Month: December 2005

What to Spec?

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With so few comedies on the air, what sitcom should an aspiring writer spec as a sample of his or her talent? Veteran comedy writer/producer Ken Levine tackles that question this weekend on his blog.

Select a
current show you like and think you know the best. “Current” is the key word
here. Once a show is cancelled the shelf life for your spec is about six months.
So don’t start that ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT you’ve been developing. And I hope you
didn’t pour a lot of time and effort into a spec KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL. When
RAYMOND went off the air everyone was sad but show runners. No more reading
fifty RAYMONDS a day when trying to staff! And for that same reason, please let
this be WILL & GRACE’S last year! The good news is if you’ve got a spec
FRASIER you can just change the names and send it out as an OUT OF PRACTICE. And
of course you never have to worry with a SIMPSONS because they will go on making
new episodes forever…

…Unfortunately, there are not a lot of great shows out there at the moment. What
I think we’ll see this year is everybody writing a MY NAME IS EARL. It’s clearly
the best of the new crop. The only caution I give you is that EVERYBODY will be
writing one. If that doesn’t concern you (or you’ve written it already) I say go
for it. If it does then some suitable alternates might be SCRUBS, TWO AND A HALF
MEN, EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS, or HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER (a far cry from the CHEERS,
TAXI, MASH, COSBY days).

Living on the Border Between Mundane and Surreal

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No, we’re not talking about TJ HOOKER masturbation fanfic, but the Chicago Tribune’s rave review of my brother Tod’s new short story collection SIMPLIFY.

Tod Goldberg’s collection, "Simplify," contradicts its title: Goldberg
complicates things, in brilliant and moving ways, in stories that live along
the border between the mundane and the surreal.

A young married couple
meet Jesus and the devil every holiday season (Jesus is a coffee drinker, the
devil likes German beer), and their lives are both blessed and cursed. A
dys lexic creates an all-encompassing alphabet, a distinct symbol for every
person and event in his world, evoking the language of a book in
a Borgesian infinite library. A picture of Elvis Presley bleeds, making
its owner a reluctant celebrity.

Goldberg’s prose is deceptively smooth,
like a vanilla milkshake spiked with grain alcohol, and his ideas
are always made more complex and engaging by the offbeat angles his
stories take.

“t3h ebil fanficcers”

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There was an interesting comment that somebody calling himself  Inside Fandom left in the "Masturbation" post. I didn’t write it, and I don’t know who did, but I didn’t want it  to get lost in the clutter:

"t3h ebil fanficcers"

Fanspeak. Sort of like jive, but with wurz speling. In fandom communities the
presumption is that anybody who isn’t really a fan – they actually refer to it
as ‘passing’ – can possibly get it, when they say ‘get it’ they mean ‘fandom in
general’.

In other words, youse either with us or you don’t get it. Sorta like what we
used to tell our parents when we were teenagers and they wanted to know the
names of the kids we were ‘hanging’ with, and what funny smell emanated from our
clothes, or how pretty the plant with five leaves growing on our windowsills was
and how nice we’d taken an interest in horticulture.

At some point, the childish stuff ends. That happens when we grow up. When we
just get older and we don’t grow up, we look for fanfic about TV characters
masturbating so that we can masturbate to it. We continue to have the hots for
David Cassidy in all his 15 year old glory on the Partridge Family. We have
intense and heated arguments with others over the characterizations of cartoon
characters.

We keep doing that even after we get degrees and jobs and look perfectly
normal to the outside world. Whenever somebody questions our proclivity to
invade the sexual privacy of real people, or why we like to write fanfiction
about children having sex, we trot out the degrees and the jobs and we call what
we do ‘scholarship’ and wonder what sort of pervert the person questioning the
action is. That’s called transference.

The most intense discussion of what happens here on Mr. Goldberg’s blog takes
place in LiveJournal land in threads that are largely protected.

Authors, scholars, whoever, do not make any statements here because who wants
their publisher or tenure committee to know that they used to write, and maybe
still do write, lies about real people’s sex lives. Heaven forfend they know we
get off on writing stories about underage people having sex. How about it coming
out that the author of that hot new fantasy series still gets off on Mutant
Ninja Turtles slashfic and spends her off hours making fun of people on Fandom
Wank under an assumed name then TALKS about it on the journal she keeps under
her real name?

There are academic papers to be had in all of this, but the only ones taking
it seriously are the ones with a vested interest in making it appear harmless.

This rings true to me. How about you? And I may be revealing my vast ignorance (which I do here daily) and the limitations of my well-thumbed edition of Websters Dictionary, but is there really such a word as "forfend?" Is there a reason why the "fen" don’t use the word forbid?

Talk About Taking Your Role Too Seriously…

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VertbrancatoapLillo Brancato Jr.,  an actor who played a wanna-be mobster on THE SORPANOS, has been arrested for the murder of an off-duty New York cop. It seems Brancato was as doomed in real-life as he was on the show — the moron and a buddy broke into a vacant house that was right next door to a cop’s home. The cop caught them, sparking a shoot-out. The officer was killed and both Brancato and his cohort were shot multiple times but survived, albeit in critical condition:

Officer Daniel Enchautegui, 28, collapsed in the driveway of his Bronx home
and died shortly afterward.

The wounded suspects were quickly captured. Investigators identified one as
Lillo Brancato Jr., an actor who got his break in the Robert De Niro-directed
film "A Bronx Tale" in 1993, and played doomed mob wannabe Matt Bevilacqua
during the 1999-2000 season of "The Sopranos."

He’s Back!

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078601709001_sclzzzzzzz_There are only a few living authors of western literature who can truly be called legends in the field — Richard Wheeler is one of them. He started a fascinating blog some time ago, then abandoned it, offering his views on writing and publishing on Ed Gorman’s blog and in comments here. But now he’s back with a blog of his own. Whether you read westerns of not, I highly recommend you put him on your blogroll for his valuable insights, candid opinions, and informed take on the biz (he was an editor before he became a novelist, so he knows both sides of the biz)

Today, in a discussion of Gary Svee’s book SANCTUARY, he blames publishers with a deeply-held, anachronistic view of westerns for the demise of the genre in print:

In the last several decades, western fiction has been forced into a procrustean
bed by New York’s mass-market publishers. And now almost all the western lines
are defunct as a result.

The idea, apparently, was to have a "line" of
books with similar classical covers and contents, and this would surely reach
the vast market of western readers pining for stories with 1940s titles that
employ words like "vengeance" and "showdown." This notion had the power of
religious conviction in New York, and still does even though most western lines
have gone to heaven, or hell as the case may be.

Wheeler’s new book FIRE IN THE HOLE is saddled with one of those traditional western covers…which bares no relation to the actual story. The hero isn’t a U.S. Marshal, he’s a detective posing as a vermin exterminator in a filthy, Montana mining camp. Not exactly your typical western hero or setting.  All you have to do is read the opening chapter and you’ll be hooked.

Masturbation!

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"MarytheFan"  defends her search for masturbation fanfic and is applauded, in later comments on her blog, for being a classy gal ("Just wanted to say that I fangirl you madly at the class you’re showing").  Anyway, MarytheFan writes, in part:

I have zero interest in a discussion with someone who functions on the
middle-school level that equates masturbation with something stupid and pathetic
that only losers do because they can’t get anything better, rather than as one
perfectly valid, healthy and fun sexual option in a smorgasboard of sexual
options. Maybe if my actual masturbatory experiences had consisted solely of
sad, pathetic situations in which I was a loser who was only masturbating
because I couldn’t get anything better, rather than situations in which I was
enjoying my own body because holy good god, that felt good, I’d think it
was a pathetic and loser activity. Guess what? You also don’t go blind or have
hair grow on your palms, in case anyone out there was still functioning
furtively in the shadow of those old myths. Well, unless you poke yourself in
the eye, I suppose, in which case, wow. Bendy, aren’t you?

I have no problem with masturbation, Mary. It’s healthy, feels good, and
keeps Cinemax in business. What I find pathetic are people who
masturbate over fanfiction that portrays TV and movie
characters masturbating, and the people who write fanfiction about fictional characters masturbating, and people who would announce to the world that they are
searching for fanfiction about TV and movie characters  masturbating that they can
masturbate to.

This would also probably be a good time to, once again, mention Lindsay Lohan’s nipples.

Potter Pedophilia

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Fanficcers think authors should be flattered by their work. Using their inane logic, JK Rowling should be overjoyed by "We Are the Women Who  Love The Boys of Harry Potter," a LiveJournal community "created for the sole purpose of discussing the beauty of the Harry Potter boys."

If
you are of legal age (18 years old or more) and feel more than just a
little attraction to the lovely boys of the Wizarding World, then
WELCOME! 😀 You will find your kind here.

We do conceed that
this community does show that we are, to some small extent, pedophiles.
Well you would be too, if you just looked at the boys! 🙂 We just
enjoy beautiful things. We can’t help that! 😀

Between Real Person Slash, DUE SOUTH Masturbation stories, and Harry Potter Pedophilia, what isn’t there to love about fanfic?

(Thanks to "Maggie Thatcher," who provided the link in her comments on my Wank Fic post)