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I haven’t a clue where I would find the time or energy for this, but…

As a means of challenging myself a little, as well as providing some regular original content for my web site, I’ve been thinking of doing something I’m calling the ABCs of Fantasy. (Inspired by both the ABCs of Horror anthology film, and the various ABC blogging challenges.)

It would work thusly:

1) People send in suggestions for a word starting with the relevant letter. Said word (using C as an example), could be a mythical place (Camelot, Carcossa), a historical place (Coventry), a culture (Celts), a mythical figure (Cu Chulainn), a historical figure (Charlemagne), a mythical creature (cockatrice, Cerberus), a mythical item (Caliburne), a fantasy concept (conjuring), a writing concept (cliche), or basically anything else that could reasonably come from, or be applied to, fantasy. Creativity and outside-the-box suggestions would be encouraged.

(It could also be a modern fantasy character, but it would have to be one of mine, since I don’t have the rights to anyone else. So, sticking with the above examples, C could be Corvis Rebaine.)

2) After a week of people sending in suggestions, I would then put the various suggestions up for a vote (with some judgment on my part; see below). After a week, the word with the most votes wins, and I would then write a piece of flash or short fiction somehow involving, incorporating, or representing that word.

(I would reserve the right to omit from the voting anything profane, racist, or otherwise objectionable to me.)

Said story would be written during the following week, while people were sending in word suggestions for the next letter.

3) Said story would be posted for free on the site.

(I might, on occasion, post a guest story in place of one of my own, if one of my author friends has an idea for a chosen word and would like to participate.)

The intent would be a tiny story every two weeks, but I wouldn’t guarantee it. Real life–and real deadlines–come up.

Now here’s the thing. If I decide to do this, if I decide I can somehow dredge up the time and energy, it only works if I get serious audience participation, as well as help spreading word of the series. So–again, with the understanding that this may or may not happen; nothing’s decided yet–what I need to know now is, would you participate? Would you send in suggestions, vote on them, maybe comment on the resulting fiction, etc.? Does this concept even interest you? Please answer honestly; I need a genuine sense of whether I’d be wasting my time or not.

Those of you on my Facebook page or Twitter have recently seen me ranting a bit about horror movies. You’ll have seen some of this before, but by no means all of it.

In trying to recharge my brain, in the midst of multiple big projects, I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies (mostly supernatural horror, which is far an away my preference). And I’m starting to get seriously frustrated with them, almost enough–at times–to make me swear off the whole bloody lot.

Point the first: End your Goddamn movie!

You can have a happy ending. You can have a grim ending. You can have an ambiguous ending. You can have an open ending. All of those are fine in horror (but see point two). But guess what, guys? You still have to have some sort of ending!

Cutting to credits in the middle of a scene, where a few of the main characters are still alive and no actual plot points have been resolved beyond "Lots of people died"? That’s not an ending. That’s lazy. It’s bad storytelling. If there’s not something that tells the viewer "This is why the story ends here," it’s not an ending. And your movie, no matter what has led up to that point, is a bad one.

Now, on a purely personal level, I really don’t much care for the "Introduce a bunch of characters, kill off all but one or two, make it look like they’re going to survive, then kill them and roll credits" technique. To me, that’s almost not an ending; it escapes qualifying as the above problem by the skin of its teeth. And it annoys the crap out of me. But, as I said, I recognize that as subjective opinion.

Point the second: Did you know that horror doesn’t have to be nihilistic?

Horror is one of the few genres where you can get away with really grim, downbeat endings. The protagonists are all dead. The monster wins. The world’s destroyed. The hero’s soul is doomed for all eternity, trapped inside a haunted bidet. Whatever.

Problem is, the fact that it’s accepted has made it common, and the fact that it’s common has made it a crutch.

If your ending is good, make it as grim/downbeat as you like. Again, that’s one of the genre’s strengths. But a lot of horror scripts seem to have down endings because it’s easier. Once again, it’s lazy writing.

It’s easy to kill everyone off. It’s easy to go for that last jump scare. It’s easy to do, and it’s just as easy to do badly. You know what happens when it’s done badly? It makes the whole movie utterly meaningless. It becomes a non-ending, as above, because the whole film has become a non-story. If you’r going to do it, you need to do it in such a way that it still feels like the actual story has reached an actual end, not like you ran out of characters.

You know what’s a lot harder? A happy ending in horror that flows well and feels natural to the story. You know who tries to write the harder stuff? Better writers.

(No, I’m not saying if you don’t have a happy ending in horror, you’re a bad writer. I’m saying that if you have a horrific ending for no better reason than that it took less effort, or because you feel like you’re "supposed" to, you may need to polish your craft a bit.)

Also? When down endings in horror were a significant minority of endings, it upped the suspense level of every horror movie. You honestly didn’t know if the characters would make it or not. But now that they’re so damn common, and so often lazy? I’ve found it much harder to get invested in the characters or stories of the horror movies, because I’ve reached the point where I don’t expect anything they do to matter.

Before I go into point three, let me be clear: I am fully aware that point three is entirely subjective. While I have some opinion in points one and two, I maintain that the core of those points has some basis in the actual rules of storytelling. I make no such claim about point three; it’s entirely my own thing.

(You’re still wrong if you disagree, though.) 😉

Point the third: There’s enough damn injustice in the real world, thanks.

Did you notice above where I said that I vastly prefer supernatural horror? That’s largely because it simply falls more in line with my tastes. I’m a fantasy guy, and frankly, dark/urban fantasy and supernatural horror are the right and left hand of the same creature. I just enjoy it more, across the board.

That said, there’s another reason I prefer supernatural horror to horror with human "monsters." And that’s a question of, well… Justice, to be dramatic about it.

If it’s a ghost, or a zombie, or whatever, then I can deal with most kinds of endings, happy or grim. But if it’s a human? I despise horror movies where the human villain wins or gets away with it. Hate them. It makes me literally gut-clenching, want-to-hit-someone angry, to the point where it’s so unpleasant, it utterly ruins my experience of the movie. If the villain of a horror movie is human, they need to get their comeuppance in some shape, form, or fashion by the end, or else I’d honestly rather never even watch it. No matter how good it otherwise may be.

Along similar lines, I really don’t like stories of struggle to no avail (such as most of the "kill off the last character in the last shot" movies tend to be). Even if it’s a grim ending, I want the protagonists’ travails to have accomplished something. Again, personal opinion, but it’s a personal blog. 😛

Given all of the above? It’s getting harder to find supernatural horror that I enjoy. I’ve reached the point of looking for spoilers before I watch a movie. How self-defeating is that? To know how a horror movie, of all things, ends before watching it. But all the above frustrations have gotten so ubiquitous that I find it preferable to spoil myself than to run into one of said endings without warning.

So please, guys. At least points one and two, okay? I can work through the personal taste stuff on my own if you’ll stop trying to make me eat lazy writing along with it.

P.S. Less about endings than horror movies as a whole, but…

Supernatural horror shouldn’t try to explain everything, no. Leave some mystery, some stuff for the audience to ponder. But explaining too little? Leaving the audience without even a semi-clear idea of what happened? That’s not "Making the audience think." It’s not "deep." It, too, is bad, lazy writing.

Today, CCP–White Wolf’s parent company–pulled the plug.

Didn’t know White Wolf was still around? That’s understandable. They stopped publishing pen-and-paper RPGs some years ago. A great many of the staff went and founded Onyx Path, the company that is currently publishing the World of Darkness games, as well as Exalted, Scion, and other stuff. They’ve been a worthy successor.

But White Wolf still existed, in the form of people at CCP working on the Vampire MMO. Today, a huge number of them have lost their jobs, to say nothing of years of hard, thankless work that will now never see the light of day. The last formal vestige of White Wolf is gone.

This is a big deal for me (though certainly not nearly as big a deal as it is for the people who were laid off). Vampire: the Masquerade was the first non-D&D game that I got into long-term. (I’d played others, but only briefly or sporadically). It was the first RPG I played with the woman I’d later marry. It completely changed the way I thought about running games.

But more than that… White Wolf gave me my career. After years of failing to break into fiction, it was White Wolf–and Justin Achilli, specifically–who gave me my first professional writing shot. It was the freelance work for WW that led me to D20 work; the d20 work that led me to official D&D work; and it was through WW and Wizards of the Coast that i was finally able to get my foot in the fiction door.

Would it have happened without them? Maybe. But it wouldn’t have been the same, and anyway, it did happen with/because of them.

As I said, Onyx Path is a worthy heir. Heck, it’s many of the same people. I hope to work with them again in the future, and I wish them all the success in the world. But I’m still sorry to see the end of the company that started it all for me, and the effect it’s having on some very good, very talented people.

Farewell, old wolf.

There are a lot of places the new Star Wars movies could go. A lot of directions they could take. Plenty of options, plenty of ideas.

Let me tell you what is pretty much at the top of my list for options that would be absolutely the wrong idea.

(Well, my "worst realistic possibilities" list. I’m not counting things like Gungan Jedi or finding out that Jabba is Han’s twin sister.)

And the funny thing, it’s already been done. And it was a bad idea then, too.

Let us return to… I don’t remember. Some year in the early 90s. And a comic book series called "Dark Empire."

"Dark Empire" was quite popular at the time, and to this day, I cannot fathom why. I mean absolutely zero disrespect to the creative team–there was nothing wrong with the writing as such, or the art, or any of that. Nonetheless, it was an absolute travesty as a chapter of the Star Wars saga, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. Jar-Jar was less damaging to the saga than "Dark Empire."

So, back to the movies, my number one thing I do not want to see. I won’t be so hyperbolic as to claim it’s a dealbreaker–I’ll be standing in that line, and we both know it–but it’s close.

Do not, do not, do not, DO NOT bring back the Emperor. No miraculous survival. Sure as hell no clones. Not even whatever the Dark Side equivalent to the "Force ghosts" might be.

NONE OF THAT.

Vader’s sacrifice at the end of Return of the Jedi is the entire reason for the original trilogy to exist in the form we know it. (Stress "in the form we know it." Before Lucas decided Vader was Anakin, it would’ve gone differently, of course, but that would’ve made two of the three movies entirely different.)

It winds up being the focal point of all six movies we have to date. It is not only the single most meaningful decision point in the Star Wars saga, it was one of the archetypal such decision points in genre/popular culture. Period. Full stop.

Bringing the Emperor back, after that? In any way, shape, or form? It renders that sacrifice utterly meaningless.

I can already hear the arguments. "But it still showed his change of heart!" "But it still dealt the Empire a major defeat!"

Yes, this is true. It’s also not enough.

You cannot take away the primary accomplishment of that act, the single most impactful, important victory, and still claim it has the same meaning. It doesn’t change damage the story of that moment, but of that entire movie, and through that the entire series.

"Darth Vader killed the Emperor at the cost of his own life, in order to save his son."

It is not just a weakening of symbolism, but literally bad storytelling, to come along afterward and undo that. To literally undo a prior story.

Find a different direction to in the new movies, okay? Don’t try to recapture old glories. Create new ones.

Well, it’s taken me longer than I’d intended to put this up, but at least it’s here.

Guys, I cannot begin to thank you enough. The call for help I posted was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, but you all really came through with more generosity than I could have hoped. While things remain extremely tight, we were able to get through the immediate crisis due entirely to all of you who helped out.

No idea how I’m going to show my gratitude yet, but I’m damn well going to think of something. You’re all the reason I do what I do.

This is–in terms of both personal and professional pride–one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to write. That it comes in the middle of the holidays just makes it even worse.

As many of my fans and friends already know, I suffer from a number of health issues, both physical and emotional. For a large chunk of this year, the dosages on my depression meds were wrong, leading to a long period where I was far less functional than I should have been. One of the results of that was that I got less work done this year than I should have.

Well, on top of that, I have several payments that are past-due to me that have not yet arrived, and I’ve just had several months straight of unexpected expenses (personal, health-wise, pet-health-wise, and other).

Bottom line, we’re deep in the red and I’m not sure about basic expenses or rent next month.

I hate talking about this in public. I’ve stopped myself from deleting this blog entry several times already. Embarrassed doesn’t begin to cover it. But I need help, not just for me, but so I don’t let my wife–who’s always been overly supportive of me and my career–down.

If you want to help… Well, my preferred method, because I have some pride left, would be for you to purchase a copy of Strange New Words. Because it’s self-published, I get a larger portion of the purchase price than I do on any of my other books, and I get said royalties much sooner as well. I know a lot of you gave to the Kickstarter and thus have a copy already, but if you’re thinking of a holiday gift for the fantasy fans in your life, this would be one good option. You can find the book here, on Amazon, or here, on Smashwords, or here, on DriveThruFiction.

If you’d really prefer to just donate directly, my Paypal e-mail is am******@au****.com. Every tiny bit is certainly appreciated. But please do give some thought to picking up the book instead. It feels a little less like I’ve got my hat in my hand.

Thank you, all of you, for everything you’ve done. I hope my work has brought you–or will, in the future, bring you–enough enjoyment to make up for me asking this of you.

Yours in gratitude,

Ari Marmell

aka

Mouseferatu

–Rodent of the Dark