just plain ‘well done’. Shot in an ordinary common landscape of some park in the east (US).

The one actor is somebody who films in the park and suddenly realizes he has lost 7 or 8 minutes of his life. It’s gone. He desperately tries to find out why, how. See it!!!

Some are fairly plotless but there is always, always something of a plot even in a wordless, personless short like Albiogenesis.

And sometimes the enthusiasm does indeed save the film, as in Losses, which is not sci-fi but just a short action film, I think 11 minutes. It uses a plot cliché but the action is wonderful and non-stop and the good guy wins. And you know they had an enormously good time doing it. Cost them about $500. And they are very good at angles, close-ups, lighting, tight cutting in the action scenes.

If you want to laugh for several minutes at a time, after a frustrating or gloomy day, go to the Pixar short, ‘Lifted’. It is sort of kind of more or less sci-fi.

More later as soon as I get my picture management program figured out…

We went to Big Bend again, third year, great trip, no mishaps. Seven hours on the road from utopia to the house we always rent ten miles north of Study Butte. Went up the Blue Creek trail (above) and a new trail on the Tornillo River, which was flat and sandy and fun. A cold wind.

Re-reading the Odyssey and getting a new perspective as always with the classics. Every time you re-read them it is new. Never noticed how much dialogue and personal interaction there is. Amazing that anyone could memorize the whole thing. So rich, so beautiful.

  That’s my honeysuckle in the last ice storm. In the meantime, the San Antonio symphony at the new Tobin center, more cold weather, a lot of reading, a lot of internet searching for good book blogs and singing. Riding this Wednesday, some of us going up to the Mill Creek area. Read Howey’s Sand which was good except for the prostitute mother, which I found not a believable plot device, and am also reading The Black Sheep, a history of the Marine fighter squadron in the Solomon Islands, WW2, led by Pappy Boyington.

Could any of us ever live through anything like that again, and still keep fighting? This question comes up when reading any WW2 history. They just seem like a different subspecies of homo sapiens sapiens. Their photographs look different; they were thinner and they looked back at the camera lens in a different way. They knew more. Their clothes were stronger cloth and thicker. Their hair was different.

Greg ‘Pappy’ Boyington was stopped by his flight controller one morning as he scrambled out of his tent for a dawn patrol. Boyington was running across the coral-based airstrip on one of the Solomons. His flight controller pointed out he didn’t have any shoes on. Boyington said, ‘I can fly an airplane with no shoes’. (He was hungover, badly) and the flight controller said. ‘Yes, but you’ll need them if you go down’.

I suppose everybody falls behind on their posts at this time of year. Include me. Singing with the Methodist choir, the bluegrass group, the Christmas all-choir cantata, and finally tomorrow Christmas eve services. There’s always a need for an alto. The cantata was a terrific success, and then the flash mob all over this little town from the restaurant to the bank was great fun.