1 Sept 2010 – Updates

Been really really REALLY busy lately.  At work it’s a case of having far too much to do and too little time to do things.  Not only have I been busy at work, but I have also been quite busy at my other desk.

I’ve got another active blog, my all sports blog, and I just finished a gigantic three-part series, a mid-season drivers’ review of the current 2010 Formula One season.  Writing about sports is something I hugely enjoy, and with the autumn coming up we’ve got the NFL and the NBA to look forward to.  The F1 season will also be reaching its exciting climax, so there will be a lot to write about then.

On top of Joe-Pinions:  Sports, I’m also quite busy writing “Echoes,” a novella-length fanfic based on V:  The Final Battle.  It’s easily the single biggest piece of writing I’ve ever done.  At the moment, it’s almost eleven chapters, ~130 pages long, with maybe three or four chapters to go, depending on how I plan to cut up the rest of the remaining plot points.  Some days the story writes itself, but on other days…  sometimes it’s very difficult to put down onto paper, so to speak.  The story’s main heroine really gets put through the wringer, and I have to confess that sometimes it’s quite soul-destroying trying to describe and elaborate upon the hell she has to go through.

Oh, to be the slave to one’s art…

Quick Slants – 16 Apr 2010 Edition

Today’s quick slants:

• I’m looking forward to a weekend of football (pro and college) on the PS3.
• It’s a shame that neither current-gen console football game is available on the PC.
• If not for the various non-racing sports game I love, I doubt I’d even have a current-gen console.  PC gaming just seems so much more fun to me.
• My broom (not a mop, since I wear my hair spiked up most of the time) of salt-and-pepper (thanks, dad, for the premature white hair gene) finally gets trimmed tonight, after work.
• More writing on tonight’s personal schedule, as well as some sim racing testing.  I installed a whole mess of race circuits and car types for rFactor recently, and I’ve got to get more familiar with netKar Pro as well.

While on my monumentally-scaled messenger run today, I was listening to 710 KSPN, to the LA Sports Live show with Andrew Siciliano and ex-L.A. Laker big man Mychal Thompson (MT is amazingly entertaining).  One of the topics discussed in today’s show was the fact that the NBA protects its superstars and gives them additional advantages, one of which is awarding them with “extra” foul calls in their favor, especially when these superstars are playing on their home courts.  Siciliano made the point that, if the NBA’s referees applied the rules strictly by the letter and called every infraction and every foul that occurred during the course of the game, then the games would be impossibly long, resulting in a boring show for the fans.  As both MT and Siciliano said, no one pays to see a free throw shooting contest.

This basketball student and fan strongly begs to differ.  Personally, I HATE the David Stern-issued edict that NBA superstars should be given extra favors, especially when it comes to officiating.

I think that Siciliano’s logic is asinine in the extreme; if nothing else, it suggests that he has never played in a sanctioned basketball competition (as opposed to pickup games) in his life.  Here’s the thing:  If the refs do indeed apply the rules with as much impartiality as possible, then there is a natural consistency in how the game is officiated, and therefore the players can adjust to the established standards the officiating crew establishes.  Call a given play one way every single time, and it thus becomes the player’s job to adjust to how that call is made.  A foul will always be a foul, traveling is always traveling, three seconds in the paint is always three seconds in the paint, etc.  The way things are (and have been ever since Stern became the commissioner and tacitly mandated the “protect and promote the superstars” edict in the 1980s), you call a given play one way if a non-superstar does it – say, Sasha Vujacic pushes off on his defender on a step-back jumpshot attempt -, then call it completely opposite when a superstar does the exact same thing (who can forget Michael Jordan pushing off on Bryon Russell in the NBA Finals?  I haven’t; nor have I forgiven such an egregious example of the shitty officiating standards in the NBA).

When you have inconsistent rules applications, the players can never adjust.  That’s when the players get frustrated, and educated fans get angry.  It’s like trying to hit a moving target through a smokescreen.  It also sends a terrible message:  The “haves” get even more advantages heaped upon them, and the “have-nots” get shafted.

And that’s just plain wrong, in my book.  And it always will be.

Quick Slants – 15 Apr 2010 Edition

Quick slants for today:

• I need a haircut.  Desperately.  Thankfully I’ll be getting one tomorrow.  Which is about a week and a half later than I usually get one on my typical schedule.
• Chapter 9 of “Echoes” is about 90% done.  Of the nine previous parts (“Echoes” has a prologue), this is the longest chapter by far.  At last count, Ch9 is a whopping twenty one pages long.  
• The danger with anything too long – whether we’re talking about movies, TV shows, books, chapters of books, songs, and even non-fiction – is that there is always a risk that whoever is reading or watching or listening will lose interest due to the sheer demand on their attention span.  Once your audience’s attention drops, it’s very difficult to recapture it.  

As a writer, you have to be conscious of this danger.  Failing to acknowledge this inevitably results in you losing your audience.  Obviously, this is the most undesirable condition.

How does one generate, sustain, and keep the audience’s attention?  An old college professor of mine who taught creative writing once told us, his class, that conflict and drama are the secret to good fiction.  If you are skillful at weaving tension into your plot and are good at describing your characters’ reactions to those tensions, you’re on your way to writing good, interesting fiction.

Quick Slants – 13 Apr 2010 Edition

Today’s quick slants:

• Something I always try to keep in mind whenever I’m writing fiction (this includes stories, song lyrics, and poetry):  Write what you know.
• An unfortunate consequence of this is coming up with something plausible, much less “truthful,” when writing from a woman’s perspective.  
• Being a man, despite whatever sensitivity I am able to muster, I’ve never been in a woman’s shoes, so it’s a little challenging to get into a woman’s head.  This is especially true when it comes to storywriting when the story’s central character is a woman.
• I don’t underestimate the importance of trying to understand the perspective of a female character.  Nor would any writer attempting to endow his/her work with a strong sense of verisimilitude, particularly when it comes to the credible portrayal of characters.

These aforementioned issues are part of my writer’s struggles in “Echoes,” my ongoing fanfiction project.  As alluded to above, the central character in “Echoes” is a woman.  Not only that, but she is a woman whose heroic journey figuratively takes her to Hell and back, as Dante does in Dante Alighieri‘s La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy).  While it’s fairly easy to come up with plot points and descriptions of scenarios and environments, it is far more challenging to portray a character’s reactions, especially if the character is female.  Foremost in my mind in writing these parts of the narrative is the question:  Is this what a woman would really feel, or is this just what I think she would?

I must remember to emphasize this very point with my crew of trusted reviewers and beta readers, many of whom are, indeed, women.