Feeds:
Posts
Comments

March Musings, on the Anniversary of an Adventure

March 8, 2010 by Andrew

March 8th. Unless it’s your birthday or your anniversary, it’s the sort of day that’s likely to pass unmarked and unnoticed, just another Monday ticked off the calendar.

The last time March 8th fell on a Monday was March 8th, 2004. It’s a day that holds special meaning for me because on that day, I started walking North from Amicalola Falls State Park in Georgia. I kept walking for about five months and 2,183 miles, and by the time I finished I had hiked the length of the Appalachian Trail. It’s still, without a doubt, the longest, craziest adventure I’ve ever embarked on. (The trail journal I kept during that time can actually still be found online at http://www.trailjournals.com/einstein. That also happens to be the longest blog/journal I’ve ever kept.)

It was an interesting time in my life. I had just graduated college in December 2003, but I wasn’t ready to get a job. I wanted to do something special, something crazy, and I settled on the Appalchian Trail. It was an odd choice… I had never been much of a backpacker, outside of what I did in Boy Scouts, but it represented an adventure, a change to test myself, not just in terms of the outdoors, but in terms of making friends and meeting people, too. Mostly, it was a chance to do something different, something extraordinary.

Most people say that hiking the Appalachian Trail changes your life. For me, I was never sure if it did or not. After I finished, I came home, found an apartment, later a house, and got a job, which I’ve been at for over five years now. Nothing extraordinary happened, in fact things were pretty mundane… but I think my mindset did change. It just didn’t always manifest itself in an obvious way. It altered the way I looked at the world, subtly but definitely. And it got me hooked on travel, although even that took a few years to fully manifest.

Now, once again, it’s Monday March 8th. I think I’m on the verge of another moment similar to the one that launched me North up the Appalachian Trail, but I’m not yet at the point where I’m ready to post about it in anything but vague terms. But suffice to say, if I follow through with what I’m planning, in a few months this blog is going to get a lot more interesting. As they say on the TV news, stay tuned for details.

Posted in Life, Travel | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

A Question and a Good-Bye

March 3, 2010 by Andrew

Does it count as a rejection if a magazine to which you submitted a story closes down before they get back to you with an answer?

Atom Jack Magazine closed, which is a shame, as I thought they printed some dang good stories (and available for free, even). I was obviously not exactly a regular reader, though, seeing as they announced the closure in December and I didn’t notice until now. (I submitted my story in November… I just thought they were taking a while to respond!)

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

Making Sense of the World, One Story at a Time

February 16, 2010 by Andrew

I haven’t blogged much lately, because I’ve been too busy following Neil Gaiman’s advice, particularly the first 27 seconds:

The stories that I’ve been writing over the past two weeks aren’t the kind that get edited, proofread and sold to a magazine. No, I’ve been writing the messy kind, the stories that I can’t write about on here, because they’re true, and I still like the people involved.

Instead, these are the stories that will get mixed up in my head, whirled around in the creative machinery of my imagination, and as I mull them over trying to figure out why things happened the way they did, maybe I’ll gain a little bit of insight into what makes people tick.

And maybe, in a few years, my mind will spit out a story idea, and I’ll recognize traces of the past two weeks in it. Then again, maybe not.

.

In unrelated news, I’ve been feeling motivated to pick up the novel again, which has lain pretty much untouched since the end of NaNoWriMo. The ending is still firmly embedded in my head, and I desperately want to tell it, so slowly but surely, I’m learning to look past all the flaws in the rough draft, and see the important part: the story that still needs to be told.

It’s sitting there, like a diamond in the rough, waiting to be unearthed, and even if it’s a little dirty and unpolished when I first pull it out of the ground, there’s still a diamond in there. It’s time to get back to work excavating it.

Or, in other words, it’s time to follow not just the first 27 seconds of Neil Gaiman’s advice, but the rest of it too.

Posted in Life, Writing | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Avatar: Dances with Pocahontas in Space?

January 30, 2010 by Andrew

Okay, so I finally got around seeing Avatar in 3D at the local IMAX. (Tickets are still selling out a week in advance– crazy!) By now, anything I say about it will be old news, but I’m still interested in analyzing it from a writer’s perspective. We all know it’s a beautiful movie, with amazing effects, and possibly the first film that seamlessly blends CGI and real action. It is, without a doubt, an incredibly well-made piece of cinema.

It is also, without a doubt, incredibly formulaic. I mean, is there anyone who hasn’t seen this movie before?

-An invading, technologically advanced force is engaged in a war with the natives, who embody the idea of the noble savage.
-The protagonist is one of the soldiers. He gets to know the natives, and falls in love with their culture. Also their women. (Well, usually only one woman.)
-The soldier’s commanding officer is an asshole who has no qualms about wiping out the natives.
-The natives’ fiercest warrior doesn’t trust the protagonist’s motives. He’s probably also in love with the woman.
-The protagonist learns the natives’ ways, and realizes that their culture and way of life need to be protected.
-He joins up with them, and helps them fight off the invaders.

It’s a story as old as time. Avatar wasn’t the first to do it, and I doubt that Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, the Last Samurai, etc. etc. were either. And it doesn’t just stop there, either. A quick search for “Avatar rip off” on Google reveals the following scandals-in-progress, in which James Cameron has apparently ripped off previous more obscure works:

Did James Cameron Rip Off Poul Anderson’s Novella?
Avatargate: The Case For the Prosecution
Did James Cameron Borrow From Soviet Sci-Fi Novels?
1985 Comic Looks a lot Like Avatar

Or, for a more general approach:

10 Movies Avatar Resembles

Do I think James Cameron purposely ripped anybody off when he wrote Avatar? No, of course not. James Cameron is like any other creative person: over the course of his life, he’s been exposed to thousands of potential influences. Some of these are other creative works: books, movies, graphic novels, ancient myths, and art of all kinds. Some are nonfiction: history, news stories, magazine articles, biographies, pictures, or conversations with friends. Some are his own experiences dealing with people, growing up, being married, working, and just living life. All these things reside in his memory, and collide off each other like ricocheting particles in his imagination, until a spark occurs, and he thinks: A ha! I’ve got an idea for a story!

Avatar treads ground that has long been tread by movies and comic books of all sorts, and so lots of similarities can doubtless be found– finding that two separate people have come up with similar names, or the same general story arc (particularly one this cliche) is hardly surprising. It may even be that James Cameron did read some old Soviet sci-fi stuff and a decade later, when coming with Avatar, unconsciously remembered some of it and put it in.

If someone were purposefully ripping off an existing work, chances are good they’d change the names, and muddle stuff around so it wasn’t quite so obvious. But really, that’s not how creative people work. Most of us who even dream of doing this kind of stuff for a living have so many ideas we couldn’t do them all even if we did this full-time; the last thing we need is to go through little-known works of fiction looking for obscure ideas to steal. I mean, seriously here. I think, in any case like this, the benefit of the doubt has to be given to the creator, because otherwise you’d have to do so much research to make sure you were being original that you’d never get anything else done.

Anyway, the point of this post wasn’t to defend James Cameron (as if he really needs “defending” by the author of a blog that about five people read). No, the point was actually to explore why he went with such a tired plot and storyline. I think he could have done a much better job of being original, and indeed, I read one article that suggests that the original draft WAS considerably more original, or at least more in-depth and interesting:

The Avatar That Almost Was

The article goes in-depth into James Cameron’s original scriptment, written after Titanic, and the title of it was “Project 880.” In it, the plot for Avatar is laid out in depth, with a lot of additional detail: there’s much more about Earth and its current state, there’s more about why Jake falls so in love with Pandora, there are several interesting characters who are left out of the final version of “Avatar” (including the Na’Vi guide who Grace is sleeping with, and a corrupt bioethics officer with a nice redemption arc that I think would have added a lot to the movie). Granted, turning that script into a film would probably have made for about a 10-hour movie, so maybe that’s why a lot of this got trimmed. Or is it that such a risk was being taken with the expensive graphics and technology that they decided to stick with a completely cookie-cutter plot that people knew and loved?

I think it was probably a combination of both these things. The Project 880 article makes me hope that now that the technology is proven, James Cameron will be willing to tell a more creative story in the inevitable sequel(s).

There’s no doubt that Avatar is a groundbreaking film. It’s just too bad that all the groundbreaking was in the special effects, and none of it in the story. Hopefully we’ll see a better balance in future Avatar films (and other films which will no doubt license the technology). We shall see.

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments »

Getting my Feet Wet

January 30, 2010 by Andrew

Two weeks ago I dusted off my backpacking gear, which has sat unused for over a year, and went backpacking on Shackleford Banks, a little island on the southern edge of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. It’s only about nine miles long by half a mile wide (if that), but it’s a cool little island.

Among other things, the island is home to a population of about 130 wild horses. No one knows exactly how they got there, although one of the more popular tales is that they’re descended from horses that survived a Spanish shipwreck, back in the 1600s or earlier.

The plan was to get ferried across to the island, hike along the beach a mile or so, then set up camp and spent the rest of the day exploring. That part went pretty much according to plan; it was a beautiful day, and the temperature was in the 50s. Pretty nice, considering just a couple weeks before we had a really bad cold snap that sent temperatures into the twenties and teens. So we set up camp behind the dunes, in a nice flat area of scrub brush, and set off down the beach.

The beach was almost empty, except for a few fishermen casting their lines from shore, and even they disappeared as we walked further down the island. My favorite part of the whole trip may have been the massive number of sea shells that littered the beach; there were piles of them freshly washed up, and more conch shells than I’ve ever seen. Most of those were broken, although even the broken ones were pretty in their own artistic-looking ways. Inland from the beach, separated from the pounding surf by a line of high dunes, little patches of forest and scrub brush were able to grow. We saw plenty of wild horses roaming here, and as it got late and we began to make our way back to camp, there were dolphins jumping twenty or three feet offshore, seemingly entire pods of them moving down the coastline and accompanying us the whole way back.

Things got more interesting during the night. Rain was expected, but we were prepared for it; what we weren’t prepared for was to wake up the next morning and find that a storm was incoming, with possible lightning and wind gusts of up to 45 miles an hour. Needless to say, it was a long morning; about half the tents didn’t stay up in the wind, and of those that did stay up, at least one had to be moved when about two-thirds of our campsite slowly transformed into marshland. Luckily, this was all around 9 or 10 am, so it was light and we were pretty well awake. My tent is an ultralight tent, and was one of the ones that didn’t survive, so I put on warm clothes, my rain gear and went for a walk. Heading inland, we found a nice area behind some trees that was pretty well sheltered from the wind. In retrospect, it would have made a nice campsite.

Finally, the rain stopped, and not long after, the sky cleared. We had a sunny walk back to the ferry point, where we were picked up about noon, and after lunch in Morehead City, headed home…the trip was sandy and wet, but fun.

I like getting away from civilization, and I don’t mean little day hikes into a patch of forest in the middle of the city (although those can be nice, too). I mean backpacking in and setting up camp, someplace where you can actually see the stars at night (we probably would have been able to on this trip, if not for the rain), and where you’re really out away from civilization and amidst nature. It’s a great way to focus your mind on something different and get a release from the mundanity of day-to-day work (which has been threatening to overwhelm me lately… stupid deadlines). I’ll definitely be doing more of this in the near future.

Posted in Travel | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

I’m Dreaming of a White… er… Groundhog’s Day?

January 30, 2010 by Andrew

It’s not often that you get snowed in in North Carolina, but here I am. At least I’ve got Internet, power, and water… and as long as the leftover pizza holds out, I should be okay. At least it gives me an excuse to catch up on the blog.

By the way, if anyone from the Northern climes reads this, and laughs about how six inches of snow = “snowed in”… yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before. I’ll post another pic in March when Spring comes, so you’ll have some green trees to admire well ahead of schedule. ;-)

Posted in Life | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

The Frozen Apple

January 14, 2010 by Andrew

Somehow everytime I visit New York City it ends up being in the dead of winter. I hear the temperature occasionally creeps above freezing there, maybe sometime between March and October, but I don’t recall ever seeing it myself.

Anyway, last weekend I boarded a plane about the size of a compact car, along with my Mom and Aunt and flew to NYC. (Okay, it was a actually a typical puddle jumper for a flight that long, but keep in mind I’m used to flying on 777s). We were visiting my brother, who’s a cast member in the Broadway show Memphis– you can see him second from the right in the Memphis poster below. (Click on it for a bigger version.)


Naturally, the main attraction was to go see my brother on Broadway, so we ended up seeing the show twice. The story takes place in the city of Memphis (duh), in the 1950s. The main characters are a white radio DJ named Huey Calhoun, and a black singer named Felicia Farrell. Huey’s goal is to get her on the mainstream radio (not an easy task in the South in the fifties), so needless to say much of the show is about the racism that was so prevalent back then. But it’s also a love story, and maybe even a cautionary tale about the dangers of fame and pride.

I was very impressed with it– and I don’t just say that because of the family connection. I went in expecting a fairly typical musical with a bunch of songs done all 50’s style (which I’ve never been particularly fond of, to be honest). But I was pleasantly surprised– the musical numbers were excellent (I’ve pretty much had the soundtrack playing on repeat since getting home), the actors were incredible (all of them, not just my brother) and the writing was really good too.

Of course, I always analyze everything from a writer’s perspective… I can’t help it. I look at the characters, setting, and plot, even in a work where the narrative is secondary– like a musical, or a very visually-oriented movie (I’ve been meaning to write a post on the movie Avatar). In the case of Memphis, all three were very strong, particularly the characters, who were heroic, brave, and also clearly flawed, even as you rooted for them. The plot had enough twists to keep me interested, and it ended in a way that surprised me, which is always good.

Interestingly, there’s a kernel of truth to the story– aside from the whole setting, which is obviously based on the way things were, the writers probably had a man named Dewey Phillips in the back of their mind as they were creating Huey Calhoun. Among other things, he was the first radio DJ to broadcast Elvis Presley, and he had to prove Elvis was white to his radio audience by asking which high school he went to. (In the musical, a bigshot radio boss told Huey to prove his race on the radio in the same way.) There are other parallels to explore, but I won’t go into too much depth… don’t want to give spoilers.

If you find yourself in NYC anytime soon, go see Memphis. Or if you can’t, be sure to go see the show when it eventually starts touring, which it definitely will.

Posted in Travel | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Novel Status Update: Does Mulling Things Over Count as “Work”?

January 3, 2010 by Andrew

Since NaNoWriMo ended, I’ve actually gotten a fair bit of writing done… unfortunately, very little of it has been on my novel. Instead, I’ve been following my muse on little flights of fancy, writing a few short stories that are too far off the weirdness scale to do much with. They’ve been fun to write, at least.

I’ve also been letting my subconscious mull over various ideas for the novel, letting them simmer, occasionally poking them with a fork and turning them over. I suppose this doesn’t really count as “working” on it, but I’ve had a few moments of inspiration, mainly ideas on how to improve the characters and setting.

When I submitted the prologue to my writing group, most people were in agreement that they weren’t able to identify with the main character. This is partly because of how I like to begin stories– fast action sequences that sort of punch the reader in the face and say, “welcome to my world.” It’s probably a result of watching too many James Bond movies. Nevertheless, that’s how this prologue operates, and while I try to mix it with character development and world building, it’s still, at its heart, a fast and somewhat bloody action sequence.

Another part of the problem is that I haven’t been able to nail down the voice of the main character. She’s an assassin, and I’ve had difficulty reconciling her hard-as-nails “warrior” side with her softer, more emotional side, which she needs in order to connect with other characters. So one “aha” moment I had basically involved letting my struggles as an author be reflected in the character. If I’m having difficulty defining her, maybe it’s because she’s having difficulty defining herself. It’s definitely an idea I want to explore; it may also mean that I set aside revising existing chapters and just work on new chapters, so I can practice and experiment more with her voice.

Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

Happy New Year and Decade

January 2, 2010 by Andrew

Happy New Year, everyone!

There are a lot of unwritten stories to be told in the upcoming year and decade, both on paper in real life. I always find it exciting to reflect on the future, to realize that from here, our lives really are unwritten stories, and we can take them anywhere we choose. That’s not to say it’s easy; consciously changing your own destiny often requires a supreme act of willpower. But I do believe that it’s possible.

The title of this blog is “Off the Written Path”, and this is part of what I mean by it. It’s up to each of us to write the story of our lives; the past may already be written, but the future is not. Where you take it from here is up to you.

A new decade is upon us. May you write many interesting stories, and here’s wishing you plenty of happy endings.

Posted in Life | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

Fun With Unused Vacation Time

December 28, 2009 by Andrew

I hope everyone had/is having a good Christmas Break. If you’re in the latter category, I fart in your general direction.

Actually… I can’t complain. Despite my Australia trip earlier this year, I had a lot of vacation time leftover at work, so I took the entire week of Christmas off. I’m just bitter today; having to go back to work after a long break does that to me.

It was a fun break from work, although they always seem too short in retrospect. I didn’t get as much writing done as I had hoped, but that’s mainly because I took a road trip instead. I knew I would have to be back in town for Christmas, but I still had a few days of my own to play with, so I loaded plenty of music onto my new Droid and hit the road. This wasn’t just a spontaneous, random trip: the idea had been actually bouncing around in my head for a few weeks. And I didn’t drive just anywhere; I had a specific destination in mind, namely, the Outer Banks.

For those of you not familiar with North Carolina geography, the Outer Banks are a series of barrier islands that run along the coast. You can access them either via ferry or road bridge (although certain sections, like Ocracoke Island, are only accessible via ferry).

I knew it would be cold, windy, and out of season– the Outer Banks are very much a tourist economy, and the more remote sections pretty much shut down during the winter. But the probable lack of tourists appealed to me, and besides, I had an additional motive for going. The ocean plays a fairly large role in a few key scenes in my novel, and I wanted to refresh my memory of what it was like.

Cape Hatteras National SeashoreDespite living in a coastal state, I haven’t actually made it out to the ocean since a trip to Florida in 2006. I wanted to get re-acquainted with the smell of it, the sound of the waves, the taste of salt in the air, the feel of the sand between my toes… maybe not the feel of the water, though. That would be pretty cold.

I also needed to write a couple poems to use as song lyrics; in one of the scenes, a character from an oceangoing culture sings some songs around a campfire, and in my mind, it’s a great moment that connects the emotions of people from two very disparate cultures. But I haven’t actually written any poetry in years, and it doesn’t flow easily for me. Nevertheless, I hoped that by actually being at the ocean, I could get the ol’ brain cells firing.

It sort of worked. I jotted down occasional bits of imagery or description that came to me; I didn’t get any full poems written, but at least I have some starting points.

I also realized that part of the prologue, which I’m currently editing, rests on an invalid assumption. See, I had this image in my mind of the waves crashing one at a time. Wave crash. Silence. Wave crash. Silence. That repeating sequence of noise and silence was a key part of the scene, but when I stood on the beach, listening to the waves, I remembered that, in reality… the noise is pretty constant. Sure, you can pick out the sound of individual waves if you’re right by the water, but even then it’s really just a constant roar of water, punctuated at irregular intervals by crashing waves.

It’s amazing the sort of things that can slip your mind during the carefree crazy days of NaNoWriMo.

Other than that, I mainly just spent a couple days exploring. I spent the night in an oceanfront hotel that was so quiet I startled the desk clerk, who must have jumped a foot out of her chair when I walked in. After that, it took her a few minutes to figure out which buildings had heat and which didn’t, and she spent several minutes explaining how all the restaurants were closed, except for one greasy pizza and seafood joint. On the bright side, I did find a nice little diner for breakfast that did awesome pancakes.

Cape Hatteras LighthouseThe next morning I visited the iconic Cape Hatteras lighthouse, and from the nearby beach I could see a massive pod of dolphins swimming maybe fifty feet offshore. There were also quite a few crazy surfers catching waves (at least they had wetsuits). After that, I hopped the ferry to Ocracoke Island, found some hiking trails, and went for a walk on a deserted beach. It was fun, albeit cold and windy, and even though I didn’t get much writing done, I don’t regret having a little adventure instead. If you want to see the full set of pics from it, click here. (The Droid’s camera has gotten a bad rap, but I was fairly pleased with it.)

Now that I’m back, and Christmas is over, it’s time to get writing again. More on that in my next post.

Posted in Life, Travel, Writing | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

Older Posts »