The last several weeks have been intense crunch time to finish the first draft of Feedback (sequel to Variant). I have until the end of next Wednesday to meet my self-imposed deadline, and I’m optimistic. It will require some long days and sleepless nights, and the end result will be a very very rough draft, but I think I’ll make it. (By the way, the awesome Shannon Hale posted a fantastic description of drafting on her Twitter last week: “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” I love that.)

However, despite being busy I’ve been doing a lot of reading. And, since it’s been a while since I’ve blogged and it’s been an even longer while since I’ve given a report of my media consumption, I figure we’re due.

Here is some of the media I’ve consumed lately. This isn’t necessarily the list of the best stuff, but it’s the list of stuff I find interesting to talk about.

Books

Incarceron:

I’d heard a lot about this one for a long time, but somehow I’d never crossed paths with it. I didn’t know much about Incarceron, but it committed one of my speculative fiction pet peeves: a science fiction world that looks like a fantasy world. Fortunately, I was happy to find that there’s a pretty interesting explanation for it and, unlike many in that category, it seemed there was actually a good, story-based reason for that setting (rather than just lazy worldbuilding).

My second pleasant surprise was that the characters are screwed up. One of the main characters begins the story as a thief and (reluctant) kidnapper, and the other is kind of a snobby aristocrat. Even better, the side characters have all sorts of secrets–and the secrets make sense and aren’t intended for the sole purpose of yanking the carpet out from under you!

I realize that all of these compliments are mainly saying “This book was good and I wasn’t expecting it to be!” and for that I’m sorry. But really, this book was good and I wasn’t expecting it to be.

All the Devils Are Here:

A major gear shift from YA science fiction here. I’m a big fan of The Smartest Guys In The Room, the Enron expose authored by Bethany McLean, so when I saw she’d written this detailed account of the current financial crisis I had to get it.

Short review: it’s fantastic. I’ve been annoyed for a long time by the simplistic coverage of the financial crisis by the media, and more annoyed by the partisan fingerpointing–conservatives blame the an overregulating, idealistic government while liberals blame greedy Wall Street bankers and real estate speculators–so it was a breath of fresh air to read an objective, detailed account of what actually happened.

Well, I should actually say “it was a breath of disgusting, noxious air”. The title of the book, a quote from The Tempest (“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”) is an apt description of the players involved. While some are definitely painted as more devious than others, few people or organizations come across as innocent as the complicated tangle of deceit, greed, hubris, ignorance and ridiculously blind optimism brings America to its knees.

One criticism: there are actually two authors–Joe Nocera joins Bethany McLean–and while I don’t know who wrote what, this book is definitely a harder read than The Smartest Guys in the Room. There are passages of detailed and dynamic storytelling, like McLean had previously used, but there are a lot of drier passages as well, and it often feels disjointed.

Even so, definitely a worthwhile read. If you’ve ever watched any of the fingerpointing and wondered who was right (or if you’ve pointed a few fingers yourself), you owe it to yourself to read this.

Cherub: The Recruit:

Jumping back to YA again (because that’s the bulk of what I’ve been reading this last year), I picked this one up at Barnes and Noble without knowing anything about it. I’d never heard of the book or the author, but I was intrigued by the premise, and I love a good YA adventure targeted at boys.

After reading it, I was not at all surprised to find that the author wrote it specifically for his nephew–it reads very much like tween boy wish fulfillment: kids are spies for the government, they learn martial arts, they vandalize (as part of their job!), they go to parties with older teenage girls and drink beer. And, despite all of the obviousness of the “I’m giving my nephew exactly what he wants”, it’s a dang fun read. It’s not great literature, but I enjoyed the heck out of it.

Apparently, this series is popular all over the world–there are already twelve novels in the series, in dozens of countries!–but it didn’t really get much a release in the US until 2010.

TV

The Chicago Code:

This is currently my hands-down favorite show on TV. I intend to blog about it in detail next week, once this first draft is finished. For now, suffice it to say that this show is a masterpiece of gray characters–no one, from the most noble cop to the baddest of the corrupt politicians–is all bad or all good. I know that most cop shows pretend like they do this, giving a character a minor drug problem or a secret mistress, but The Chicago Code gets it right. Man, I want to blog all about it right now…. It’ll have to wait.

Top Shot:

I’ve mentioned this show before on this blog, and I’m happy to see it back on the air. However, I’ve been watching it on DVR and skipping most of the interpersonal drama this time around. It manages to be just as entertaining, and a third the length.

American Idol:

Remember how I’ve blogged about American Idol every year since season three? And how I obsess, and how I actually devoted an entire blog to it last season (along with fellow author Tristi Pinkston)? Well, I gave up this year. Part of it was that I was reluctant to watch Steven Tyler, who I dislike, and Jennifer Lopez, who I hate. But the bigger part was that I just didn’t have the time to devote to it. And–shocker!–I haven’t missed it.

Community and 30 Rock:

These continue to be the best comedies on TV, regardless of what those Modern Family dorks say.

Movies

I’ve watched a lot of movies lately, but two in particular make for interesting discussion. (These movies are old: I rarely make it to the theater, so I see everything on RedBox or On Demand.) First, I watched Salt, starring Angelina Jolie as a maybe-she’s-a-spy-and-maybe-she’s-a-double-agent. Shortly after, I watched Knight and Day, starring Tom Cruise as a spy and Cameron Diaz as a normal person.

Remember when I posted about implausibilty in cop shows, and how it drove me crazy? My basic premise was this: We all know how the real world works, so if you’re portraying the real world, you have to do it realistically, or else we’ll all roll our eyes.

Salt and Knight and Day illustrate this well. Both Jolie and Cruise play super amazing James Bond-esque spies who can do insane stunts and defy gravity and kill all the bad guys without trying. The difference: Salt pretends like it’s the real world. It puts on airs of being a Very Serious Movie. And it obviously fails to acheive those goals because absolutely nothing that ever happens is believable.  On the other hand, Knight and Day is an action comedy, where the fact that Cruise is the quintessential superspy is played for laughs. (One quick sequence shows him hanging upside down in a torture chamber, and it’s the funniest scene in the movie, essentially saying: “Of course he’s going to escape, because he’s better than James Bond; he’s the love child of John McClane and River Tam.”)

In Salt, Jolie does ridiculous stuff and we roll our eyes. In Knight and Day, Cruise does ridiculous stuff and we cheer. The moral: if you want your story to be realistic, then you have to make it realistic. If you tell someone this is the real world, then we don’t suspend our disbelief nearly as much as we do if we’re told it’s fake.

Music

I don’t have much to say here, because I haven’t dabbled into too much new music lately. I did, however, get the new Iron and Wine album, and it’s awesome. I know Iron and Wine is not for everyone, but it’s definitely for me. I’m not enough of a music critic to describe this in intelligent detail. But it’s fantastic.

Anyway, my deadline for the first draft is Wednesday. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I admit it: I’m a sucker for reality TV. My favorite reality shows tend to be those where the contestants have to demonstrate some amount of skill–American Idol, The Next Food Network Star, Project Runway. Most recently, my wife and I have become big fans of the History Channel’s Top Shot.

The show is a shooting competition, where sixteen marksmen from different backgrounds (former marine snipers, ex-police, Olympians, semi-pro competition shooters) have to shoot many different kinds of ranged weapons: rifles, pistols, long bows, cross bows, etc. Sometimes they’re timed, sometimes they’re shooting moving targets, sometimes it’s all about accuracy. The show has been great fun to watch, partially because of the addictive reality drama, but more because, well, it’s fun to watch people shoot stuff.

But this week’s episode has soured the show for me a bit, and it’s got me thinking about writing.

The episode was titled “Wild, Wild West”, and the selected weapon was the Colt Peacemaker–the gun used by Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. The team challenge was set up like an amusement park shooting gallery (only with real bullets). It was all very fun and old-westy.

But then came the elimination challenge, and the two people fighting for survival had to compete head-to-head. The gun was the same, but the challenge was new: a large target displayed all 52 playing cards in a deck, and the competitors had to play poker. By shooting a card, they put it in their hand, and the best hand won.

And here’s the problem: neither competitor had ever played poker before. They had no idea what strategies to use, and they fumbled around awkwardly trying to create good hands and block the other guys’ hand. The winning competitor had three-of-a-kind with fives, if that tells you anything about how little they knew about this game.

And here’s the kicker: the guy who won the poker game missed two shots, while the guy who lost never missed. So the result of the episode was that the better shooter had to go because he didn’t know the rules of poker. He thought the competition was testing his skills with a weapon but he now discovered he needed to know a card game, too.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to writing, and I think it’s a trap that writers can fall into: changing the rules.

The obvious example of this is the Deus Ex Machina, where characters are in a situation where all seems lost and there’s no hope, and then a previously unknown force appears to save the day. Yes, the characters are saved and we have a happy ending, but that ending is ultimately unsatisfying because the author changed the rules.

The other side of this is changing the rules to restrict the characters and limit their abilities. My brother, Dan (a marvelous author), likes to complain about how Superman has been abused by various writers and screenwriters over the years: we all can list Superman’s superpowers, but the writers seem to forget about some of them when it’s convenient for the story. Why does he punch when he can shoot lasers from his eyes? Why can he fly up into space and listen for crimes down below, but still manage to be surprised by hidden traps and bad guys? And, most egregious, after the first Superman movie, where he can make the earth spin backwards to reverse time and bring someone back to life, does he ever allow bad things to happen ever again? He has an automatic do-over, a superpowered Mulligan, and we all know he can do it–so WHY DOESN’T HE DO IT ALL THE TIME?

There’s a maxim about writing endings that they must be surprising, yet inevitable. In other words, readers want the thrill of the twist, but we have to say “Oh, I totally should have seen that coming!” When we change the rules late in the game, there’s no way anything can be inevitable, because it has no foundation. We haven’t laid the groundwork, so it’s all new, and it’s unsatisfying.

So, what do you think? Have there ever been moments, in books or TV or movies, where you feel the writers changed the rules at the last second? Did it ruin it for you, or were you able to still enjoy the ending?