A close friend of mine, Bill Dye, has asked me to co-write Scribble Splatter. As a result, Wyvern Entertainment is being repurposed as exclusively a fiction blog. If you’re looking for meta, criticism, theory, go there.

This site will be for my fiction. Feedback welcome.

In my previous entry, I touched incidentally on my aversion to stories set in the “real world”. I didn’t have this problem growing up — although I preferred fantasy and science fiction stories, I consumed far more contemporary realism, mystery, and suspense stories growing up.

I started to become a staunch Science Fiction and Fantasy “reader” around the same time that I went to college. I put “reader” in quotes because it was around that time that I stopped reading all but my favorite writers, and even then, only the works of my favorite writers’ favorite series. I spent much more time watching anime with a paranormal bent, and most of my time playing fantasy MMORPGs. It was during this time that I solidly decided that I wanted to be a writer, but as time went on, I knew less and less what that meant.

I became even more entrenched in my reading habits when forced to read the writing of such literary “greats” as Stein, Hemingway and Joyce, authors who, although skilled, brought no joy to me in the reading. So it’s realistic! Big deal. It’s dry and academic and stands diametrically opposed to my notion that reading should be fun.

So what did I do? I criticized it. I criticized unrealism where I found it, I criticized how boring it was, and I criticized anything else I could find. In the meantime, I’d avoid the obvious fact that fantasy and science fictions are oftentimes hundreds or thousands of times more unrealistic than the “real world” stories I’d criticize. My defense was easy. Those worlds are not the real world. My chosen genres do not attempt to imitate the real world. It’s not a fair meter to say that The Hobbit is unrealistic — of course it is. It’s Heroic Fantasy!

So a month ago when my girlfriend asks me to watch Dexter, I spent more time analyzing how it didn’t align to the real world than I did enjoying the show, never realizing that every story  is a fantasy world. Some just look more like this one than others do.

During my group’s New Years’ Eve party, one of my friends since before High School and I got to discussing what we’d been watching lately.

“I’ve been enjoying Shakugan no Shana,” I said. I am, as usual, late to the scene, but to my surprise my friend, with much more free time on his hands, had just finished watching the second season, so I was only one behind.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s fine, and all, it’s just…” He paused and then continued exactly as I expected, “They could have done so much more with it.”

He says this a lot, this friend of mine, and I’d always just nodded. It had always gone without saying that we could have done it better ourselves. But this time, when I heard it, it tugged on a recent memory, a memory brought up watching the first season of Dexter with my girlfriend.

It had only been two weeks before this conversation (Yes, again, late to the show). She’d been a long-time watcher, but I have a lot of trouble getting into shows that are set in the “real” world. (More on that later, maybe.)

“Come on, just watch the first season, it’s fully encapsulated,” she had said.

“Fine, just the first season.”

We sat down, we watched, I paused at any slight jarring inconsistency. I complained loudly at them. Never mind that it was actually a pretty good show, never mind that I actually saw a kernel of something I might enjoy in it, I’m a creator, damn it, and as a result, I must for the sake of my craft find flaws in the craft of others!

Flash forward back to the New Years’ party. My friend’s incredibly vague comment about how a show ‘could have been better’. I’d gotten more skilled since High School at articulating a show’s flaws. If I’d wanted to.

James Joyce’s epiphanies are a convenient work of fiction. Any decent epiphany is brewing in a person’s gut long before the incident that tips the scale. Over the previous month, I’d read a work of pulpy high fantasy and genuinely enjoyed it (despite its editorial flaws), I’d read a suspense thriller set in a horse racing circuit, I’d watched a show about a serial killer, and I’d watched an anime about a tiny girl who fights to protect the balance of this world. What do they all have in common? Two things stick out to me.

1) Someone wrote them.
2) They are all flawed, in one way or another.

Why does that matter? Because my friend hasn’t written in half a decade, and I haven’t in three months. After the finish of my first novel, I briefly entertained finding an agent and getting it published. After one form rejection letter, I dug back into my hole to nurse my wounds. My friend never even tried to get that far.

These works are out there because someone believed in them. Because they resonated with many people. And because someone finished writing, and then finished the submission process. Compared to that, being a critic is easy:

1) Watch someone else’s show/Read someone else’s book.
2) Find a reason why it sucks.
3) Repeat until ego is sufficiently stoked.

As a writer, it’s undignified for me to tear apart a good show, or a good book, and say why it fell short. If I watch a show, or read a book, I should enjoy it like a reader or a watcher, and then get back to work finishing my story. If I thought there were flaws: Great. That’s fuel for me to do a better job on mine. Nothing more.

The stone pillars to each side of the dirt road had been overgrown with moss, and lichen covered the fenceposts. The old farmstead had fallen apart once he’d left it. The sheds where the sheep wintered lay in shambles, and the animals grazed in overgrown flowerbeds. Ol’ Mag, the cow that had been ancient before Barrett had left, gazed at his carriage as it rolled up to the entryway and bellowed before returning to her grass.

Barrett stared forlornly out of the curtains. When the carriage stopped, he made no move to leave it. Why would his old home look like this? Surely the farmhands were coming out to work the land in exchange for their share. He shook his head and stood to leave the wagon before the coachman decided to encourage him. His cases greeted him at ground-level, and the shiny gold piece he flicked into the man’s hand was more than enough to pay for a bumpy, dusty ride with barely two hours of peace each day for sleep.

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Wil huddled on his cot, peering through a crack in the wall that admitted starlight and rooftops. The straw mattress couldn’t hide the hardwood underneath from his bruises. He tried to ignore the tearing sackcloth sounds his Father’s snores made. He tried not to think about the old drunk at all.

Curling tighter to keep out the cold only drew his mind to the aches. His hands clenched around a normal looking tooth strung onto a necklace. To him, the tooth seemed to shine through his fingers, but he knew that it didn’t.

The tooth was no bigger than one of Wil’s, and the same yellow hue. Nor was it sharp. Much less sharp than an alley mongrel’s fangs.

He smiled thinking about it. The man who’d given him this necklace had torn the tooth from a wild jalt’s mouth. No one in Oakbrook had anything like it.

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For the last month or two, I’ve been absolutely crazy to see the movie Sucker Punch, or as I heard it called (sounds like a great pitch quote) : “Alice in Wonderland with Machine Guns”.  I’m not aiming to spoil this for anyone, so there’s a courtesy cut below.  Don’t go complaining to me about spoilers if you clicked to read the rest: This entry is about the intersection between plot and message, and how the two can undermine each other, leaving the audience dissatisfied.  Also, I will say above the cut that the movie is definitely worth seeing.  The 1% of the movie that I complain about is what I focus on in this article, not the 99% that was amazing.

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