Dark Karma

This could well be the end of our wretched fanboy saga.   The script is complete.

Technically, the first draft.  But I’ve made so many edits and major plot revisions while writing it that it feels more like a third draft.  Every time I took a significant detour from the treatment, I saved it to a new file.  Three detours.  Three files.  The third time’s the charm, they say.

I was aiming for a 45-page script.  The plot as outlined would’ve been longer, maybe twice as long.  Scenes were combined, condensed even more beyond the treatment stage, or simply cut.  And after all that, this completed draft is roughly 60 pages.

But it’s all a moot point.  Unless someone actually performs it.

So if anyone — anyone — anyone out there is reading my nonsense, speak out.  I’m attaching an Abode Acrobat file (PDF) of the Proteus Rising audio script. If you read it, I’d like constructive feedback.

And nicely.  Spambots, trolls, and other defective brain cases need not apply.  Causing trouble will only provide me with a data trail.  And some of my friends don’t wear white hats.

And of course, yet another disclaimer for writers, producers, and anybody working with the BBC.  We’re talking about an unproduced Doctor Who story.  This isn’t for your eyes.

And obviously, I’d love to hear from anyone interested in actually performing this thing.

I mean, c’mon.  Say hi.  Or  “cool!”  Or even the perennial “I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me.”

Because that’s what I was shooting for.

We return to our horrific tale of fanboy obsession and computer keyboard intrigue.

This is the second or third draft of this posting.  It turned into a loud, bitter rant.  But this should be about the story, not the noise or the foolishness that distracted from it.  So let’s get back to that.

I went through a lot of wrangling to hammer out the basics of this new version.  And even in the scripting change, I’m still banging on it.

Writing isn’t about perfection.  Writing is about getting the ideas out.  Get it all out.  Out of your head.  Outta yer system.   Screw perfection.  Put it down on the page.   Do it now.   All the clean-up — the tightening of bolts, the caulking of plot holes, gritting your teeth, cutting out the stuff you love but doesn’t work or moves too slow — that’s editing.  Edits come later.  Write it down first.

I point this out because of the shaky nature of this treatment. A synopsis is a quick sketch, summarizing the overall plot.  An outline can be done several ways, sometimes as a list of key plot points, or a scene breakdown that narrates key events.  A treatment is usually more detailed than all the rest, written like a short story, spelling out the drama.

If you’ve been following this blog thread from the beginning, you already know about the distractions that brought me here.   This treatment was written under the pressure of those distractions, in the hope of stripping all the rathole ideas and audience pandering that was holding the story down.

And even with that, it’s still kinda messy.  Writing.  Getting the ideas out.  So I’m going to throw in commentary, the sort of stuff people say when their place is a mess and they weren’t expecting guests.

And again, this is a Doctor Who story.  BBC employees, writers, and producers of a nervous disposition should be mindful of this.  But knowing that, and if you’re still interested, follow the jump: Read more »

We continue this sordid tale of scriptwriting and fanboy intrigue. Reader discretion is advised.

For the sake of context and clarity, we’ll briefly cover the history of the project. Details behind the BBC writer/producer story-protecting jump:

Read more »

Let me start with profound apologies to anyone who cares about this here empty space of mine, my personal blog. The last few years have been turbulent, full of all those things, as John Lennon once wrote, that happen while you make other plans. Personal and professional conflicts. Illness. And family losses, including my father. I wish I knew how to juggle blogging and all those other things at the time. But I’m here now.

And Facebook is one hell of a time sink. Hello, Facebook, by the way.

I return with a mission. I’m stuck with a story that probably won’t ever be produced. Two reasons. One, it’s a Doctor Who story and their writing assignments are by invitation only. The second reason: The exec producer of this fanfic project, Neil Marsh (not the showrunners of the actual BBC production), is into passive-aggressive behavior. He has run away. Rather than abandon this project yet again, I intend to finish it — here on this blog.

The next several postings will feature the work in progress. If you were ever curious how a story or a script is written (or how I write them), maybe they’ll be interesting. Normally, copyright concerns would keep me from doing something like this. But Doctor Who is a BBC property and I wouldn’t claim otherwise. This is partly an exercise to begin with, playing with somebody’s else concepts to see what can be done.

But I also wanted to prove the work was being done — and that it’s worth doing. Enablers and apologists can dismiss the work and the worth out of hand, I’m sure. They almost have to. Otherwise they’d have to re-evaluate who and what they’re enabling and excusing.

Therefore, all and sundry are on notice: If Neil insists on abandoning this project, it won’t be for lack of a great story.

Because it’ll be here, true believers. Stay tuned.

Snarky remarks have been made about my recent cat-related blog postings. Awfully sorry to whine about friends dying around me. And on my own personal blog. How selfish of me.

Here’s a little change of pace. Let’s talk about global warming.

A few months ago, I worked on a radio adaptation of John Campbell’s classic short story “Who Goes There?” Most people remember it as The Thing From Another World and The Thing. I set the script in the modern day, which referred to a frozen island that was now a mile further away from the coast of Antarctica than it had been a year before the story began.

I was never sure how controversial that little snippet of backstory was — within the cast or the audience. There were questions about some other science bits, but not that.

This afternoon I stumbled on a news item. Here are three articles:

Here in the fact-based world, the Wilkins Ice Shelf didn’t lose one or two measly square miles. It lost 160 square miles.

And the audience at the live show thought we were scary. Sleep tight, kiddies.

I’m awake on the first few hours of my birthday, and I’m confronted by two of my great obsessions– Charlie Chaplin and Doctor Who. Don’t worry; I can explain.

For those not familiar or not aware, Doctor Who was a science fiction TV produced in the UK, which ran for nearly 26 years. It was essentially a kid’s show, intended to teach science and history through the eyes of a time traveling scientist. Yup, the BBC beat Carmen Sandiego to the punch by 30 years.

The main character is known only as the Doctor. He had no name to speak of, many faces, and a mysterious past. Except for his two hearts, he seemed quite human. He travelled the cosmos with his time machine…or to be more precise, his TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension in Space.)

Most people think of a futuristic car or a Victorian buggy-type thing when you say “time machine.” But the TARDIS is a universe in a box, bigger on the inside than outside, capable of going anywhere in time and space. The Doctor’s TARDIS didn’t work all that well, though. It was in for repairs when he stole–er, borrowed it, so it’s hard to tell where you might end up. Or maybe the Doctor is a bad navigator. It’s anyone’s guess. The TARDIS was also supposed to disguise itself, but it got stuck in the shape of a British police public call box. So as you can see, it’s a mess.

Like the Doctor, the show went through many changes. It went from educational kid’s show to science fiction adventure after just one trip through time. Instead of wandering into living history lessons, he started confronting alien monsters. The first time we see him, he’s a cranky old scientist who doesn’t seem to have a lot of scruples. Several stories later, he demonstrates compassion and a sense of fair play. If a tyrant or an alien invader starts throwing his weight around, the Doctor does something about it.

Here’s where the character really stands out. Unlike most science fiction heroes, his wits are his weapon of choice. The Doctor doesn’t need a phaser, a lightsaber, or an attack fleet. He outthinks his opponents. He wins his battles because he’s smarter, not stronger or well armed.

His face and his costume changed, but his character remained the same. The Doctor was a brainiac who was cool. He was a hero because he was compassionate. He didn’t try to fit in. He was a free thinker who embraced his eccentricities. He did and said what he thought was right…even if it cost him his life.

And it did. Several times.

Remember, he wasn’t human. When his body grew old or close to death, he regenerated. He’d in effect be reborn as a new person, with a different appearance and a new personality.

Unlike most other TV shows, this hero could die at any time. Basically it was an excuse to get a new actor every once in a while, but each time it happened, it was suspenseful: What will the new Doctor be like?

The stories themselves were as clever as the Doctor, throwing occasional digs at other science fiction or even real-world politics. A Doctor Who adventure could spoof “King Kong” one minute and make a dig at the CIA the next. The effects were cheesy, but hey, the show had cool stories. Mix “Phantom of the Opera” with “The Machurian Candidate.” Why not? Doctor Who could go anywhere, do anything.

When the TV show ended, it all changed. Some well-meaning folks took Doctor Who into a new arena. Paperbacks. They were called “Doctor Who: The New Adventures.” They claimed to be true science fiction novels, solid stories with a modern outlook, tackling themes and situations the TV show couldn’t do.

That was true enough. There were grand vistas and epic confrontations between the Doctor and the latest galactic baddie. Darker tones and dystopic themes came into play. Fine with me. I’d written DW fanfics that were plenty dark.

Then the writers started screwing it up. Isn’t it the way of the world though? There’s always some dork who want to fix that which ain’t broke.

They seemed to have an inferiority complex about being grown-ups writing about a kid’s show. They wanted to prove they were sophisticated and clever and stuff. So they start pulling Mary Sues where the Doctor’s sidekicks know better than he does. The Doctor became callous and deadly. Smartmouthed twentysomethings upheld the cause of humanity by whining, stomping off in fits of pique only to rejoin him later. This was supposed to be complex characterization, but smacks of ego, shallowness, and artistic laziness. The Doctor later conspires to kill off one of his earlier incarnations so he can come into the world that much sooner and become Time’s Champion. (Huh?) And we get incompetent depictions of graphic violence, tons of sex, and drug abuse totally out of nowhere. Instead of developing plot, character, or these brave new themes, they riddled the stories with plot holes. There was no Grand Guignol, but plenty of “Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf” crap. And every once in a while, the writers would steal liberally from William Burroughs, Michael Moorcock, H.P. Lovecraft, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Jack Chalker, Jorge Luis Borges, even other TV shows…and claim these stories were not only unique, but works of artistic genius.

Genius. Closer to plagarism, if you ask me. At best, they’re pale imitations, about as sophisicated as a grade-Z teeny bopper flick. I half expect Phoebe Cates to show up.

They even went as far as to blowing up the Doctor’s home planet just to keep themselves from overusing it. And we’re expected to believe that he’d wander the Earth for centuries, carting his TARDIS around even though he doesn’t know what it’s for, never opening it just to find out what it is.

Get me the hell out of here. They ruined a perfectly good dream.

So where does Charlie Chaplin come in? Whimsy. Charm. A heart of gold. Intelligence. They were the things they had in common.

Had. Past tense. Doctor Who is a confused, base and menial thing now. It makes money for the BBC and it keeps several thousand white kids busy every month.

I’m practically preaching to the choir at this point, but I’m fed up. For the last decade, neither ham-fisted New Wave SF impersonators nor their toadies ever managed to sway me with their third-rate goods. I’ve seen a few good books out of the new DW line. There are also tons of bad ones. Mediocre ones. Stories that lie, that tell the readers what they want to believe about the world around them.

Sometimes I hope the DW booklickers see me or hear me go off like this. It makes them angry, almost as mad as me. I’m not playing along. I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid.

I don’t need to. I got my own dream. In it, there’s a guy who helps people because he can, who’s brilliant, who’s joyfully and unrepentantly eccentric, who’s…well, Doctor Who.

If anyone cares, I’ll be shocked rigid. If someone actually listens, not just laughs or blows it off…I’ll be impressed.

There. So I explained. What’re you gonna do about it? ;P

I’ve spent the last few weeks fighting off a really persistent cold, and I’m only just coming out of it. Nasty little bug. For a cold, it took me and Jamie down pretty hard. Almost at the same time.

In a weird way, it was also the best vacation I’ve gotten in years. Being a writer means no paid holidays. When you’re a freelancer, it means no holidays at all. I got a lot of reading done, soaked in quite a few DVD’s in bed, courtesy of my laptop and a pair of headphones. And with one carefully worded e-mail, a lot of my job stress suddenly disappeared.

My big project right now is an audio series called “AfterHell,” a horror anthology. It feels like my co-producer and I have been playing patty-cake with the pilot script ever since I wrote it a few years ago. And the whole time, he’s been nickel-and-diming it to death. It runs too short, can you add a scene here, can you develop this business here, it’s still running five minutes short, etc etc. Rinse, lather, repeat. Every time I did a rewrite, he insisted I write more. And when we got two more scripts in, he did exactly the same thing with each of them. So I was stuck rewriting three scripts at the same time, the only explanation given being they were always “too short.”

Wait a minute. Two years of edits, additions, and myriad changes–and they’re all too short?!

This all came to a head on the third script. He loved it to death. He even went so far to say it was the right length. (It didn’t stop him from wanting more scenes, but it was apparently the right length.) Now this didn’t make any sense to me. I did the scripting on that one, the same way I did the first story. The formatting and spacing was the same. Until then, his page counts and mine never tallied. I wrote 25 pages for the pilot. He counted 22. But on the third script, we both counted 28 pages. We tried to put our heads together on this over the phone and got absolutely nowhere. He started lecturing me about the page-to-minute ratio on scripts when, ironically, I’d been scriptwriting a lot longer than he ever had. I decided to take another shot at nailing down the page count differential, making sure the format and spacing on the first script was exactly the same as the third one. I ended up with about 26 pages. But when I turned it in, he sent back an e-mail explaining that he “fixed” the spacing again and that it still came out to 22 pages. And he added a smiley.

He might as well have said, “Nice try, now get back to work. “

The whole situation was ridiculous all by itself. Two years, no explanations, no progress. My project–my story–has been held up like this for two years. And the best he can do is say the same thing over and over again, except this time with a smug little smiley. He thought he was being nice, defusing a situation with a cute smiley. Sure, smileys are cute. But when I want something and I’m not getting it, ah hates cute.

Man, I wanted to flame him good. Unload both barrels of my modem on ‘im, that’s what I wanted to do. It took all my willpower to keep myself from char-broiling his butt. And my cold was in full gear by then, so I had about as much patience as a boll weevil in heat. (I was in Yosemite Sam mode, as you can see.) Instead, I went on strike. Time to put up or shut up. Figure out a script format that works.

I told Jamie, “Watch this, he’s going to find out I was right the whole time.”

Guess what he said five days later. She’s my witness.

My co-producer writes back, “No doubt you’ll want to kill me by the end of this, but it turns out you were absolutely correct the whole time.” I just threw my hands up in the air.

At least it’s not my problem anymore. He’s working the problem, not me. And it frees up a lot of my time, not to mention a lot of the pressure. I get to work on some stories I’ve been meaning to write for a while now.

One of them is one of several stories planned for “AfterHell” brings in an old character of mine, a time traveler known to all and sundry as Harlan. I first made up him for some ancient Doctor Who fan fiction stories I did back in the 80′s. (A version of him appears in a fanvid I finished only just a few years ago, “The Prisoner and the Time Lord,” found here: http://www.theta-g.com/drwho/prisoner/ ) I must’ve written 20 stories with that characters, but he never got much exposure. Every time I submitted a Harlan fanfic to a DW zine, the zine folded before it ever saw print.

At the risk of sounding like sour grapes, it may be just as well. I’m tired of Doctor Who fandom–just about any fandom, for that matter–and I’m disgusted by the state of the books that tried to continue the stories long after the series ended in ’89. I miss Doctor Who a lot, the show and the character I knew. I’ve watched it go through many changes, adapted to them as best I could, but I don’t follow it slavishly like a junkie waiting for his fix. I can see DW just fine. I don’t need anyone to describe it to me which, as I said, may be just as well. Very few writers don’t envision very clearly or very well at all anymore.

Maybe this AfterHell story will help me get this Harlan character into a form that works without Doctor Who. So much of his identity is based in that universe, because I loved it so much. Now that dream world feels like a stone around my neck. People outside as well as inside fandom don’t understand how I feel about DW, or how I perceive it. To the fanboys, it’s whatever they’re told it is. To everyone else, it’s another blip in the background radiation of the world. Whenever this time of the year comes around, the day of JFK’s assassination and the first premiere of Doctor Who, that all the unresolved issues I have come back. And part of me wants to be free of the disappointment. The sense of isolation follows me, but that’s not going away no matter what I do.

Maybe one day I’ll get a fair shot and someone’ll listen. A sense of belonging wouldn’t come as easily as that, but it’d be nice to be welcomed back into a community I was once a part of. I just have a point of view, one that diverges from the norm.

I’ll explain later.

If things get any weirder, I’ll have to check the water supply. Just when I thought things were going to calm down, this weekend delivered a better curveball than any I’ve ever seen in Major League Baseball. And I want it all to go away, just for a day.

I had a different attitude about change once. Change isn’t necessarily bad. It’s the way of the universe. There would be no life without it. Every belief and creed is based on that: God calls forth Light; Vishnu dreams a new dream; a void explodes; the end of a cosmic status quo. Change can be exciting. I can’t be the only one to think so.

Still, some people panic. They run and hide, assuming the worst, lashing out. They hold true to the ancient Chinese curse and make it prophecy. May you live in interesting times. So you can imagine what a downer it is when somebody freaks out and you have to spend the next several days picking up the pieces.

I’ll bet you’ve noticed a total lack of hard info in my kvetching here. I won’t go into the specifics, not here. I’m tired of that. It’s the trend, not the event, that’s getting to me. The schtick, not the dialogue.

I’ve spent the last few days kicking ass and naming names. I never wanted to do it in the first place. I keep getting volunteered to be the pointman in someone else’s war, knocking down their personal demons just to defend myself. I want to speak in a soft tone, civil, mature and sensible. I’m tired of shouting. I feel like I ought to carry around a water cannon just to have it on hand in case someone flips out again.

Again. It always happens again. No rest, no peace. The pace and the tension goes up a notch every day. It takes so many energy–sheer willpower–to keep someone under control when they don’t want to be. Each day for the last three years, my will gets spent faster than I can recover it. It gets harder to get out of bed. To eat. To write. To care. And I have to keep doing it because no one says it should stop. No one except me, anyway.

Hence the references to Blue Oyster Cult at the top. (No, no fraggin’ omlaut. Deal.) The song of that title was based on Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, the cosmic hero reincarnated again and again to yet another conflict he must resolve. In college I lost my interest in the mordant weariness of the character in all his guises. When my life began to take on the tone of those stories, I finally understood the character. He wasn’t morbid or world-weary. He was burned out. The battle between Order and Chaos never ends. In it, ethics become a luxury.

I’m the only one playing by a set of rules. A few entries back, I raised the question of whether preying on other people was the right way to go. It’s times like this when the idea seems the most appealing. I feel beaten down, and yet the only time anyone gives any quarter is when I beat them down in return. It happens so much that I wonder whether this is supposed to be Life’s Great Lesson or something. I was raised to believe in the Golden Rule. Left to my own devices, that’s how I’d do things. But that doesn’t protect me…more like the opposite. It leaves me vulnerable to those who won’t play by the same rules. I’m forced to fight just as dirty just to make them back off. And the arguments get more brutal, more draining, each time.

Ironically I started the weekend on a very different note…courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Jamie got a copy of the DVD in a steal of a deal, so I filled my brain with webbing for almost 24 hours. It brought up a lot of memories.

Strange as it sounds, I learned more about ethics and morals from comic books and the Bible more than I ever did from my parents. Even now, I see ol’ Spidey as a spiritual mentor. A totem, maybe? And while lots of people have written off Sam Raimi’s flick as just another soul-sucking, money-hungry Hollywood blockbuster, he captures the heart of that character. For all the garish color and adolescent wish fulfillment, there is a strong philosophical message in Spider-Man. “With great power comes great responsibility.” That’s the whole point of the character and thus the movie. The script places protagonist and antagonist on opposite ends of the issue of power. The Green Goblin represents a reckless, selfish use of power, the darker and older instinct in humanity. Spidey has realizes that someone else suffers when power is used selfishly. He made that mistake once and, as Spider-Man, struggles and sacrifices to atone. Instead of being a martyr, paralyzed and impotent, he grows into maturity and becomes something greater than he was at the start.

And it’s that message that informs my actions, even now, after three decades. I just hope I have the strength to stay in there and…well, keep swinging.

I figured I oughta tackle this before I get too deep into anything else. What’s with the handle, right?

Like most things on the net, it’s the name I could still get and it’s the one I’m best known by in cyberspace. It started with a character I had to roll up for a Cyberpunk 2020 RPG. He was a netrunner, a hacker basically, and I was trying to figure out how to translate the Shadow into cyberpunk. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men”–red scarf, black slouch, big schnoz, a .45 in each hand–that guy. Naming my character “Shadow” was too easy in my mind, too obvious and pretentious. I went through various permutations of dark, shade, shadow, mystery, etc etc. Dark Karma was the one that stuck. It sounded ominous and mysterious. And it doesn’t mean any one thing. “Karma” as in destiny, spirit, aura? Is having a dark one necessarily bad, and for whom? Anyway it had the feel I wanted. Style triumphs; substance had better keep up.

(FWIW it turned into a interesting character and he has the makings of a cool story: a hacker who had a black-cat rep for making things crash just by walking past them, literally.)

Anyway, when Jamie and I decided to sign up on a friend’s BBS back in late 1992, that was my handle. Most of the kids thought it had sufficient street cred (especially when I was able to punt losers offline). Ever since, it’s a handle I keep going back to. It makes people sit up and look twice in a chat room. “Kewl, wassat mean?” Now and again, I can someone online…er, borrow it. (Remind me to trademark it.)

And when the thought of my own stupid blog was too big to ignore, I just knew it had to be Dark Karma. I have to be angry, surly, and snide somewhere. I would’ve sign up on Dead Journal, but they sold out and stopped offering free accounts. (I’ll bet the sales dept here at Blogger will love that!) If I’m stylin’, whatever. That’s okay too, I guess. As long as I leave a mark–something inoperable. Dark Karma isn’t necessarily good luck or bad. I’m sure it’s bad news for somebody. But the secret, kiddies, is to make it bad news for someone you don’t like!

Now there’s a thought for this Election Day, huh? Vote angry! Vote to hurt, shoot to kill, aim to maim! The system has failed for a lot of people, but only because they’ve failed to use it. If you can’t vote for something, vote against something else!

And now, to make sure this still fits in with the miasma of narcissism that is blogdom, a Gratuitous Shallow Moment: “Oh, the Backstreet Boys are so the bomb!!!!”

Stink bomb, perhaps. Shaddup, go back to the record store and check out some CD racks full of grown-ups, you dinkette.

And here I was thinking this wasn’t going to sound angry enough by the end….