Posted by: C.D. Reimer
on 5 Jul 2009
The political world got turned upside down this week when former 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin announced that she was resigning as governor of Alaska. There's a lot of speculation on why she would resign 18 months before the end of her first term and what she should do with her immediate future. Family concerns, the 2012 presidential election, and a possible ethics scandal are the top three.
My advice is for Palin to move her family to California, run for governor in 2010, clean up the state budget mess that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had failed to fix since 2003, and claim Ronald Reagan's legacy by running for the presidency in 2012.
Seriously, if the Governator can't clean up in Sacramento, maybe Caribou Barbie can do a better job.
(Otherwise, I'm supporting Tom Campbell to win in next year's governor election.)
Posted by: C.D. Reimer
on 4 Jul 2009
I read the reviews from the The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle describing the new "Ice Age: Dawn of The Dinosaurs" movie as being scientifically inaccurate because the last great ice age occurred after the dinosaurs been wiped out by a meteor. Funny. I thought this was entertainment rather than a documentary. Or maybe the reviewers are scientifically stupid?
I'm at a lost to understand why this movie is considered to be scientifically inaccurate because a pocket of dinosaurs continued to exist into the ice age. Such a situation is unlikely but not that far fetch. A possible new species of humanity, homo floresiensis, was discovered on an island in the Far East. The ancestors of these small people settled there during the ice age when the ocean levels were low, and, isolated from the rest of humanity after the ice age, evolved into a new species. They lived until about 12,000 years ago when a possible volcanic eruption wiped them out, which is fairly recent in geological time.
I enjoy the Ice Age movies only to see the squirrel in his pursuit of the acorn that is always out of his reach. This time he has new female competitor/lover for the acorn with the opening scene set to "You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine" by Lou Rawls (there's an instrumental tango version of this song later on). During the course of the movie, we see them going through all stages of love until they forget all about the acorn. When domestic bliss becomes too much of a burden, chasing the acorn becomes more appealing. I once took a date to a hole in the wall jazz club when I was in college. The woman jazz singer was describing all the different stages of love, and we left at midnight when she was describing how love sucks. The way the movie ends with the squirrel losing both the acorn and the love interest reminded me of that moment.
As for the rest of the movie, I really didn't care. All the fat jokes got replaced by penis jokes. (Not that I can complain too much about that since I wrote a novella about a chain-smoking vampire hunter with a wooden stake in his pocket that's a phallic fantasy when looking up a dream dictionary.) The only bright spot was the swashbuckling Buck the weasel voiced by Simon Pegg, with the best lines, characterization, and action scenes. The 3D work was handled exceptionally well in comparison to other 3D movies that came out this year.
As for scientifically accuracy, I would care only if this movie was a documentary.
Posted by: C.D. Reimer
on 30 Jun 2009
June has been quite a busy month for me as a writer. I finished the rough draft of my first novel at the first half of the month. I finished my vampire novella after two years of on-and-off work, wrote four new short stories, and tossed everything into a short story collection at the second half of the month.
The vampire novella was my first attempt to write something longer than 3,000 words. I struggled for the first year to make the story coherent but it didn't go anywhere. Before I started writing my first novel, I made a serious effort to get the novella into shape with the eighth draft coming in at ~120 pages and ~23,000 words. After spending a year writing 665 pages and 120,495 for my first novel that I wrote straight through without looking back (my first reader confirmed that the rough draft is a sprawling mess), I knew how to finish editing the novella.
For a marathon two weeks, I edited two more drafts. The tenth draft came in at 97 pages and 20,000 words. I had to trim back to reach that particular word count. There are approximately a half dozen print publications where I can submit a story of that length. If those markets won't accept the story, then I will find an ebook publisher where that length is a popular size. (I'm still somewhat old fashioned about wanting to physically handle the manuscript and see my work in print.) I learned more about editing in the last two weeks then I have in the last three years.
With the completion of the novella, my short story collection was also completed since the novella represents second half of the book. Since I had time to kill between finishing this and starting the rough draft of my second novel (tomorrow, July 1st), I had a creative burst to write four more stories of various lengths over the weekend. The collection has 27 short stories and one novella (251 pages and 47,550 words), representing three years of hard work.
A short story collection is like the bastard child of the publishing industry. If a best selling author has a collection, no problem. But if a new author is trying to shop a collection, forget about it. That's probably because the graduates of the literary writing programs are too busy shopping around their collection while floundering around to write their first novel. Since I didn't graduate from one of these programs, I'm not morally obligated to flog my collection around the marketplace. With only three stories published or slated for publication, I want to get more of my stories published first before the collection is published.
The purpose of my collection is to define a writing milestone I can look back on, and something I can give to an agent if I get contacted before I go agent hunting next year with my finished first and second novels.
Posted by: C.D. Reimer
on 26 Jun 2009
When the news that Michael Jackson had died broke yesterday, my initial response was in this tweet.
"Who wants to bet that Michael Jackson's death will push the Iranian election out of the U.S. news?"
Less than 24 hours later, the U.S. news media is saturated with stories about Michael Jackson. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
The real death yesterday was the Iranian election protest movement in the U.S. news media. The lead story was how the now illegitimate Iranian government was systematically shutting down the protest movement by beating, gassing and shooting protesters, arresting anyone who had shown support against the election result, and suppressing all news reporting in the name of restoring order. Today, in the wake of Michael Jackson's untimely death, you have to hunt for the lead story—if there is one—in the U.S. news media.
Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett both died this week. But neither one of them had the same paparazzi-fueled celebrity cachet of Michael Jackson to push the Iranian election protest out of the U.S. news media—and the American consciousness. Why is it that U.S. news media is so eager to switch away from a protest movement that might change the balance of power in the Middle East if given the opportunity to blossom, flourish and moderate the tone of an anti-Western government?
With the illegitimate Iranian government cracking down on the opposition news media, restricting journalists access to people and protest sites, and sending international journalists out of the country, there's no one on the ground to report the news. The traditional U.S. news media had to rely on the non-traditional sources like Twitter and YouTube. Technology that wasn't around during the Tiananmen Square protest movement in China twenty years ago (except for one video that made popular culture). Now Iranian citizens can bypass the restrictions of their own corrupt government to report the news to the outside world. Citizen journalism has always been regarded as inferior to traditional journalism for lacking the ethical training to report the story without bias (which seems to be an endangered species as the media companies promote controversies to gain market share and sell advertising), but citizens can get into areas of society where a government-authorized press badge cannot.
Not only has technology undermine the U.S. news media traditional role as gatekeepers of what is seen and heard in America, they can be shellacked into providing more coverage. Both CNN and MSNBC been criticized for not having relevant weekend coverage during the height of the protests when people wanted more news. With Michael Jackson's untimely death, who represented the best and the worse of American society, the U.S. news media can now conveniently switch away from the serious to the frivolous while the illegitimate Iranian government can breath a sigh of relief that they can continue to consolidate power without the harsh glare of the U.S. news media shining down on them.
Posted by: C.D. Reimer
on 20 Jun 2009
My family gathered today for an early birthday party for my great-nephew, Travis, who will turn two in July, and a Father's Day celebration. As Travis had learned how to run before walking, he already started in on being a Terrible Two to the dismay of his parents. Since his mother and three of her coworkers all got pregnant at the same time, there were four Terrible Twos running around the place. Only the adults with cameras outnumbered the Terrible Twos to prevent them from overrunning the neighborhood.
I gave my Dad a rough draft copy of my short story collection (23 short stories and a novella from the last three years) in a binder. He haven't read any of my stuff. When he saw what I was giving him, he said: "I don't need a binder."
That made me paused. My Dad is a very practical person. If he really needed a binder, he wouldn't hesitate to recycle whatever was inside for toilet paper. (He did install a new toilet in his trailer yesterday.) The irony was not lost on me as a writer. My work may very well be appreciated in other ways in my immediate family. The dedication page is made out to my mother. Her death from breast cancer in March 2004 helped me find myself as a writer. (No doubt some hidebound critic will criticize my collection as "therapy stories" or worse.) That alone should prevent my Dad from recycling the pages—or keeping only that one page before disposing the rest.
