1) I’ve written about endings before. I like them. I lost interest in the Marvel movies after Endgame (though I did like Moon Knight). I lost interest in Star Wars at some point (though I really liked Rogue One). I loved the three Lord of the Rings movies, and then I stopped. Beginning, middle, and that wonderful end — what more did I need?

It turns out that’s happened with the Sandman show, too. I liked the first season a lot. The show was supposed to go on for at least several more seasons, but then it was announced that the second season would be the last (long story — you could look it up). The seasons each had series of episodes (ten or eleven), then an extra, self-contained episode which came out later.

I watched the second season, and it was good (not as good as the first, I thought), but it had a very satisfying ending. Then the bonus episode came out, and, even though it’s based on a story I enjoyed in the original comic books, I don’t have any desire to see it right away. I’m sure I’ll watch it eventually, but for now I’d rather just enjoy the ending of the overall story.

 
2) I’ve written about hypertext writing, including my own, here and here, and in other places.

As I said recently, talking about my current project, “In one scene, Character One warns Character Two about getting involved with Character Three, based on personal experience, and I had no idea that Character One and Character Three had ever even met.”

Well, that was fun, but it also bugged me a little, and it made be realize how long it’s been since I read Carly, and so I went back to it, and I found it somewhat tiring to read. I think that hypertext is kind of fun, at least in theory, but ultimately it’s not for me (which is probably one reason I never did it again). But, working on the part of the story I’m working on now, it turned out to be a good idea to go back and refresh myself on what happens immediately before, since, as I said, I’d had no idea that Carly Stein and Nicky Porter had ever met.

Not that I’m rewriting the plot — mostly just polishing the story, and slicing off the fat — but it still seemed to be a good idea to remind myself of the recent history.

But that led to the idea of “flattening” the story Carly — straightening it out into a non-hypertext story, and now that’s done (and I’m pretty happy with it): “Carly (four years earlier)“

Here are various comments and updates, in alphabetical order:

Artificial Intelligence: I’m still not paying much attention to this, but I did find this article interesting: “AI Can’t Gaslight Me if I Write by Hand“

It’s really too bad that, apparently, people can’t imagine a computer except as a box that connects them to the web. As I’ve said before (probably many times) when I bought my first computer, it was because it meant I’d never again have to retype things in order to edit them.

Other stuff came later (BBSs, email, the web), but that was all gravy. Still is.

Now, I do think there’s a difference between “writing on a computer” (which has, as the writer says, advantages over pen and paper) and “writing on a computer that’s connected to the internet” (which means endless distractions and nonsense, of which AI is only the most recent example), but those are not the only two options.

Turn off your wifi, silence your phone, and then write with whatever tools you prefer. Write description longhand and write dialogue on a keyboard, as Hemingway used to.

 
Lorde: I do like Lorde’s new album, Virgin. I’m not sure how it stacks up against her first two albums (that will clarify itself over time, or not), but I’ve already listened to it more times than I ever listened to Solar Power (album #3). In fact, I may never have listened to Solar Power all the way through even once. I remember a few times thinking that I really should listen to it, so I’d put it on, and then an hour later I’d realize it wasn’t playing any more, but no part of it (except sometimes the song of the same name) had actually captured my attention.

I also like the clips I’ve seen of her performance at Glastonbury.

 
Thomas Pynchon: Still looking forward to Shadow Ticket, and I did enjoy this article: “(Don’t Fear) Thomas Pynchon.”

I do feel shamed by the fact that the fact that the writer of the article is rereading Against the Day. I really do have to read that one (I’ve read the rest, multiple times).

 
Writing: I’m still writing what I’m writing. Sort of the third novel, sort of the next chunk of the second novel, maybe it has a title and maybe it doesn’t — who cares. It’s a story. It has a beginning and a middle and a (pretty open-ended) end. It has a ton of characters.

It’s fun to work on for two reasons. One is that the plot is all set, so I can just tweak punctuation and word choice. Some writers complain about editing, but it can be really fun. Also, since it’s been many years since I’ve read the older novels, I sometimes surprise myself. In one scene, Character One warns Character Two about getting involved with Character Three, based on personal experience, and I had no idea that Character One and Character Three had ever even met. So, that’s fun.

The second fun part of that when I was originally writing it, I apparently felt the need to explain a lot of things about the characters and their history and their abilities and their complex family entanglements. I’m taking most of that out.

Why is Vicki a tiny teenage girl with high, pointed ears, and superhuman strength and speed? Are the Golden mutants, or aliens, or three manifestations of the same person?

I know the answers to some of those questions (I have no idea what’s going on with Vicki’s ears), but dumping those answers into the text doesn’t exactly move things along. That’s not what makes a story (or a movie or TV show) compelling to me.

(Jeepers, it’s been a while since I posted. So, this may wander around a bit.)

“There wasn’t a laugh in it.” I remember my father saying that on a fairly regular basis, generally as a negative. Sometimes he was annoyed that the [movie, television show, play, whatever] he had just watched had failed to make him laugh, and sometimes he was more regretful (he’d seen the potential in the writing, but in the end it hadn’t delivered the jokes).

(I do have to note that he was not an easy laugh. He had high standards.)

Of course, he liked, and even loved, some things which had no laughs at all, such as the movies Persona, The Exterminating Angel, and The Seventh Seal. But if laughs were a possibility and those laughs were not delivered, he was cross.

I’ve been thinking about this in a few connections in terms of my reactions to various things.

 
1) Ulysses.

As I wrote before:

I’ve been watching videos about Joyce and Ulysses, and I just saw one which clarified why I’m always drawn to Ulysses rather than to Joyce’s earlier works, even though they’re a lot easier to read.

Ulysses is funny, sometimes wildly funny. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are not funny.

I think it’s that simple.

 
2) I’ve been thinking about David Lynch since his death. Why do I like Mulholland Drive so much better than some of his other movies? Maybe partly because it’s funnier.

I do like directors who, even in the most serious moments, can insert a pratfall or a malapropism or some other bit of goofiness. Maybe it’s just because that can make a scene more realistic, since real life does that all the time.

Plus, of course, there’s was FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (played by Lynch) in Twin Peaks. (I wish the YouTube clip had gone on a bit longer, since when Cooper and Cole go into the Sheriff’s office for a private conversation, everything they say can be heard by everybody in the building anyway. 🙂 )

I don’t have any big statements to make about Lynch or his movies. As I’ve said before, some things just please me tremendously without giving me a feeling that I need to dissect them.

 
3) My third novel, which I wrote about last time, makes me laugh. If it didn’t make me laugh, I doubt if I’d put a lot of work into it at this point, given that:

• It’s not really a novel. (It’s more like a single episode of a long-running television show, probably a soap opera.)
• It’s got a ridiculous number of characters.
• It sets up a big question which it never answers, and I’m definitely not taking the story any further at this point.

So, for now, I’m continuing to polish everything up. I don’t have any idea when it will be “done,” but I am trying to trim it a little — to slice off a few characters who don’t advance the plot but who require, for various reasons, enormous amounts of explanation. (At least The Golden don’t appear — I think because I hadn’t invented them yet.)

There are some laughs in it, at least for me, so it’s fun to work on. And I do know one thing already: This is going to be the first chapter.

 
____________
Tedious background information follows.

This story was originally called “The U-town Mystery.” It was going to be an early chapter in the third novel. I was working on the novel — with no idea where it was going (of course) — and it occurred to me that Jan Sleet was a detective but I’d never written her a proper, traditional mystery to solve. It seemed like she’d enjoy having one of those, so I wrote this one.

But then, two thing happened (in some order):

• I found that I really enjoyed writing mystery stories, and
• I didn’t think the novel was going anywhere.

So, I wrote a whole series of mysteries for JS to solve.

For that purpose, I renamed “The U-town Mystery” to “The Apartment Mystery,” since it didn’t work to have it called “The U-town Mystery” as part of a whole series of mystery stories set in U-town. (Sherlock Holmes never had an adventure called “The London Mystery.”)

But then, some attentive readers pointed out that “The Apartment Mystery” didn’t work as part of the whole series, since the tone was very different (more dark, with more blood). That was a valid criticism, so when I completed the series I removed that one (I also removed a couple of other stories, for other reasons).

So, it was kind of an orphan, but now it’s going to be back where it originally belonged.