Dark Karma

This is it, folks! The official grand re-opening. As of this date, this place is the cyberspace for those curious about my teeny-tiny sector of the cosmos.

Welcome one and all! And my apologies to anyone who’s been (trying to) follow me back and forth from one blog to another. I’ll do my best to keep it entertaining.

I’m trying to calm down. I just did something that makes me nervous, and I need to let it go or it’s going to be with me all day.

I just wrote something dangerous.

Oh, I’m glad I did it. Well, maybe not glad. I’ve just done something I’ve never done to one of my characters before. I’ve killed plenty, driven a few mad, subjected a couple to utter despair. But not this. It took a tall glass of Guinness, but I did it.

Now I know how Anthony Burgess and William Peter Blatty felt. Burgess relived the murder of his wife to write A Clockwork Orange. Writing The Exorcist, Blatty had to do something to sweet little Regan so horrible that even he thought it was too much. I frown on the idea of an artist needing to chemically mood-alter to accomplish anything, but creation is just as much a grey area as it is green. You survive however you can.

The story I wrote is a script outline for my Afterhell audio project. I wanted something disturbing, but above all, thought-provoking. No answers, just a lot of disturbing questions. The working title is “Damning Praise.” The story is a blatant indictment of SF fandom, relentlessly so. And in it, a couple of fanboys…assault…an elven princess.

It happens in real life, with real people, sometimes at conventions. I remind myself of that. It happens. But nobody talks about it.

It can be taken as symbolic of fandom’s treatment of their flesh-and-blood heroes, the writers and the actors, but it’s more than just a metaphor for me. I deliberately slapped fandom in the face. They say they protect their own, but they don’t. Women get hurt, harassed, abused. Nobody protects them at the cons. Con security can only do so much. For all the flames, fanboys look out for each other. They rarely speak out unless they have a stake in what happens, an axe they’d like to grind…preferably on their rival’s skull. They hide each other’s dirty laundry when it suits them. They air it when it doesn’t. Good people suffered because of it. And I hate them for it.

Maybe it’s naivete on my part. I never bought the party line that fans were intrinsically better than mundanes. But I wanted the proof. I wanted to see us make some of our dreams come true. Instead I saw a lot of dreams getting held back. A lot of “don’t rock the boat.” A lot of head games and sexual harassment.

So I did something to a character that they’ve been doing to themselves for God knows how long. Part of me is defiant, proud to push the envelope, even if it’s only my own. Part of me feels sick inside. Elven princesses aren’t real, but this one is real enough to me.

And I know that I’ll have to go back into that dark place again. Not because it’s fun. Because it’s true. Because I’m angry, aching to lash out at the human race and its apparent lack of humanity. At the fanboy ubermensch wannabes who failed to be worthy of their passions.

This story is bound to tick people off. Even I think I’ve gone too far.

Someone might accuse me of only trying to shock people, resorting to cheap tactics. Duh. Of course I did! And I want this to hurt.

Well, it hurts me. Disturbs me. I can only assume that means I did my job well…and hope it does more good than harm.

Meanwhile I wait for my friend Neil to give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Is he going to be too shocked, too outraged to sanction this?

He takes forever to answer mail these days. This is gonna be a long wait.

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.

Yesterday was Nita’s Urinary Infection Day. Her problem was still going on after two days, and still no clue and no urine sample, so we turned to the experts. Jamie packed Nita off to the Allen Boulevard Vet Clinic for a few hours and let Dr. Mark Nielsen get it from the source. Of course they had to get off the exam counter before they got it into the specimen cup. After a few drinkee-poos, kitty-kat kut loose.

The diagnosis was a more confident one, but still had a tentative ring to it. Apparently the urinary tract is uncharted territory. (I guess I can’t blame ‘em. I sure couldn’t fit in there.)

But at least every other possibility has been eliminated. It’s urinary for sure. That’s our number one suspect. We minded our P’s and Q’s, and that’s what it all trickles down to.

In blog space, there is no pun tax.

Jamie and I used to host a local writer’s group meeting thingie. I’m starting to wonder if this was ever meant to be. These meetings hardly ever happen anymore. I know everyone’s busy and, since we’re not exactly rich, these are basically trying times for all of us. All the same, something about people not showing up…it really brings me down. I mean, what’s the point to the whole group anymore?

Maybe men really are allergic to rejection. The slightest whiff of it drives me up the wall. I’ll stop there before I start sounding all weepy or something. “Oh, the world sucks, no one understands me! Rhubarb, rhubarb, martyr rhubarb….”

I wasn’t sure, but I guess a few people have been reading this after all. Every once in a while, someone comes up to me and asks if I’m okay or something. I don’t know why that’s such a surprise for me. In the last entry, I practically hint at going postal the way most people might talk about going Democrat or Republican.

“And how are you voting this year?”

“Postal.” Insert maniacal grin here.

I’m just used to writing and not getting any apparent effect out of an audience. When I write something, no one stands up and applauds. It’s just me, a cat, and her tiny tiny bladder in the room. Looking for feedback is a waste of time. Someone says it’s good. When I ask for more detail, the answer comes back, “It’s really good.” It’s hard to tell if anyone’s there at all. I’m not a TV set; I need to know someone is receiving. I’ve written things to shock or get people mad just to see if anyone’s really listening. It’s a waste of time. People don’t turn into English lit. scholars when they’re massively cheesed.

Dickens would’ve shot himself with help like that. “Do they say anything about Miss Havisham’s wedding cake? A single word about the double irony about Pip, Estella, and Magwitch? No, no, it’s just ‘really good’! Forget it! I quit! I knew I should’ve gone into taxidermy….”

So anyway, I’ve gotten used to working in complete isolation. I didn’t show anyone my work for years. I just did it. I couldn’t stop. I had words and images in my head, and I had to get ‘em out of there. I was convinced that being alone was the best I could hope for. If there was no audience, they couldn’t ruin it for me. You don’t get applause or cheers either, but after years of people laughing at the wrong parts and nitpicking even my choice in word processor, I stopped expecting any.

And frankly, most people can’t see what’s in front of them anyway. In high school, I was on self-destruct. For days I would walk around, at home, at school, with my hands coated in my own blood. I know of only five people who took a second glance. OJ gets off scot-free. Posers and corporate shills are lauded as artistes. My prez the Shrub argues with the debating skills of a mummified walrus, and even without evidence, he’ll get his war.

And I expect people to wake up half a minute just for me?

So whenever I get a clear and positive response to something I’ve written or said, I’m stunned. Old habits die hard.

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….

This is more of a last-ditch effort than anything else. I haven’t been able to stay in touch with nearly as many people as I’d like, and as time and work progresses, it’s bound to get worse long before it gets better. (Santa, I would like a smaller workload for Christmas. And if I don’t get it, I swear I’ll blow yer freakin’ head off….)

So if you really, really, really wonder what’s going on in my labyrinthine psyche in these times of trials, troubles, and tribulations–not to mention alliteration–this is the place. I’ll be polite where I can, honest where I can’t not, and brutally sarcastic where I slip up. I want to make this space as family-friendly as possible, but you can see the brilliant success I’ve had in just 40-50 words. Not even a paragraph in, and already I’m convincing the local authorities that it’s time to send in the negotiators.

I’m new to this blog malarky. Please bear with me. If you don’t, well, the scars will heal in time. (A very long time if I have anything to say about it….)

I certainly don’t want this to be one of those silly, self-indulgent things where you see cute little icons dancing around, painstaking descriptions of my trip to the mall, listings for what I’m currently listening to or my current mood. If you can’t tell how I’m feeling at the end of each entry, we’re all screwed.

Welcome to my world. Now don’t touch anything–you’ll get fingerprints all over it.