Birthday Reflections

Posted on February 24, 2017 by Michael R. Underwood

It feels weird to have a birthday and focus on joy with the current political climate, but the concert I went to last night was 100% what I needed. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Pulse events present orchestral music in a fresh, accessible way, and last night they played alongside Lake Street Dive.

I listened to classical pieces (new and old) that I’d never heard and got to lose myself in the richly textured performances. Next was Lake Street Dive themselves, a band of classically-trained performers who have found solid success in popular music, thanks to technical skill, great songwriting, and a lead singer with a truly singular voice. This set was far more rocking than the festival show I saw several years ago as they were starting to break out. It brought me so much joy to see them pack and captivate a 2,000+ person room.

And then, after 100 minutes of amazing music performing each on their own, the BSO and Lake Street Dive combined for a short set of LSD’s songs with 20 performers on stage. Lake Street Dive’s music is already textured and dense, and with 5x as many instruments, the magnified effect was transcendent.

But it wasn’t just the music that made the night. Before the show, there were local food vendors and local performers, like a mini indoor festival.Food, drinks, and then unforgettable music.

But that wasn’t the end.

After, we got to go backstage.

The friend whose +1 I was knows one of the bandmates, and so we got to meet and chat with each of them. I found out that the guitarist and the guest keyboardist are both SF/F fans, so we talked science fiction, the differences between prose and music, writing across media traveling for work.

The whole night was a magnificent, life-affirming event that reminded me of the power of the arts. I’ve spent so much time these last few months on the day-to-day short-term resistance – calling, sharing info, etc. All important stuff. But to keep from burning out, I need to resist through art as well as the day-to-day. To celebrate & remember what we’re fighting for.

So the birthday gift I need to give myself is permission to rotate off the front lines and make art. I’ll still make my calls, but the last few months have been utterly exhausting, reacting to every new indignity and making dozens of calls per week to rouse my reps to action. I’ve been recovering from surgery, which has kept me from the protests, but I’ve been no less active for it.

It would be easy to focus entirely on art, but I want to fight the short-term and on the cultural level. As with many things, balance. So that’s my goal for this year. To find and maintain a balance. To live fully without burning out or hiding behind my privilege.

Kameron Hurley, a brilliant fiction writer and one of the sharpest, clearest voices in SF/F, has talked about her strategy for getting through the Trump era – she talks about how she imagines herself 30~ years from now, looking back on who she was and what she did to get through all of this. And then she tries to figure out what it will take to get through to that future.

What we do right now will be remembered. Not just personally, but by our families, our friends, our neighbors, and by the world. Most of us would prefer to live in peaceful times, to never know a massive upheaval. But that is not the world we live in.

So this year, I will fight, I will live, I will laugh, I will love. I will make art and phone calls, I will go to conventions and to rallies. I will geek out with my friends about comics and share information about executive orders or legislation.

This push for balance is not some revolutionary new idea – activists and civil rights advocates have had to find this balance throughout history. I’m just a bit late to the game, like many of us are. But we’re in this together, and there are people who have been fighting the good fights for many years, people we can support and learn from.

So if you need permission to take a break, like I did, this is me giving you permission. As the resistance shifts from the rage of the inauguration and the flurry of horrendous initial actions to the sustained opposition and campaigning for run-offs/special elections this year and the big races in 2018, we’ll all need to take care of ourselves and one another to make it through this.

Because we can do this. The DJT White House and the GOP have abandoned their duty to the American people, but we’re still here, we have the numbers and the tools to protect the vulnerable, and if we can survive to 2018 with elections about as fair as we had in 2016 (noting that the 2016 elections had major problems in voter suppression, gerrymandering, and voter intimidation), the resistance can win, and can hold DJT accountable where the GOP won’t.

And the Content Wars Continue

Aside

I’ve talked before about the Content Wars in media – the fight for exclusive content, of capturing, holding, and monetizing attention with subscription models, walled garden marketplaces, and so on.

It behooves writers, readers, and all media consumers/producers to stay abreast of what’s going on in the broader business landscape for creatives.

Which is why I wanted to point out this Tumblr article by musician Zoe Keating.

The music industry is not the publishing industry, so I’m not saying this precise model will be replicated in publishing with services like Kindle Unlimited, Oyster, Scribd, etc.

But among other things, it’s a good reminder to be aware of the partnerships you’re making, and that aggregators, distributors, and retailers (Google, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Kobo) are not your friends. They are businesses looking out for their own best interests. And if you are beholden to any one of them for too much of your business/reach/content, it can and often does end poorly.

How to Write a Novel in a Month

Posted on October 28, 2014 by Michael R. Underwood

Hi folks! Since NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, I thought I’d re-post and expand on my piece from earlier this year, How to Write a Novel in Four Weeks.

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I wrote the first draft of Hexomancy, the third Ree Reyes novel, in a month and a day (April 14th to May 15th). The draft was 72,326 words, and it was written in twenty-eight days of production (I gave myself Saturdays off to recover, and I had a couple of low-production days).

Hexomancy was written twice as quickly as any novel I’ve written before, and I think the first draft was stronger that any other, as well, partially thanks to the accumulation of experience, but also due to the power of momentum. After the first couple of days, I was averaging 2,800 to 3,300 words a day in two sessions a day of around 45 minutes to 60 minutes each.

Here are some factors that went in to my being able to write a complete, if short, draft in just over a month of calendar time.

1) Hexomancy was the fourth Ree Reyes story, following two novels and a novella. By now, I know the characters, they have pre-existing relationships that I can leverage into lots of tension and sparks, making interpersonal scenes zoom along fairly well. I had a clear vision of what the big concept for the novel was, what the major sub-plot would be, and what the big, explosive ending would be. Those all got me very excited to write the novel, so I started with a ton of energy, writing 15K words in the first week.

2) The series is designed to be light, energetic, and action-packed urban fantasy. Much of the setting is our own world, and most of the rest of the setting I’d already created in previous books in the series. This means I didn’t have to do much world development on top of what I already had, which might slow me down as I have to create whole new systems or settings before moving on with a scene. I broke down the new settings during the outline stage, so I knew enough about each of them to flesh them out on the fly as I wrote. If I were writing sociological SF that was light on action and long on politics, I don’t think I’d have been writing anywhere near as fast. But the important thing was that I was passionate about the story, the characters, and I knew what kind of experience I wanted the reader to have with the story, so I could write to that aesthetic.

3) Most importantly (for me), I outlined the whole novel before I started writing. This was a chapter-by-chapter outline, though some of my chapters were more like beats, as I discovered going through and seeing places where a beat was a chapter, or a chapter turned out to be just a beat. I’ve been outlining more and more for my work, between reading Rachel Aaron’s 2K to 10K, following Chuck Wendig’s TerribleMinds, and perhaps most importantly, taking the Writing on the Fast Track class with Mary Robinette Kowal, which focused on writing fast by outlining and training for better discipline.

4) Writing quickly meant that I always had the story in mind. I was always excited about the story, even on the days when I consciously stepped away to relax and let myself recovery. But I never spent too much time away from the novel, writing six days a week, usually twice a day. And I always left myself clues at the end of any session as to what was going to happen next, by leaving the outline/beats at the bottom of my Scrivener document. That meant that whenever I started a session, I could take three to five minutes to read what I’d last written and to remind myself what was coming next. And from there, it was off to the races.

5) I used a writing soundtrack – this is something I have done for years, and it helps me get into the right frame of mind. If you’re curious, here’s the playlist I used for Hexomancy.

The Musical Life

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Michael R. Underwood

I come from musical people. Not just Musical People (Broadway, etc.), but music people. My parents met doing musical theater, my little sister is likely to study Vocal Performance/Musical Theater at college, I’ve performed in musicals and spent more than ten year in various choirs.

Even though I’m five years out from my last music gig, music still has an incredible impact on me. Even being a writer, music is still the form most likely to get me from emotionally neutral to teary in 60 seconds flat.

I’ve talked before about the fact that I write to music. In fact, music is so integrated into my process that I seldom really feel like I have my head wrapped around a story concept until I’ve settled on at least a small handful of songs that take me to the right mental/emotional headspace.

Here’s some music that’s gotten me moving and kept me writing in the last few months:

Postmodern Jukebox “Die Young”

Daft Punk ft. Farrell Williams “Get Lucky”

Amy McNally Hazardous Fiddle

Grace Potter & The Nocturnals “Stars”

Two Steps From Hell Archangel

Gamer Girl/Country Boy — Geek and Sundry music video

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Michael R. Underwood

One of this week’s offerings from the Geek and Sundry YouTube channel is a music video for a song called “Gamer Girl, Country Boy” by Felicia Day and Jason Charles Miller.

Watching the video, in addition to being amused, I found myself thinking that this would probably become a theme for the GEEKOMANCY readers who ship Ree and Eastwood (of which I know there are more than one).

Glee as Fantasy

Posted on June 12, 2010 by Michael R. Underwood

I posit that Glee is a fantasy television series, in that it can be fruitfully evaluated using a focus on its non-mimetic narrative style to both comment on the traditions of the musical genre (especially the Hollywood Musical) but also in discussing “Music as Magic” and the way that said magic can be transformative, liberating, and revelatory.

From the ubiquitous piano player — “He’s always just around” to the fact that in Glee, seemingly everyone can instantly learn arrangements and choreagraphy and the elaborate fantasy sequences which bleed in and out of the diegesis, we have what could be described by some as Slipstream, some as Urban Fantasy, and possibly even Magical Realism (though less so on that one, given what I see as a lack of a definitive tie to the fairly culturally-specific tradition of Magical Realism).

Why does this matter?

1) If Glee is a fantasy series, then the places/times when it diverts from realism can be seen not as a violation of believability inspiring a rolling of the eyes, but a demonstration of the times when life is not enough and extra-normal storytelling is required. This brings back my beloved Etienne Decroux quote:

“One must have something to say. Art is first of all a complaint. One who is happy with things as they are has no business being on the stage.” — Etienne Decroux

And to paraphrase my former professor John Schmor, Musicals are a complaint that life should be more marvelous — why don’t we just burst into song when mere speech can no longer contain our emotional intensity?

2) It allows Glee to be more easily analyzed in the context of other SF/F musicals such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Once More With Feeling,” Fringe’s “Brown Betty” and so on.

3) It allows the use of the scholarship regarding the metaphors of the Fantastic to be applied t the series. It also enables scholars to bring to bear Samuel R. Delany’s notion of SF/F as a literature that allows for the “literalization of the metaphor” — music is soul-healing, music is empowering, music enables people to express themselves in ways they had previously/traditionally not been able.

These are merely preliminary thoughts. Look for more in time, as I believe this approach is the one which allows me to most effectively analyze the series.

Glee = Win

Posted on October 23, 2009 by Michael R. Underwood

FOX’s new offering Glee debuted a pilot episode earlier in the year and made it available online throughout the summer, and responded to initial positive responses with a very strong and pervasive advertising campaign which continues even now.

It’s impressive to think that a weekly musical television show could get this positive a response, but there are a lot of reasons to love the show.

1) If you are a musical theatre fan, the chance to see it on network primetime is inspiring and delightful.

2) If you aren’t a musical theatre fan, the show offers constant laughs with compelling laughs.

3) Jane Lynch portrays the shows main antagonist, the coach of the national-attention-winning cheerleading team (aka the Cheerios). Lynch is given reign to cut loose and portray a vicious competitive scheming selfish heel of a character — and she revels in it. Lynch’s Coach Sylvester is one of the strongest parts of the show.

4) The way that the musical numbers are integrated into the show are mostly diegetic, given the focus on a glee club, but there are some breakout fantasy numbers, such as “Bust Your Windows” when diva-licious Mercedes is rejected by the fashion-forward Kurt, or head Cheerio Quinn’s crazy-go-nuts anthem railing against her treatment by her boyfriend and others in general

5) The showrunners and writers keep on finding new ways of eliciting laughter and delight from the audience. Last week, we had Jane Lynch in a zoot suit, “I Could Have Danced All Night” sung in a dress shop by the adorable Jayma Mays while dancing, and the glorious Slushee War.

6) The show’s musical selection ranges from classic rock “Don’t Stop Believing” to contemporary hip-hop “Gold Digger” and a strong but not overwhelming sampling of musical theatre numbers such as “Maybe This Time” and “Tonight.” Upcoming numbers include “Defying Gravity” from Wicked (not the TV show by the same name — that’s another blog post).

7) Characters originally introduced in an antagonistic role are frequently fleshed out into sympathetic characters, including head cheerio Quinn, coach Tanaka, football bully “Puck”, Will’s wife Terri, and even the dread Sue Sylvester has her pensive moments. Few characters are universally good or universally villainous — our protagonists are flawed, lie and cheat for understandable if misguided reasons, and generally act like high schoolers — even the adults.

8) Despite this ambiguity, it’s very hard not to root for the Glee kids, and most see the dissolution of Will’s marriage as an inevitable precursor to the more-inevitable union of charming Glee coach Will and adorably OCD guidance counselor Emma.

It’s Both Good and Popular! Amazing!

There are more reasons to love the show, and Glee’s popularity is written nearly everywhere — critical praise abounds, it consistently trends in the top 10 topics on Twitter the nights of its episode airings, and most importantly, it’s ratings are consistently strong, consistently earning a 4.X rating and 7 share and a 3.X/9 among the coveted 18-49 demographic. The show was the first new show of the season to (publically) receive an order for the back 9 episodes — and the first DVD set (collecting episodes 1-13) has already been solicited). Another important facet of the show’s success is that the musical numbers from the show are made available on iTunes and consistently reach best-seller levels in that market. The show is another example of Most Repeatable Programming (ala Steven Johnson), where small moments/reaction shots may be missed without multiple viewings, and it’s easy to see why people would watch and re-watch (including Hulu) given the selfless-smile-inducing musical numbers.

If Glee is able to maintain its current balance of drama and humor, delightful musical numbers and ridiculous antics, it’s likely to survive for several years. In times of economic and social instability (recession, massive conflict over health care reform, gay rights, etc.), a happy, inspiring show is an easy pick for success.

After all, as the dearly departed Irene Adler, long-time coach of the McKinley Glee Club (inc. during Schuester’s time) saif,

“Glee, by its very definition, is about opening yourself up to joy.”

(P)review: Glee

Posted on May 28, 2009 by Michael R. Underwood

I’ve maintained for a few years now that the world needs more high-profile musicals. It’s certainly due to my own bias, but every so often, a show/film/whatever that reminds me why I love the genre.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes about creating art, from Etienne Decroux, known for his Corporeal Mime style:

One must have something to say. Art is first of all a complaint. One who is happy with things as they are has no business being on the stage. — Etienne Decroux

In addition to its own argument, any musical can be seen as an argument that we need more music and wonder in our lives — by positing a universe where people are able to delve into emotion and express it through song and dance.

Glee achieves this effect not by the unrealistic approach of expecting everyday people to burst into song in unison and perfectly execute choreagraphy that didn’t exist five seconds before, however. It contextualizes the musical theatre genre within actual musical theatre — in this case a High School Glee club in the fictional McKinley High School of Lima, OH.

The members of the Glee club are outcasts and outsiders who don’t fit in anywhere, as well as the odd-man-out for the outsiders — Finn Hudson (Cory Montieth) the quarterback of football squad, who has cultivated a love of music from an early age.

The show is quirky, cute, fun and inspirational, with compelling oddball characters well cast and well-performed. Especially outstanding are Jane Lynch as Sue Sylvester, the coach of the socially dominant “Cheerios” cheerleading squad, Lea Michele as Rachel Berry, self-styled ingenue, and Jayma Mays as Emma Pillsbury, the cute OCD school counselor with feelings for the Spanish-teacher director of the glee club.

In what I can only hope will be a tradition for the show, two pieces from the Pilot are available as iTunes downloads — a rival glee club’s rendition of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” and the McKinley glee club’s version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”, well-chosen for its ability to be a theme not just for the pilot, but the whole show.

Glee is a quirky, oddball show full of underdogs. Initial response to the show is very positive, and there is a lot to be positive about. I encourage readers to look for the pilot episode on Fox.com and Hulu, then watch the show as it continues this fall.

enre

Review — Portal

Posted on October 28, 2008 by Michael R. Underwood

The Cake is a Lie.

Underneath a clever physics game is gleeful homicidal glee with a cute voice. Valve’s Portal, originally packaged in with Half-Life: The Orange Box, is a gem of a game that earned countless accolades last year.

Portal takes the simple idea of a two-way portal gun and makes a whole (if short) game around it, showing off their physics engine and their dark sense of humor.

In Portal, the closest thing you get to a weapon is the portal gun, which can shoot at a plane and create a portal on that plane, which connects to the other end of the portal, which you also deploy. This lets you get up high to push buttons, or to send plasma balls around corners to activate switches, or to jump through the portal so you can jump through the portal again and use the accumulated velocity to jump up to new platforms. The game is a clear test of the user’s physics knowledge and critical/spatial problem solving skills.

I also think it should be used in Physics classes world-wide, as possible. The idea of vectors, conservation of momentum, and many other principles of physics are at work in Portal.

But if Portal were just a physics tutorial in game form, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun. Along the way, your guide/host/jailkeeper is GlaDOS, an erratic computer that talks you through the early puzzles, unraveling to reveal its sadistic streak and its nature as the architect of countless attempts on your character’s life. Physics experiments to test the portal gun and human ingenuity give way to the increasingly dangerous tests, where the player is prompted to design complex plans of layered portal use, planning several steps ahead.

Portal is the exact kind of video game that Steven Johnson (of Everything Bad is Good For You) declares as laudable — not only does the player have to explore and probe the world of the game, they are forced to think critically, implement their spatial awareness/intelligence, and are rewarded for their cleverness but also their curiosity, as occasional glimpses behind the curtains reveal previous test-subjects desperate scrawlings on the walls between the test areas, writings that indicate GlaDOS’s hidden agenda, the virtues of the companion cube (a weighted cube that is used as the only other tool at the character’s disposal), and most of all, that

The Cake is a Lie.

“Still Alive,” the game’s theme song, has become a geek music classic, makings its way through the livejournal/blogosphere shortly after the game’s release, and helping to catapult Geek Rocker Jonathan Coulton (who wrote the song) into the limelight within the subculture. Another indicator of “Still Alive”‘s fan appeal can be seen in the fact that it was released as a free downloadable track for the game Rock Band.

The game is now available for download on XBox Live arcade, which is how I played it. It is more than a mere tech demo wrapped in a thin game shell, and that elevation is thanks to tone and style– if GlaDOS had been unironic and uninflected, she/it would have been just another stereotypical computer-gone-evil. Instead, she has earned a place as an iconic computer-gone-evil, appearing beside favorites such as HAL9000

Everything interesting about Portal adds up to a charmingly demented game that will make you laugh while you’re running around trying not to get blown up and figuring out how to arrange portals so you can get to the next room.