"8 Days": Keeping It Real

Basically, that big "V" word means you write about something like it's real.  You treat it real so that the reader accepts it as real, too.  Obviously, this is a must in science fiction.  Without it, scifi won't be taken seriously.

For something like 8 Days, it's needed in more ways than the obvious.  Since this is a story about the near future (2019), it can't feel too far flung from the present.  And since this is set in the real world, any interaction my characters have with the real world must feel real, too.

Thanks to Google Earth, it's easy for me to pick a route for bank robbers to follow in Des Moines.  I can choose a neighborhood for a family to live in Phoenix.  I can find grocery stores near an old lady's house in Little Rock.  But it's more than just that.

I had to learn a little bit about a steam power plant on the outskirts of Atlanta.  I studied up on the primate population at the Greensboro Science Center.  I know the names and faces of local TV anchors in several markets now.  The layout of the University of Florida in Gainesville.  NASA's Near-Earth Object program.  (The facts and figures laid out in a chapter featuring a Senate committee hearing are all true.  And a NASA director did recently say that Congress shouldn't "pour funds" into the NEO program.  And a lot of what the president and others say about the federal budget is completely true, too.)

Trying to "keep it real" did bite me on the ass, though.  While the president was always going to be a fictional character, I intended to surround him with real politicians.  Speaker of the House John Boehner put in an appearance, too.  Well, that didn't work out so hot.  I decided to go ahead and fictionalize all of the politicians.  (See if you can guess who the senators in the committee hearing chapter were originally supposed to be.)  But all of those TV anchors?  They're real.

Next week, I'll post about the two realizations that made me clutch my chest.  Also, as I wrap up my third and final reading/editing/rewriting session, I may give away the book before its Friday 10/30 release.

"8 Days": Tone

The tone of 8 Days was important to me.  Yes, there's an asteroid coming and the world freaks out.  But how does that feel?

Did I want to show wall-to-wall, drug-fueled partying, a la Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" music video?  Did I want to show masses of humanity, coming together, singing "Kumbaya" until the minutes tick away?  Did I want everyone to be utterly and woefully depressed about the whole thing?

It's easy to fall into any one of those realms, but I decided from the start that this would be an anthologized story.  Meaning, multiple tales involving different characters, but all reacting to the same basic circumstances.  So I can have party scenes with family scenes with depressing scenes.  Yay!

In a way, I took some storytelling inspiration from the HBO series The Leftovers.

Like 8 Days, it focuses on a single, worldwide event and the aftermath.  (In the show's case, it's a Rapture-like event dubbed The Sudden Departure.  Two percent of the world's population just vanished.)  If you've watched the show, it can be a very dour hour.  I mean, ... it can be emotionally taxing.  (But I like the show.  Really.)

It would have been easy for me to go down that same path.  Given the choices that people might make when they believe the world is ending, it would not be hard for the book to feel leaden with angst and strife.  Therefore, I took my inspiration from the show by not going down that path.  Yes, there's some dark shit.  There's some drama.  But I made sure that there was some lightness, too.

For a bit of the lightness, I took some additional inspiration from another HBO show.

You may notice there's some wisecracking in the scenes involving the president.  This, actually, isn't too far from the truth.  It's often said that people in very serious positions (police, doctors, etc.) resort to jokes to help them deal with the stresses of their work.  So I put some of that in here, too.


In the next post, learning about "verisimilitude."  And coming soon, a couple of near-cardiac events I had (one relating to the title, the other relating to the quality of the book).

"8 Days" for Real

This is some pretty good publicity for my book, I think:

NASA Predicts Huge Asteroid Will Just Miss Earth As It Zips Past This Halloween

No, for real.  It's the size of a skyscraper and astronomers just detected it a couple of weeks ago.  It'll miss us ... for now.

And check out what it looks like:

A skull.  That's awesome.

Man, I wish 8 Days was ready to distribute.  I could really capitalize on this.  Oh well.  I can have it ready by the asteroid's flyby, I believe.

"8 Days": Theme

Yes, you know that the main plot of 8 Days is that there's an asteroid coming to Earth, people freak out, the asteroid misses, and people have to live with their decisions.  That's not really a theme, though.

The theme is crisis.

Just about every phrasing with that word can be found.  Crisis of conscience, crisis of faith, identity crisis, family crisis ...

Well, not every kind of crisis.

It's a worldwide crisis and of real magnitude.  The phrase "first-world problems" is overused, but most of the issues here are far beyond that.  These crises affect everyone and how people react to these crises will affect everyone, too.

Also, not for nothing, this scene from The Dark Knight embodies a rather prominent theme in the book:


Coming soon, more posts on the book's tone and how I nearly had a heart attack after my first readthrough.

"8 Days": Inspiration

8 Days is my upcoming near-apocalyptic novel.  "Near-apocalyptic"?  Yes.  An asteroid is eight days away from hitting the Earth, people go nuts, and, oops, it misses.  The rest of the book is dealing with people's decisions during that time.

Where did I get the idea?  Oddly enough, a podcast.

Are you familiar with Impractical Jokers on TruTV?  What about the podcast Tell 'Em Steve-Dave?  A fixture on both is Brian Quinn.  His friend (and fellow Impractical Joker) is Sal Vulcano.  Brian and Sal have a podcast of their own, What Say You?

Click to visit

It's a lot of fun.  Anyway, at the beginning of episode 43, they started talking about the apocalypse and what they and other people might do with their limited time left on Earth.  At one point, Q talks about trying hard drugs, and Sal says, "What if you then get addicted to it, the most addictive thing in the world, ..."  And he paused just long enough for my mind to finish his sentence in my head: "And the asteroid misses."  That's not how Sal finished it, but my imagination took the hell off.

In fact, I don't remember too much else about that episode because I was thinking of all kinds of end-of-the world scenarios.  I thought about it all day and, when I got home, wrote some notes down to form a basic outline of a story.

Thus, 8 Days.

The good news is that I'm just about done.  A couple of chapters to finish, some minor restructuring, and then the editing process.  I aim to have it released by the end of the month.

More news and background coming soon.  Thanks.

MST3K, Rifftrax, CT, etc.: Hours of Riffing

As most of you know, I am a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and I help annotate riffs for the website AnnotatedMST.com.  I'm also a fan of many of that crew's subsequent projects, including Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax.

Recently, Rifftrax riffed their 200th film and that got me to thinking: how much time have the people involved spent working on talking over (mostly) bad movies?

So I did the math.

I'm looking at the time spent riffing on movies by the "main" people involved.  Joel Hodgson, Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Trace Beaulieu, Bill Corbett, Josh Weinstein (now known as J. Elvis Weinstein), Frank Conniff and Mary Jo Pehl.

(Apologies to the other writers, including Paul Chaplin, Bridget Nelson, Conor Lastowka, and Sean Thomason.  I know they've busted their butts, but it was hard enough focusing just on the people on screen.)

A caveat upfront.  Primarily, I went with some rather general times for the various shows.  Since we're talking hundreds of films, there's no way I'm going to look up the length of each movie and catalog it.  I'm not THAT obsessive.

Another thing: I'm looking at this two different ways.  First, I'll look at how much time they spend "on screen" talking at their subjects.  Then I'll examine how many hours of riffing they worked on.  Here's what I mean by that, by way of example: even though Mike didn't start hosting MST3K until episode 513, he worked as a writer since the first episode of season one.  So the first calculation will be Mike's time starting with 513 and the second will start with episode 101.

Here are the different shows as of July 17, 2015:

Mystery Science Theater 3000: 197 episodes, 1 feature film, 4 thirty minute specials.  Since I'm only concerned about the time spent riffing on the movies, I went with a time of 75 minutes for each episode and the film.  (Each show was two hours long, minus about thirty-five minutes of commercials and ten-to-fifteen minutes of host segments, intros, etc.)  The four half-hour specials I added up to be equal to one episode.  (I did not include the KTMA pilot, The Green Slime, because I am unsure of its actual length and the fact that no real riffing at all occurs during the theater sequences.)  I know there were a few other things the guys did, like riffing on a PlayStation promo and for a sports show ... I didn't include those times primarily because I forgot about them until just now, which is after I made the charts.  At most, we're talking about an additional half-hour for a few of the people.

Film Crew: a brief foray into riffing before Rifftrax, there were 4 episodes.  I decided to use 90 minutes for each as the figure.

America's Funniest Home Videos: Huh?  Yes.  Both Trace Beaulieu and Josh Weinstein wrote for the show for a few years, and what else is AFHV but riffing on amateur films?  Obviously, since neither Trace nor Josh were on screen for the show, those figures won't come into play until the second section.  I went with 15 minutes for each episode (since there's five-plus minutes of each with the host and the audience and subtracting commercials).

Cinematic Titanic: 14 different shows were written and performed, though only 11 were released to video.  (Come on!  I have to have the other three!)  I count all fourteen and consider each to be 90 minutes.

Rifftrax: Holy crap.  OK, there are 130 downloadable commentaries; 31 of the so-called "Rifftrax Presents" commentaries (meaning they're Mike-less); 97 downloadable video-on-demand films with riffs (I did my best to subtract the ones that were previously released as downloadable commentaries); 16 live shows; 5 episodes of Total Riff Off (TV specials aired on NatGeo Wild).  For the many, many films, I went with an estimate of 105 minutes ... an hour forty-five seems about right to balance out the shorter films versus the many two-hour blockbusters and the occasional three-hour epics they've done.  Also, I'll add in Total Riff Off as being 45 minutes each, plus there are a few other TV shows they've done and I'll fudge the numbers to 45 minutes on them as well.  (Another note: there are several films that were done multiple times.  For example, Night of the Living Dead.  It was released first with a Mike commentary, then a commentary was released with Mike, Kevin & Bill, then it was performed as a live show.  All three had different content, so I'm counting NotLD as three separate entries.)

Rifftrax Shorts: Seems worthy of being separate to me.  248 shorts.  Wow.  I'm going with 15 minutes each as the estimate here.

"ON SCREEN" RIFFING

(Again, this accounts only for the voices heard during riffing and not behind-the-scenes effort.)

(Click to embiggen; right-click here to download)

Yes, both TV's Frank and Pearl Forrester got a little bit of riffing time in during a couple of episodes of MST3K.  And, yes, Mary Jo Pehl has done a few Rifftrax, too.

A few other tidbits: during MST3K's so-called "Season Zero" on KTMA, there were three episodes in which Trace did not appear; one without Josh; one without Joel (leaving Crow and Servo to riff on the movie alone!); and another where Servo left in the middle of the movie to "bake muffins."

TOTALS (from highest to lowest):

1. Kevin: 628.5 hours  (26.19 days)
2. Mike: 581 hours (24.2 days)
3. Bill: 459.75 hours (19.16 days)
4. Trace: 205 hours (8.54 days)
5. Joel: 153.5 hours (6.4 days)
6. Josh: 61.625 hours (2.57 days)
7. Mary Jo: 25.5 hours
8. Frank: 21.25 hours

"ON AND OFF SCREEN" RIFFING

(Again, this accounts for the writers as well as performers.  Despite occasional absences during KTMA episodes, IMDB credits everyone so they all get credit from me.)

(Click to embiggen; right-click here to download)

Other than incorporating America's Funniest Home Videos, the only real changes here are to the MST3K totals.

As I said before, Mike was a writer almost from the show's inception.  Even though TV's Frank wasn't in the theater (except for briefly in Last of the Wild Horses), he was a writer for five whole seasons.  Mary Jo helped write for many episodes before she ever showed up as Pearl.  And Bill even co-wrote a few episodes in season six; years before the jump to SciFi Channel.

I know the process of writing riffs for movies takes far longer than just the hour and change it takes to watch the finished result.  There's no way I could calculate how long they actually spent slaving over Manos or The Room.  The final product will have to suffice for these calculations.

TOTALS (from highest to lowest):

1. Mike: 689.25 hours (28.72 days)
2. Kevin: 671.25 hours (27.97 days)
3. Bill: 464 hours (19.33 days)
4. Trace: 248.25 hours (10.34 days)
5. Mary Jo: 180 hours (7.5 days)
6. Frank: 157.25 hours (6.55 days)
7. Joel: 154.75 hours (6.45 days)
8. Josh: 99.75 hours (4.16 days)

IN CONCLUSION:

Why did I do this?  Hell if I know.  Maybe Torgo, Ortega, Norman and Gregory the Skunk teamed up to threaten me ... nah.

Seriously, though, I saw a post by Kevin Murphy reflecting on his time spent riffing things over these last 27 years, particularly since Rifftrax just did their 200th unique film.  It got me to thinking: just how much enjoyment have these people given me?  And, if I use charts and math, can I somehow sap said enjoyment from that effort?  I think the results speak for themselves.

To Joel, Mike, Kevin, Trace, Josh, Bill, Frank, Mary Jo, Bridget, Paul, Conor, Sean, Jim Mallon and everyone else ... thank you.

'8 Days': The first two chapters

8 Days is my next book and I've been working on it for about two weeks.  It's nowhere near being finished, but I'm very pleased with the progress so far.

In case you missed the earlier post on the subject, here's the story in a nutshell: "Imagine that the world is coming to an end in eight days.  What would you do with the time you have left?  Now imagine that those eight days pass and the world doesn't end after all.  How do you feel about what you've done?"

And, after the JUMP, I will post the first two chapters.  (Language warning, I guess, if that kind of thing bugs you.)

Enjoy!