Idol 2014: It's... On, and Stuff

I’ve been meaning to write about the new season of American Idol, not because I want to praise or condemn it, but because I still have a few friends that watch it and sooner or later they’ll click over here and go, “Hey, what does that joker think of Idol?  He hasn’t said yet.”

 

The correct answer is that I think of Idol almost not at all.  I bought the Phillip Phillps record two years ago, and then last year I bought a Kelly Clarkson compilation because I’m too forgetful to go on iTunes and remember what songs my wife likes.

 

By the way, the answer is “People Like Us.”  There are a few others that she goes between liking and tolerating, but even on Kelly’s “best” collection, there are songs she feels compelled to skip.  That’s… that’s not really much of a recommendation of an artist, I guess.

 

When it comes down to it, about the only thing I do care about is the fact that I’m so, so, so sick of every journalist trying to figure out if this season is going to “save” Idol.

 

I’m bothered by this because Idol doesn’t actually need to be saved. 

 

The argument goes, if you haven’t heard it, that the ratings are down.  But the truth is, the ratings are down everywhere. 

 

There are probably ten, maybe twenty big hits left on the various networks now, and most of them are bleeding off fans, season by season.

 

Idol is on season 13 now, and last Thursday, up against The Big Bang Theory, one of a handful of sure things, Idol had eleven and a half million viewers.

 

On Wednesday, up against weaker competition, the show does even better.

 

Now, there are other complications in there, I suppose.  The judges are pulling in millions, I’m sure there are licensing fees, and this, that, and the other thing, but…

 

As I noted last year, we’re talking about 50 hours of programming.  They’d have to produce four sitcoms, or two dramas, to fill the hole if Idol went away.

 

Considering the fact that Fox is now experimenting with skipping pilot season AND is slowly moving to the cable method of 13 episode seasons, I am 99.9% sure that Idol will make it to year 14, and roughly 90% sure it’ll hit year 15. 

 

(Heck, I’ll take 75% sure on year 20.  Fifty hours of programming is a MASSIVE amount of programming.)

 

Okay, moving on.

 

With all that said, it’s clear that the producers have been listening (To me?  Sure.  Why not?) and they have been making an effort to make the entire show suck less.

 

By this I mean: They got rid of the judges who seem incapable of judging.  Mostly.  J-Lo seems to have some kind of an issue with letting people who might be okay go through to Hollywood.  I guess making people happy also makes for more fun TV, but all of those people are, inevitably, scrap-heaped the minute they get to Hollywood.

 

It would be much better to have 100 really great auditions move on than have 220 great-to-meh people move on.

 

(Of course, then they might have trouble filling those 50 hours…)

 

But the number of terrible auditions has been cut way down, which saves on most (though not all) of the auditions designed to mock actual people with feelings.

 

And the judges are also giving really good, honest advice.  People aren’t always listening, granted, but the judges are trying, instead of talking in fake British accents and pointing and laughing.

 

And as I said on Twitter a few times, I would love to see Harry Connick Jr. and Ben Folds come together and produce a talk/music show. 

 

What do I think of the talent?

 

Well, here’s my final issue with all these types of shows: I just don’t care about backstory.

 

I was about to type that this wasn’t entirely true, but you know what?  It is!

 

Every year we spend HOURS hashing and rehashing the history of these people.  They show film clips week after week detailing the heartbreaking/interesting folks we’re looking at, but really, who cares?

 

It’s supposed to be a singing competition.  You know what I want to see?  Singing!  Instead, over the course of two hours, I get at most 2 minutes of 12 songs.  That’s 24 minutes.  Meanwhile, I’m also skipping over 36 minutes of commercials.  There are 12 more minutes of Coke ads than there are of songs.

 

And that’s an at best scenario. 

 

Of course, we haven’t gotten to the performances yet, so maybe they’ll cut out some of backstory and give us more music.

 

To follow the narrative of the journalists who follow this kind of thing, I don’t think there’s any saving of Idol.

 

I don’t think there’s any way to go back to the big-ratings heyday.  I think this next year will find a few less Idol concerts. 

 

What I think is possible at this point is maintaining what they’ve got, which is a hit show that fills 50 hours a week.  And as long as they keep pleasant people in the seats and keep things fun, Idol will be around for a long time to come.

 

Oh, and one minor aside: When the singers come in with songs they wrote?  And those songs are good?  Why is NO ONE bringing them down to the studio, cutting those songs during Hollywood week, and getting them up on iTunes?  Every year I hear at least two originals I really want to own, but can’t and never will because these people vanish into obscurity.

 

Do these people not like making money?

Brendan Halpin, John Green, And Cancer

The other day, one of my favorite authors, Brendan Halpin, took a machete to the trailer for The Fault In our Stars.

 

I’ll let you read his comments here:

 

http://tinyurl.com/k8elg4p

 

Okay.

 

I’m also going to link you to the trailer itself, which is here:

 

http://tinyurl.com/k8elg4p

 

Okay.

 

I had wanted to write a response directly to Brandon, and there are a lot of ways I could have done it.  I could have addressed him directly on Facebook, or Tweeted at him, or even said something on his blog.

 

But this is actually something I’ve been meaning to talk about for some time, so I’ll do it here and link at him later.

 

To summarize his position as I see it, The Fault in Our Stars looks like a movie about two people with magical, non-painful cancer that teaches them valuable life lessons also about love.  To take a quote from Brendan:

 

“It's not pretty. It's not romantic. You do not gain any beautiful wisdom from it.  Oh yeah, and cancer makes you hideous and wrecks your life before it kills you.”

 

Brendan’s wife died of cancer (much of the story is related in his amazing and heartrending memoir, “It Takes a Worried Man”) and it’s easy to see where this rage comes from.

 

Okay, so here I need to back up the train to two different locations:

 

The First Location:

 

Last year, I got to watch two very dear friends die of cancer.  And Brendan is not wrong.

 

Both my friends died bad deaths, and they’ve both left behind a lot of horrible emotional devastation.  There are huge holes where those people belong, not just in their families, not just in their friends, but in their communities.

 

In the trailer of the movie, the girl with cancer notes that she feels like a grenade, but I think this is not a very accurate description.  Watching someone die, especially when they die so much younger than they should, is more like watching them fall apart and turn into landmines.

 

You literally never know when you’re going to step on one, and feel all of the pain of that loss all over again.  It can happen weeks, months, years, decades after it happens.

 

The Second Location:

 

Two summers ago, I read The Fault in Our Stars, because I had two students that love to read, and both of them read it and loved it.

 

At the time, I had one friend who had cancer, and who I knew was going to die from it, and I read it anyway.

 

And here’s my capsule review, with the caveat that I read it more than a year and a half ago.

 

It was a good book.

 

I realize that right now John Green is the hot thing and this book is the hot thing, and people are going crazy for it, and I’m juuust starting to see the backlash as new readers are coming to it who don’t get what all the fuss is about.

 

This is not that backlash.  I enjoyed the book enough that I eventually worked my way through all of John Green’s books, and my review of Fault is pretty much the same review of all of his books.

 

They’re quirky indie movies.

 

If you liked the movie Garden State and/or enjoyed John Hughes in his teen phase, you will probably like John Green’s work.  I don’t mean this as a knock, exactly, but Green has definitely put himself into a niche of quirky teen fiction, and he appears to be happy there.

 

But what we’re talking about here isn’t quirk, what we’re talking about is whether or not “The Fault In Our Stars” is a fair representation of the horrors of cancer.

 

Which of course means we need to have two more flashbacks.

 

For the first, we need to go back to 1970, with a book and movie called “Love Story.”  The novel was a huge hit, and the movie was a HUGE hit, to the point where it became part of the world’s vernacular.

 

If you’ve ever hear the phrase:

 

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

 

That’s from “Love Story.” 

 

The other famous line that doesn’t get as much play:

 

“What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Mozart and Bach? The Beatles? And me?”

 

Okay, so, let’s talk about that movie for a while.  It’s a pretty basic boy-meets-girl thing.  Boy meets girl, boy marries girl and father cuts him off because she’s beneath him.  Girl gets very sick (in the movie they don’t say why, though Wikipedia tells me that in the novel it’s leukemia) and the girl dies.

 

“Love Story” is a perfect example of what Halpin is talking about with the “Fault” trailer, as it was absolutely designed to cause “feels,” and the leukemia itself has nothing to do with reality.  The “girl” in the equation is supposedly dying, but appears that she might have perhaps a bad cold.

 

But that’s the thing – the film was not designed to be a careful examination of the devastation that can be caused by dying young.  It was designed to show that love is powerful and wonderful and worth it, even if it ends horribly. 

 

It’s called “Love Story,” and not, “Cancer Story,” for a reason.

 

And the thing of it is, it worked, as far as catharsis material went.  The producer of the film tells stories about men bringing women to the movie specifically to cause “feels” which put them in the mood to do something “life-affirming” later. 

 

If you know what I mean and I think that you do.

 

One more quick side journey, and then back to “Love Story.”

 

When “Titanic” came out, no one knew that it would be a massive hit.  People saw that movie, which is three hours long, multiple times.  When it came out on video, people were buying three copies (someone researched this): one to keep, one to loan out, and one to give as a gift.

 

And there were stories about how women would actually have gatherings where they would sit and listen to the soundtrack and cry, as a form of emotional release.

 

Which… if it works for you, then, great.

 

And this is the spot where I start tying the threads together.

 

Ultimately, both “Love Story” and “Titanic” took real-life situations (terminal disease and Titanic disaster) and used them to, as the saying goes, cause “feels.” 

 

And in some ways, there isn’t anything wrong with that.  Unfortunately, real disaster and real sadness are hard to wrap your brain around when you don’ have a real-life tie to the actual event.  By making us care for these characters, in some ways we give people more sympathy and/or empathy for, respectively, people who lose their loved ones all too soon, and people who died horribly due to an inconceivable accident.

 

On the other hand…

 

In the case of the Titanic, many actual people died.  And yet, the film asked us to care about two people who never even really existed.  And people were mourning this tragic love story, crying to the soundtrack, even though actual human beings with family and friends really did perish.

 

And in the case of “Love Story,” well, it mostly made people crave an epic love and feel sad that someone died young, which, as Brendan noted, doesn’t offer up an accurate picture of what something like that looks like.

 

It takes a real-life horror and puts it on film, in a sanitary way that you can mock (because the movie is pretty cornball) and keep at arm’s length.

 

And now we’ve bubbled back up to “Stars.”

 

Watching the trailer, I found myself very much in agreement with Brendan.  Our two supposedly cancer-ridden characters, quite frankly, don’t look cancer-ridden.  The girl is carrying around an oxygen tube, but this seems mostly like an inconvenience or a mild affectation.  The boy seems ready to star in a show on the CW.

 

They have cutesy conversations.  They appear to go on zany adventure.  They make the beast with two backs. 

 

The fact of the matter is, judging by the trailer, Brendan’s assessment of the material is entirely accurate.  It makes the movie look like it takes a very serious subject, and gives lip service to the pain and horror it causes.

 

And…

 

Okay, I’ll give my nutshell thought here, but to dig in a little deeper, I have to spoil the end of the book.

 

So the short version is, the book does take the topic more seriously, and is not entirely dishonest about the pain and humiliation and horror caused by cancer. 

 

To put it delicately, I wouldn’t put this book on the list of things people should read if they have a friend or family member with cancer.  I think there’s a strong chance they’ll reject it as unrealistic.

 

But if they make it to the end of the novel, I think they’ll find that that horror is there.  As it should be.

 

But…

 

Here’s where the book gets into trouble.

 

First, it gives the girl a special drug that’s keeping her cancer in check, even though she’s in stage four.  (As one of my friends with cancer noted, there is no stage five.)  She’s pretty healthy and vital.

 

That drug doesn’t exist.  It might, one day, and it’s based on a drug that exists, but stage four is a lot more horrible than portrayed.

 

The book also exists in a fairy-tale world where the folks who grant wishes for sick kids can foot an impossibly large bill… which is also not terribly realistic.

 

Now, what’s interesting is that, in a post-internet world, we can cut to the tape of John Green discussing why he made these choices.

 

And here, I’m afraid, is where you have to walk away if you plan to read the book/see the movie with no prior knowledge:

 

http://johngreenbooks.com/questions-about-the-fault-in-our-stars-spoilers/

 

Up there are answers to those questions, and many more, and in there is a question not asked by me that refers to the guy as a Manic Pixie Dream Boy.

 

(Which is to say, I probably wasn’t the first person who thought of that when reading the novel.)

 

And this is where the big “walk away now” line goes.

 

Because the big “twist” of the book, if you want to call it that, is that it’s the boy who ends up dying.  He who tried to teach lessons about life, who tried to teach our protagonist that the journey, nay, that LOVE is what makes the journey worthwhile?

 

He dies.

 

And the book IS honest, when it gets there, about the horrors of dying of cancer, which are many and varied.  But, well, in John Green’s own words (with editing for language):

 

Q. Did you have any second thoughts about the way in which you described the degeneration of Augustus’s health in his final days?

 

A. Well, I didn’t want to [lie to] the reader, but I also didn’t want to be gratuitous about it. I left the worst of it off the page, I guess, but I don’t really regret that. You might be asking whether I regret being so explicit, in which case the answer is definitely not. Our literature has enough novels that glorify suffering as transcendently beautiful.

 

And that, nearly 2000 words later, is the answer to the $64,000 question of whether this story gets at the true awfulness of the cancer experience.

 

The answer is, er…

 

Well, and no and yes, isn’t it?

 

Ultimately, the book is about trying to find meaning and making connections in life, no matter how short that life might be.

 

In another post about another novel, Green refers to his books as having “magical realism,” which I guess is a fancy way of saying that they exist in a heightened reality.

 

Which is to say, the world of quirky indie movies, where a guy can be depressed and meet a girl and she can turn his life around, or a group of people can end up in detention together and realize they’re not so different from one another.

 

But…

 

There’s a saying, which I’m going to paraphrase, that the best answer to a bad book a better book.

 

And in this case, one exists, and Brendan Halpin wrote it.

 

That book is called “Forever Changes,” and if you squint your eyes a bit you can see the similarities.  In both cases, it’s about a teen girl who is, ultimately, going to die from a terminal illness (Cystic fibrosis, in “Changes.”)

 

And in both cases, the question is posed whether it’s worth trying to really live your life in the face of the end being so frighteningly close.

 

When I read “Fault,” I spent much of my reading time comparing the two books, and in the end I think that’s why I rated “Fault” as just a good book, as opposed to a great one.

 

“Fault” exists in a world where people have money, get treatments that don’t exist yet, and everyone learns valuable lessons about life.

 

It is, in its own way, about as realistic as “Harry Potter.”

 

But “Forever Changes” exists in a real world where people react badly to knowing their child is going to die.  Where love doesn’t conquer all, or even conquer some.  Where, when the ugliness comes at the end, it comes hard.

 

I’ve read “Changes” twice, and I cried both times.  Hard.  For all of the last 15 pages.

 

I did not cry at the end of “The Fault in Our Stars.”

 

And here is where I think I have to split the differences.

 

The fact is, “Fault” is a quirky indie movie book.  It’s a deliberate romantic tale that I think can give you a glimpse into the horrors of terminal illness, but really only a glimpse.

 

It tells you A truth, but not THE truth.

 

But as I said about “Love Story” and “Titanic,” I think there can be some value in that.  You can see the story, feel about the story, get in touch with that part of you, and then if you want to you can stick it somewhere in a box never really think about it again.

 

But in real life, as I said before, there are land mines.

 

So is Halpin right?

 

Here’s the truth:  Halpin IS right.

 

For better or worse, “Fault” soft-pedals the world of cancer.

 

But.

 

I think John Green made that choice, all those choices, really, deliberately, in order to tell the best story he could.

 

Ultimately, if you want to see a cancer story that lays it all out on the table, you should go find yourself a copy of “Wit.”

 

If you want to read a book that shows those first few land mines going off, I highly recommend Halpin’s “Forever Changes.”  (His memoir, “It Takes a Worried Man” treads this territory as well.)

 

Green did not write the teen version of “Love Story.”  But he also made a deliberate choice to not write the teen version of, “Wit.”

 

He wrote a good book that, I think, falls somewhere between the two.

 

But it did soft-pedal, and I suspect the movie will do even more so.

 

Ultimately, watching people die of cancer changes you.  I don’t know if “Fault” is something that I could handle now, but I don’t know if it would make me feel sad or just angry.

 

I do know that I can never watch “Wit” again.  Not that I really felt I would be able to handle it before my friends passed away.

 

Ultimately, what I’m saying here is, John Green got cancer wrong in his cancer book.  He did it deliberately, and if I understand him, he did it not to soft-pedal cancer (even though he did) but in an attempt to talk about broader themes, and the value of love and connections.

 

For some people, this pulling back is going to be a trigger, and it’s understandable and even a correct reaction.

 

In the end, I’m not sure that John Green is the issue – it’s all the people feeling feels.  Books, movies, songs, yes, these are things that give you feels.

 

But cancer just causes devastation.

 

 

Why I Haven't Been Writing

Patrick Rothfuss nailed it.  Maybe this is why he’s a New York Times bestseller.

 

He compared writing to working in a garden.  If you do it for the joy of doing it, it’s a wonderful thing.  You go out in the dirt, you get some sun, and at the end of it all, maybe you get some really good vegetables or fruits.

 

But the input almost never equals the output.  Overall, you’d be better off putting in a few extra hours at work, then buying those fruits or vegetables at a store.

 

But you can’t think that way.  You must write (or garden) for the joy of it.

 

If your world flip-flops, you’re in trouble.  If you have demands of your garden, where it must feed your family for a month, or a season, or a year, and something goes wrong, or it just doesn’t come together, or you have bad seeds, or any other number of things, well, then it wasn’t fun.

 

Then you’re hungry and tired and you did all that work and all you got were a few tomatoes.

 

And maybe the year before, you got those tomatoes and it was a bonus.  You had fun and you got tomatoes.

 

But this year, you were planning on those tomatoes, plus more tomatoes, and now they aren’t there, and you’re panicking.

 

That is, pretty much exactly, what it means when you start to think about being a working writer.

 

***

 

I had a friend who was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago.

 

There are levels of cancer, I’ve learned.  There are mouse trap cancers, where you might get hurt but they rarely do major damage.  There are bear trap cancers, which will do a lot of damage to you, but you can still escape most of the time.

 

And there are avalanche cancers.  The ones that roll down the hill and crush you.  On rare occasions, someone gets away, but most people just hope to slow the roll a bit.  They know the rocks are coming, though. 

 

And the rocks will win.

 

My friend was a fantasy reader.  A big George RR Martin fan.  When my friend got cancer, they joked that they were going to call George and ask how the Song of Ice and Fire (which we now all think of as Game of Thrones) ended.  They knew they wouldn’t live to see the end of the series.

 

I don’t think a call was ever made.

 

My friend was also a fan of Patrick Rothfuss.  Driving to chemotherapy, sitting around after treatments, not able to do anything but watch TV if the concentration wasn’t there and read  books if the concentration was there, my friend read through the first two parts of the Rothfuss trilogy.

 

They were hoping that Patrick would get the final novel out before they died, but I pay close enough attention to the series I follow that I knew it would never happen.

 

I hunted around online for Patrick’s email address.  I just wanted to drop him a note, and say, “Hey, I met you at a book festival and you were really nice and my friend is dying of cancer and how does your trilogy end?  I swear I won’t read it.  I just want my friend to know.”

 

I didn’t do it.

 

Not long after I went hunting for that email address, Patrick posted a blog about how behind he was in his correspondence. It was hundreds of emails.

 

(George RR Martin said he was something like 3000 emails behind a few months ago.  So even if my friend sent him an email, it’s likely sitting there, unread.)

 

I guess it’s just as well that I didn’t email Patrick.  I imagine he’d finally be reading the email about now, debating what to say, wondering if he should even answer.

 

My friend passed away months ago.

 

***

 

I started reading the Martin books right after seeing the first season of Game of Thrones.  It was a great show, to be sure.

 

I dove into the first book, and it took me almost three years to get through it.  I read dozens of other books in the meantime, never getting back to that first one.

 

I finally finished it this year.  When I finished I turned to my wife, sitting nearby, and said, “I don’t think I’m smart enough to read these.”

 

The Martin books are dense.  There are probably more than 100 major characters, and when you read interviews with Martin is obvious that even minor characters in the novels, ones who appear in a handful of scenes, are (or can be, or will be) important.

 

And there may be a 1000 of them.

 

When my friend got to the last few weeks, when the pain was winning and there was more sleeping than waking, I started thinking about reading the rest of the Martin books, not for me, but for my friend.  I would read them, and then go to my friend’s grave and talk about what happened.

 

The only problem there is, I would probably get the information, or much of it, wrong.

 

My friend was smart enough to follow the books.  To talk about the minor characters, who got maybe a scene or two in the early going, somewhere in book one, who might come back two books from now and finish their character arc.

 

I would never remember all those people.  Like I said, I’m not smart enough.

 

I haven’t started that second book yet.  I’m not sure I want to.

 

***

 

When Robert Jordan came to the end of his life, he and his family picked an author to finish up his Wheel of Time series.  He provided copious notes, a partially finished manuscript, and if I remember correctly, he walked his successor through the final plot of what was supposed to be the “last” book.

 

The last book, as it turned out, had to be three books to tie up all the loose ends Jordan left lying around, like so much plot flotsam.

 

I didn’t envy the guy who took the job at all.  Not even a little bit.  I suppose he got to be on the New York Times bestseller list a few times, and that was probably nice.  But really, it wasn’t his name bringing in the sales.

 

It was all those people looking for a scratch for their itch.

 

And the entire time, he had to know, if he missed even one little detail, the fans would be up in arms.  Things that Jordon himself probably would have blown past or declared unimportant, the new guy wasn’t allowed to miss.

 

And even those people who finally got all their answers, somewhere in their brains, they know that this couldn’t possibly be everything that Jordan intended.  Something, somewhere, was changed.

 

***

 

My friend put a message on Facebook a few months before the end, saying not to send emails or Facebook messages anymore, because they probably wouldn’t get read.

 

A week before that, I offered to start writing a new Blood Calling book, and to send it in chunks.  My friend could be the first reader.

 

My friend loved those books.  Compared them to The Hunger Games, which was an extremely generous compliment.

 

I thought it might be fun, providing these bits of happiness in bite-sized pieces, every few days, while the sand ran out of the hourglass.  I started writing, wanting to get a jump on the story so I could share it with my friend.

 

I never got an answer.  I don’t know if it was lack of interest, or if the message never got to my friend, or if they didn’t want to start another story that would never be finished in their lifetime.

 

***

 

I once heard a joke that if Robert Rodriguez had been writing and directing the Harry Potter movies, the last two books would have been adaptations of the movies.

 

Seeing as how only one person (that being the actor who played him) knew whether Snape was good or bad up until the final book was released, you’ve got to wonder if the book and the movie might have ended differently.

 

Then there’s the curious case of the V, the original TV miniseries.  The creator wanted to do a new series each year, updating the world on what happened to the various characters, one year after another.

 

Only he got kicked off the project.  The second series, labeled The Final Battle, was not the final battle.  They made a TV series out of it.  That got cancelled, so there was no ending.  I had read that the comics gave a final resolution to the series, but I guess that’s faulty memory.  A quick check on Wikipedia says that the last issue was the second part of a flashback story.  (Though another article says that the visitors decided to leave in an earlier comic.  This might be the ending I’m thinking of.)

 

Later, the creator of the show wrote and released a novel that gave a “true” ending, ignoring everything else he didn’t write.  So you could pick your ending.  The show.  The comics.  The miniseries.  The novel.

 

George RR Martin is 65, and it’s taking him longer and longer to finish each novel in his series.  He used to post his progress, but that led to too much hope and letdown in his fans.

 

In a few months, the fourth season of Game of Thrones will air.  A season comes out once every year, and the show’s creators have said they’ll probably have to wrap it up by season seven.

 

Martin told them the end of the story, more or less.  Every once in a while he makes noises about finding ways to slow down the series, to have a season come out every two years instead of every one, but the show is filled with children who are all aging at a rapid clip onscreen.

 

TV is relentless.  You can write a sequel novel 20 years after the original and everyone can be the same age.

 

TV simply can’t work that way.

 

The fifth Thrones book came out in 2011.  Six years from then is 2017.  Six years from then is 2023.

 

Martin will be 75.

 

If he makes it.

 

Martin has said there are no notes, there is no backup plan if he passes away with the books unfinished.

 

A theory: Martin is waiting to die, knowing that even if he finishes the books, they will never live up to the hype they’ve garnered up to this point.

 

People will get their ending on the show, and that, he has probably concluded, is good enough.  The pressure is off.

 

And if he dies, his publisher probably won’t come after him for his advance.  Instead, they’ll take whatever pages are in existence, publish them as-is, and get someone to novelize the last season or two of the show.

 

Assuming there’s a call for it in a decade.

 

Maybe.  Who knew that so many people wanted to know how V was really supposed to end that the creator would be able to novelize the “true” ending?

 

***

 

I’ve barely written anything this year.

 

One short story.  That’s it.  And the fate of that story is unknown.

 

It’s the garden metaphor again.

 

When I was writing screenplays just to write them, it was fun for a while.

 

Then I started making money, and writing them without the money component felt… wrong.

 

Actually, it wasn’t even the money component.  I was happy to write something that, when I was done, was going to be produced.  A screenplay that hasn’t been shot is just paper and words.  No one wants to read it, even if you put it in book format.

 

I’ve done some treatment writing since I abandoned screenplays, and yet, every time I put something together, I just can’t get excited enough to type fade in.

 

I know I’m going to lose days.  Weeks.  Probably months to the writing process.

 

And when it’s all done, and I’ve pressed print, and given to someone, it’s going to sit there.  Just so much paper.

 

Short stories?  Novels?

 

I can write the short stories, but creating just to create, I feel the time slipping away.  The truth is, I don’t really know the markets for short stories.  I read them sometimes, but in collections, and mostly just from authors I know and like.  Harlan Ellison.  Neil Gaiman.  Stephen King.

 

If you don’t know the markets, it’s hard to sell to the markets.  Two years ago, you could sell short stories on the Kindle.

 

Today?  Eh.  Not so much.  Not unless you’re writing about women and dinosaurs.  I am very much not kidding.

 

And barely poked at my novels, because…

 

Because of time.  I had none.  I had two major deaths and a family medical crisis and a full time job that brought in actual constant money, which I needed.

 

I could barely write because I was sad.  And stressed.  And those tiny little pockets of time I would find to write dried up like worms in the sun after a rainstorm.

 

It’s not a writer’s block.  It’s a sad block. 

 

I look at the time it takes to write a novel, and I think I want to spend more time with my family, and friends, because the novel will be there tomorrow, but they might not be.

 

And you might recall the old saying that no one, on their deathbed, says they wished that they spent more time at work.

 

And that’s it, really.

 

When I look at my books, I know what they bring in.  I know some of them sell well, and some sell poorly, and I know the time that I put into them. 

 

That time was fun.  But this last year, as I actually did the thing in the poem and raged against the dying of the light, and also parts of the medical community, I knew the handful of cash I could gain from the hundreds of hours spent at the keyboard wasn’t enough to justify the typing time.

 

That’s why I blogged about things pointless and stupid.  They were easy, they rarely required focus, and when I was done, well, who was going to argue with me about the plot of The Vampire Diaries?

 

I’ve been wanting to get back to it, saying I’ll get back to it, for a while now.

 

Will I?

 

I think I will.

 

I realized today that last month was probably the first time in a long time that I didn’t feel like I had a crisis in the works every single moment.  My family was safe.  I was safe.

 

And if I can keep that feeling, can actually let my brain uncurl and stretch and feel like making the garden is fun again, well, we’ll see what comes out.

 

We’ll see.