Isegoria

Orson Scott Card explains that his only “start-quick novel” was Ender’s Game:

I had had some traction with the novelet “Ender’s Game,” and I had already committed to its main character as the protagonist of Speaker for the Dead. I needed a novel version of Ender’s Game to properly set up Speaker, so readers of the EG novel would be prepared to pick up the story 3,000 years later. (Time dilation in lightspeed flight allowed frequent travelers to live through millennia.)

I already knew, from expanding Mikal’s Songbird into the novel Songmaster, that you don’t novelize a short story by tacking twenty chapters onto the end. If the short story works, you start way earlier, developing characters and situations leading up to the same climax and resolution that worked so well in the short form. (If they did not work well, why are you novelizing it in the first place?)

[…]

To show Ender’s childhood family, I handled it quickly by putting Ender in my own family, back when there were only three of us kids. In my family, my sister was eldest, and a four-year gap between me and my older brother made us anything but close. So Ender grew up with a hostile older brother and a protective and kindly older sister — both of whom had come close to being drafted themselves.

Every vile thing Peter did to Ender, my own brother had done to me. Every in-joke between Ender and Valentine was based on real memories shared with my sister. In this tiny cell, the parents seemed as distant as prison guards, quite unlike my own parents, who were in the main much more nurturing and involved.

Once Ender got to Battle School, he was placed in various armies led by somewhat older children. My most powerful understanding of military command came from reading Bruce Catton’s brilliant trilogy about the Army of the Potomac in the American Civil War. Lincoln’s frustrating search for an effective commander for the army that campaigned between Washington and Richmond became the semi-deliberate basis of all the bad-to-mediocre army commanders Ender came across.

So apart from trying to invent tactics for combat in a cubic enclosed space in zero-G (Shuttle astronauts confirmed for me that their own experiments in the cargo bay showed that I did OK with my thought experiments), I was relying on either my own life or powerfully-remembered history for my characters and their actions.

[…]

In my life I had never been a leader, as far as I was aware. But I had always been impervious to peer pressure, never aspiring to “coolness” and never achieving it, but always deciding what I wanted to do and then doing it. I always considered my actions in childhood and adolescence to be real — when I wrote, produced, and/or directed plays in college, often against faculty opposition, I regarded my plays as actual productions, fictional in content but real in the execution. When Ender never loses sight of the goal of Battle School, which was to win the war against the Hive Queens, it does echo my constant attitude that my scripts and productions were never “student work,” but real dramas and comedies for real audiences; my competition was not other students or even the variably talented faculty — my competition was Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. I never came close to winning that competition, but in my mind, that was my playing field and my aspiration. I gave Ender that kind of ambition — he didn’t care about being top student, he cared about preparing himself and his best colleagues to face the Hive Queens in combat and destroy them, thereby saving the human race once and for all.

By mining my own psyche and memories of experiences and readings, I was able to write the novel with NO additional research and development. I wrote the early chapters in a week, getting Ender into Battle School. Then my publisher sent me on a brief signing tour for my novel Saints (published incompetently under a stupid title with an appallingly bad cover). This being before the invention of the laptop computer, I wrote nothing that week. But unconsciously, I was developing Ender’s story like mad. I got home and immediately got back to work. I wrote the rest of the novel, including Ender’s post-war transformation into the original Speaker for the Dead, in just under three weeks. I printed it out on my NEC Spinwriter and mailed it off to my then-editor at TOR, Harriet McDougal (married to the soon-to-be-famous Robert Jordan).

David J. West recently cited a quote from a letter from Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft:

My tastes and habits are simple; I am neither erudite nor sophisticated. I prefer jazz to classical music, musical burlesque to Greek tragedy, A. Conan Doyle to Balzac, and Bob Service’s verse to Santayana’s writing, a prize fight to a lecture on art.

I had to look up Bob Service. Apparently he was “the Canadian Kipling”:

Robert William Service (16 January 1874 – 11 September 1958) was an English-born Canadian poet and writer, often called “The Bard of the Yukon” and “The Canadian Kipling”. Born in Lancashire of Scottish descent, he was a bank clerk by trade, but spent long periods travelling in the west in the United States and Canada, often in poverty. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was inspired by tales of the Klondike Gold Rush, and wrote two poems, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee”, which showed remarkable authenticity from an author with no experience of the gold rush or mining, and enjoyed immediate popularity.

You can, of course, find his poems online. “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” should appeal to REH fans:

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger’s face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

There’s men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;
And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;
With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,
As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.
Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he’d do,
And I turned my head — and there watching him was the lady that’s known as Lou.

His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,
So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man could play.

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you’ve a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars.

And hunger not of the belly kind, that’s banished with bacon and beans,
But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means;
For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above;
But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman’s love —
A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true —
(God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, — the lady that’s known as Lou.)

Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;
But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear;
That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil’s lie;
That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die.
‘Twas the crowning cry of a heart’s despair, and it thrilled you through and through —
“I guess I’ll make it a spread misere”, said Dangerous Dan McGrew.

The music almost died away … then it burst like a pent-up flood;
And it seemed to say, “Repay, repay,” and my eyes were blind with blood.
The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash,
And the lust awoke to kill, to kill … then the music stopped with a crash,
And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm,
And “Boys,” says he, “you don’t know me, and none of you care a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I’ll bet my poke they’re true,
That one of you is a hound of hell. . .and that one is Dan McGrew.”

Then I ducked my head, and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark,
And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark.
Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,
While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that’s known as Lou.

These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know.
They say that the stranger was crazed with “hooch,” and I’m not denying it’s so.
I’m not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two —
The woman that kissed him and — pinched his poke — was the lady that’s known as Lou.

Paul Daniel “Ace” Frehley, co-founder and lead guitarist of the legendary rock band Kiss, has died following injuries suffered during a fall last month, Variety reports:

In an era that preceded MTV, their performances were almost overwhelmingly visual and experiential, with explosions, elevators and more. Yet the mystique of Kiss was key: the bandmembers’ faces were not revealed for more than a decade, by which point Frehley and drummer Peter Criss had left the band. Frehley was known as “Space Ace” and cultivated an otherworldly image.

[…]

Paul Daniel Frehley was born to a musical family in the Bronx borough of New York City and received an electric guitar as a Christmas present in 1964. He never took lessons and never looked back: citing Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and the Who as his primary influences, he began playing in bands as a teenager and purportedly acquired his nickname from friends based on his ability to score dates with girls.

He dropped out of high school after one of his bands, Cathedral, began earning money, but later returned and got his diploma. He continued playing and by 1971, one of his bands, Molimo, signed with RCA Records and recorded several unreleased songs for the label. But late the following year, a friend spotted an advertisement in the Village Voice that turned out to be for the lead guitar slot in the embryonic Kiss. Famously, Frehley went to the audition in Manhattan wearing one red sneaker and one orange one. Stanley, Simmons and Criss were dismayed by his appearance but sufficiently impressed with his fiery lead guitar work, and he was invited to join a few weeks later. The band, which was preceded by Stanley and Simmons’ previous group Wicked Lester, dubbed themselves Kiss in January 1973 and soon, inspired by the New York Dolls and Alice Cooper, began painting their faces and crafting outrageous costumes for their concerts.

[…]

Frehley’s abuse of drugs and alcohol grew worse, and in May of 1983, he was arrested following a high-speed chase on the Bronx River Parkway in his 1981 DeLorean. He was charged with DUI, reckless driving and leaving the scene of an accident after hitting four cars during the incident (luckily with no injuries). He spent two weeks in a hospital detox unit and was required to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Last year, for April Fools, the James Bond fans at “MI6” ran a spoof news story about cigarettes being digitally removed from the James Bond films, and now Amazon has digitally removed guns from James Bond film key art:

Some covers have been achieved by cropping the image so the gun is outside the lower edge, but in some cases the images have been digitally manipulated to varying levels of success, including: Dr No (awkwardly folded arms), A View To A Kill (long arms), GoldenEye (contemplation), and Spectre (clumsily shortened empty holster).

Ryan Williamson explains how to murder an icon in seven episodes:

Let’s start with what made Boba Fett legendary in the first place. In The Empire Strikes Back, he appears in maybe ten minutes of screen time, speaks perhaps twenty words, and yet became one of the most beloved characters in the entire saga. How? Because those ten minutes were perfect.

Fett didn’t need exposition. He didn’t need backstory. He didn’t need to explain his motivations or philosophy of leadership. He was pure, distilled competence wrapped in battered armor. When Vader warns him “no disintegrations,” we immediately understand this isn’t a man who asks polite questions. When he tracks the Millennium Falcon to Cloud City while Imperial Star Destroyers fail, we see tactical brilliance in action. When he goes toe-to-toe with Luke Skywalker and nearly wins, we witness lethal skill.

Most importantly, he was economical. Every movement deliberate. Every word weighted. “He’s no good to me dead” tells you everything about his priorities, professionalism, and pragmatic worldview in six syllables. That’s masterful character work.

The mystique was everything. Fett represented the dangerous unknown—a wild card who operated by his own rules in a galaxy dominated by the Empire and Rebellion’s grand ideologies. He was the shark in the water, glimpsed but never fully revealed.

The Book of Boba Fett took that mystique and fed it through a wood chipper. Then set the wood chipper on fire. Then tossed the whole mess into deep space with a trebuchet.

Gone was the economical dialogue, replaced by endless speeches about ruling “with respect” instead of fear. Gone was the aura of quiet menace, replaced by a surprisingly chatty crime boss who felt compelled to explain his every decision. Gone was the tactical brilliance, replaced by a leader who seemed perpetually surprised by obvious betrayals and threats.

Most damaging of all, Disney made him safe. The man who once disintegrated people without hesitation became someone who agonized over moral choices. The predator became prey, constantly reacting to threats instead of eliminating them. The professional became an amateur, learning on the job how to run a criminal organization.

This wasn’t character development—it was character assassination.