Fight Club: The Movie with the Best Fights

No, it's not the sweeping, epic battle scenes of Lord of the Rings. Nor is it the highly stylized violence of the Matrix, that one duel in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, anything from Bourne or Bond. It's not even the hour long fight scene at the end of Advent Children (the only reason to watch that movie).

It's this movie, with these guys. The Seven Samurai, a movie some considered to be the first in the action genre, as opposed to the wars, westerns, and detective movies that happened to have gunfights in them. In Seven Samurai, it's about the action, and even films decades later steal shots from the film. And swords are cooler than guns*.

Now as a movie it has its flaws. It's in Japanese, it's black and white, it's three hours long, and it starts off slowly. Perhaps the worst part is how often you're forced to stare at the bare asses of the guys in the film, but I digress. The film's flaws aren't the reason it's great. It's the action.

The fight scenes of Seven Samurai are brutal, messy, chaotic affairs; no one looks particularly cool during them. And it's not that the characters are incompetent, either (maybe the farmers, but what can you expect?); there's a couple scenes  of individual duels or skirmishes where you can see these guys are expert swordsmen. But that doesn't matter: fighting is a messy affair. People trip, they scramble, they get tunnel vision, they keep stabbing someone long after he's dead.

And the film doesn't try to showcase the chaos and desperation of battle by splattering everything with blood and guts, nor does it employ shaky cam to trick you into thinking something's chaotic (more on this topic later). By avoiding making the characters look cool, Seven Samurai creates some hella cool battles and skirmishes of samurai against bandits.


*As a connoisseur of fictional violence, I prefer swords, fists, and other melee weapons (not nunchaku, those things look dumb) to guns as a general rule. Why? Because you can block attacks from swords with a parry or by moving; you really can't avoid bullets coming at you unless you're Neo or you're running past an iron railing that mysteriously attracts all incoming projectiles. The best way to avoid getting shot is to shoot the other guy, which leads to a short, often unsatisfying fight (unless Indiana Jones does it), or you cower behind something that can stop a bullet, such as cars, corners, and struggling hostages.

Fight Club: One Versus One Hundred

This post is the first of a series about fights, battles, and how they're dealt with in fiction (no mentions of the movie bearing the same name, however). So every post this week will be about fighting.

My first topic is about the epic battles featuring the few against many, the one against one hundred. It seems to me that these days it's not enough for the hero to be outnumbered, that it's not enough for them to triumph against improbable odds. They need to face impossible odds. I don't know how this happened, but we've experienced some serious bad guy/mook inflation.

Two movies I've seen in the last year, The Three Musketeers and John Carter of Mars (mentioned last post) are prime examples of this. Both are based on books written years and years ago, and both make quite a few changes from their written version, but I'll focus on two specific fight scenes. In the Three Musketeers movie, the Three Musketeers plus our swashbuckling hero D'Artagnan have their triple duel interrupted by the Cardinal's men, just like in the book. Except that instead of five men against four, it's four against dozens.  And the fight in the book seems far closer than the one in the movie; I don't recall Athos nearly dying, nor Porthos being wounded during this scene in the movie. Instead, the Cardinal's men fall like properly lined up dominoes.

John Carter also fights off dozens of men in a climatic 'one versus one hundred' battle scene.With fury and his own Earthman strength, John Carter defeats an entire horde of the enemy, eventually leaving a giant pile of corpses in his wake. It's a pretty epic scene, to be sure, but I recall a desperate swordfight in the book Princess of Mars as well, another fight he barely won. There, it was against four swordsmen (not Tharks, and I'd give the edge to a Thark in a fight). Four. And it was close.

Here's a passage from Lieber's first Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, Jewels in the Forest: "Fafhrd, his back to a great oak, had his broadsword out and was holding off two of Rannarsh's henchmen, who were attacking with their shorter weapons. it was a tight spot and the Northerner realized it. He knew that the ancient sags told of heroes who could four or more men at swordplay. He also knew that such sagas were lies, providing the hero's opponents were reasonably competent."

Now, the barbarian hero eventually wins, of course, but I find this passage incredibly satisfying. Because it's true. Beating two people at the same time, assuming everyone knows how to fight at least reasonably well, is pretty tough no matter how much better you are than them. If one of them can circle behind you, chances are pretty good you'll end up with a sword in your back.

But not in movies like these. These one versus many battles are just an evolution of those awful old kung fu movies, where the twelve bad guys would dance around the martial artist hero threateningly in a circle while one of their buddies fought him. Once that guy got taken out, the hapless mook would rush in, exchange a few blows, blocks, whatever, before being dispatched to make room for the next idiot.

In those kinds of fights, at least the mook gets to throw a punch or two, maybe block the first strike, something. The reason they dance around the hero is because if they charged in en masse, they'd beat him down hard and then the story would be over. In more modern fight choreography, everyone does charge in at once, and everyone dies. Because shields are dead weights, armor is cosmetic, and no one has ever heard of the concept of parrying. Instead, everyone throws themselves into the paths of punches, swords, and even bullets.

Evidently it's no longer enough for our protagonists to simply be the best, they need to so far ahead of their enemies that it takes dozens of them to pose a threat. But the problem is that it's not that satisfying to watch people fight enemies they overmatch to a ridiculous degree. No one would pay money to watch a professional boxer fight a toddler (well, maybe once), or even twelve toddlers. Maybe we need to step away from the idea that one guy can fight an army and win.

Now, obviously, there are exceptions to my argument. If you have the advantage of fortification, terrain, or surprise, then your effective numbers are much higher than your actual. If the hero's side is the only one with a machine gun, for example, then yeah, they're going to kick ass.

My next Fight Club post will be about the movie with the coolest battle scenes, and why.

Adventure Is My Middle Name

It's not, actually. I like my initials, although they do tend to confuse some people when they see my email address and think I picked one that said "Mr. Oehler." No, it's M. R. Oehler. But if my middle initial was an A, I would totally change my middle name to Adventure. Ditto for D and Danger, but you can't do much with Rs.

But I'm not actually here to talk about my name and how, regrettably, it's not going to change into a more awesome one. I wanted to write about one of, if not the, best novel within the uncluttered sub-genre of Planetary Romance. That book is Planet of Adventure (actually a collection of four related novels in a single volume), by Jack Vance.

The iconic author of Planetary Romance is Burroughs and his tales of Barsoom, most notably Princess of Mars. A movie was released recently based on the first few books of Barsoom, titled John Carter of Mars; it was okay.And in Princess of Mars, the main character is an Earthman transported to a strange, distant, hostile planet and has a bunch of adventures and wins many victories; this is a very similar set-up to Vance's Planet of Adventure.

The protagonist of Princess, one John Carter, succeeds in his adventures for two specific reasons, three if you count the uncanny luck that just about every action hero is blessed by. The first is that he's superior physically to just about every other creature or person on Barsoom, justified by the higher gravity of his home planet. He's stronger, faster, and can jump tall buildings in a single bound!

The other reason he succeeds is that on Barsoom, life is cheap, and qualities like kindness and mercy are in short supply. John Carter acts differently, sparing the lives of his enemies and preferring charity to cruelty. This wins him friends and allies in his adventures, and his 'naive' philosophy is ultimately vindicated.

Adam Reith isn't like John Carter, although he's probably the smartest and most capable of all of Vance's protagonists. Reith might be better (physically and mentally) than the other humans on Tschai by virtue of his advanced scientific/technical knowledge and his military scout training, but he's frequently overmatched by the four species of aliens that rule the planet.

And Adam Reith comes from a world more similar to our own, where Good Samaritans often end up killed or robbed, and sparing your enemies is a good way to end up with a knife in your back. Where nice guys often finish last.  The enemies he overcomes are generally undeserving of kindness or mercy.

When Adam Reith wins, it's because he's a bigger son of a bitch than everyone else on the planet. He tricks his enemies, lies and cheats to get what he needs, and never gives his enemies a fair break.More than that, true to the Trickster archetype, thinks differently than everyone else. Humans are a subjugated, lesser species, but Adam Reith insists that his species is superior! And because I can, I'm putting in a funny pic from a completely different work (but the same message). 

Homo Sapiens Are Superior!

When he shares his ideas with the other people on Tschai, they think Adam Reith is crazy, even his friends and companions he meets on his journey. No one believes that humanity has its own home planet under human rule, or that humans could reach the level of technology necessary to travel to other stars.

In the end, it's the fact that Adam Reith operates under a totally different set of assumptions than every other person he meets that allows him to succeed on the harsh, strange world of Tschai. It's why I think Planet of Adventure is such a great book, and deserves wider exposure. So if you're a fan of Vance, Barsoom, other planetary romance, or just science fiction, you owe it to yourself to check out Planet of Adventure.

The Worst Book Ever Written

When trying any activity, it's important to set realistic goals for yourself. I set a goal for my first novel, an achievable one. I wasn't going to write the worst book ever written. Or, perhaps, the worst book ever published.

I've read more than a few absolutely terrible books, and listened to many more on audiotape when I was stuck in a car, typically going to and from some college. I've got to give Cracker Barrel credit for renting books on CD, but their selection needs some work.

But, amazingly, I wasn't exposed to the worst book ever written through Cracker Barrel or sheer boredom. No, this is one of those books that I was forced to read by school, one of those hated classes that attempts to drive all love of reading and story out from its students. This is the worst book ever written:

Plainsong. The characters are boring and largely unlikeable, the setting is dull, and nothing interesting happens the entire novel. Pick the most boring person you know: Plainsong is a novel about that guy, except even less interesting. I'd compare this to watching paint dry, but there you might get high or dizzy from paint fumes; there's no such escape from this thing. And in an effort to make his "bore de force" even more unreadable, the author doesn't bother to include quotation marks to signal the beginning and end of dialogue.

I was told by my teacher that this was to make the writing seem more organic, but I know that if I tried that on one of my papers I'd lose some serious points. Perhaps we should eliminate punctuation altogether to make our writing more organic (or absolutely destroy clarity, take your pick). But even without the quotation fiasco, this book would top the list as the Worst Book Ever Written for its boring characters, plot, and inability to make me give a damn about anything happening to anyone in the book.

Now my book triumphs over Plainsong, although it's by no means a great book. A good start, certainly (well, maybe). I've heard that when he was writing Nine Princes in Amber, Zelazny had no idea what he would end up writing. He just started with a man waking up in a hospital with no memory of who he was and ended up creating one of the best fantasy books ever (the rest of the series drops off, IMO).

Not having any idea of what to write either, I started the exact same way as Roger Zelazny, although we obviously ended up in very different places. But it has plot, action, and characters, so I consider it a far better story than Plainsong.

In Praise of Happy Endings

Disney gets a lot of flack for the way it changes classic fairy tales, but do you know how The Little Mermaid ended in the original, written version? The prince rejects the mermaid in favor of some other tramp, the mermaid is heartbroken, and she dissolves into sea foam and loses her soul. Oh, this was after she used her mad dancing skills, even though it was like walking on knives for our mermaid turned human. All that just to impress some idiot.

Well, then there's some weird bit at the end about her turning into some spirit of air and earning her soul by doing good deeds, but that pretty much comes out of nowhere and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, so I'm ignoring it.

Reading this ending, I can't help but think: What the hell? That ending is TERRIBLE. It is basically the most awful, depressing ending ever. Could you imagine if other stories ended that way? If at the very end of Lear, Cordelia says "Go to hell, Dad!" and tosses him off a castle tower? (okay, that would be pretty awesome) If Frodo and Sam kill each other over the ring, or if Luke joined the Emperor? Or if John McClane bled out from his crippling foot wounds before he could even stop Hans? 

Maybe the Disney ending, the "happily-ever-after" ending is kind of dumb. But I will take that treacly 'goodness' over the pointlessly dark ending any day of the week. At the very least, a stupid happily ever after ending leaves the audience with some positive feelings A good ending needs to satisfy, it needs to make all the struggle and darkness and pain mean something. 

If the protagonist doesn't win, there at least needs to be a mention of hope, or room for a sequel or whatever. And I'm not saying that it should be one of those Disney endings, either; I don't like those. The happy ending needs to come at some cost to the character, else the conflicts they faced and obstacles overcome just weren't tough enough. Maybe they die, or someone close to them dies. Maybe they lose their 'innocence,' whatever that means. Maybe their soul is indelibly scarred, or there's some wound in their side that just won't heal. Maybe they give up one dream to save another. You know what I mean.

I think that writers experience the temptation to avoid a happy ending because it's seen as childish, and I expect that many writers, including myself, are cynics at heart. According to a family friend, I've been cynical since the second grade. Can anyone top that? Didn't think so. So instead they labor hard to create endings where the protagonist loses, or maybe the whole venture was pointless, or there's some other ironic twist worthy of the bad writing seen in the Twilight Zone (Scary Door = truest parody ever).

But as a reader, I like the good endings far more than the bad ones. I like worlds where suffering and conflict have meaning. Because there's a world that lacks that kind of meaning, where terrible things happen without real purpose, where there's no guarantee the heroic protagonists will achieve any kind victory whatsoever. It's the one we live in.

Does this make me escapist? Maybe. But fiction's first goal, in my opinion, is to entertain. If you want to be some literary snob and make some profound statement on the human condition, go for it, but no one will read the book if it isn't a good story.

The Illusion of Competence

This blog post is about the illusion of competence and intelligence in fictional characters, or "hollywood smart." Now, one of the rules for creating likeable protagonists is that they need to be good at what they do. In most cases, this means that the protagonists in fiction need to be smart. However, sometimes the creator of these characters relies on a few stupid, tired tools to show how smart their beloved characters are, and it just doesn't work.

The worst method is one we typically see only in Hollywood movies. Bad ones. I'm going to use the tragedy of a movie called 21, adapted from a much better book called Bringing Down the House. In this film, the hero of our piece, some college student from either Harvard or MIT (MIT in the book), is supposed to be a genius. Never mind the fact that High/Low Card Counting doesn't require too much in the way of observational skills or mental discipline, in the movie it requires a genius.

And one of the great skills of this cognitive superstar is his ability to do math. Not the kind of math that's tricky, not calculus, not the post-calculus stuff that non-math majors such as myself manage to avoid. Not the kind of math where it ceases to be about numbers. No, this guy can multiply three digit numbers in his head. And we, as the audience, are supposed to be impressed by his intelligence, because he can replicate the functions of a two dollar calculator. Don't get me wrong, it's a neat trick, useful for calculating tips, but not much else.

So yes, Hollywood often tries to attempt to showcase intelligence through multiplication and division, and it just doesn't impress. I've never read a book that tries to do this though; if there has been one, please let me know!

This might be the stupidest way to attempt to show intelligence, but it's not the most common. So, reader, let's see how convergent our experiences are, and allow me to ask you this: when a book tries to convince you that it's doctor, lawyer, or other educated professional is the smartest guy around, what information does it always convey?

Their college. And not just college, but what their class rank was. Always. Always. Always. And that college is nearly always Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or other colleges with extremely strong brands. And their class rank is almost always one; if they didn't place first, you can be damn sure that they're second, and the first in their class is going to show up in the story.

Now, this is probably more impressive than the ability to multiply 233 by 56 in your head, don't get me wrong. Those are all good colleges, and getting a degree, especially an advanced degree, is a good way to prove you're no dummy. But I honestly think that there's more fictional characters who have graduated at the top of their class from Harvard Law than there are opportunities for them to have done so.

And let's be honest here. Getting good grades in high school is important: it helps you get into college. Getting good grades in college rather less so, since most companies don't care too much about your grades once you leave academia. And the most successful people I knew in college weren't spending all of their hours in the library inflating their GPA; they were doing internships, starting their own businesses, and moving on with their lives.

My point here is that nothing requires a fictional character to be the absolute best of the best during his education, or even at all, unless Jack Welch wrote a novel that I'm unaware of.  It's unrealistic, and gets to be a little annoying when every single fictional character ever graduated at the top of his class. Especially when you'd never know it when the same characters prove to be utter, incompetent morons throughout the entire story, simply because THE PLOT DEMANDED IT (sorry, I couldn't resist :) ).

The other common way a character's intelligence is rammed down the audience's throats is their IQ score. A smart character's IQ is never just high, it's phenomenal, at least over 150, and more commonly in the range of 180-200 for these geniuses. If not higher. Worse, this high IQ is often used as a flimsy justification for why our 'intelligent' man is able to outwit his enemies or foresee future events.

Studies have shown that there's some correlation between job performance and IQ, but having a high IQ is no substitute for training, experience, and drive. Just because my IQ is high doesn't mean that I know any more about computer hacking than anyone else (although I can quite confidently state that I know more about it than whoever wrote Die Hard 4 :) ).

The problem is that as authors, we want our characters to be smart, competent, and effective. We want them to be the kind of people we can throw all kinds of terrible problems at, and have them emerge victorious, with a little bit of luck and help from the supporting cast. So we come up with ways to tell the audience how smart these character are; after all, graduating first in class from Harvard MUST mean they're the best lawyer of their age, right?

Unfortunately, one of the very first rules of effective storytelling is to SHOW, don't TELL. The character should have some scene that shows how smart they are, how skilled they are at their job, etc. Even Conan Doyle didn't tell his readers about Sherlock Holmes's amazing record of solving police cases or his genius; he demonstrated it with an example of his deductive reasoning.

I can't think of an author that doesn't know this, yet so many resort to the TELLING us about the character's competence, and this so often falls flat, at least for me. Why don't authors do this? Because it can be hard. It often requires research. And it can delay the sections that we really want to write. But it's probably worth it.

As a confession, I resort to a similar mechanism in my fantasy novel No More Kings. There, the two main characters, Maerden and Edelle, are the two most powerful sorcerers of their land. I basically just say that they're the best, and leave it at that. Now, it's probably a bit harder to realistically show why someone is a great sorcerer, since it's all made up anyway (or maybe that makes it easier).

More importantly, however, my book is about two people who are already legends, who have already saved the world, rescued the princess, and destroyed the dark lord and his McGuffin of terror. I'm generalizing here, and invoking more than a few fantasy tropes that don't actually appear in my book. But it does show what can happen to a hero when there are no more dragons left to slay. Should I change that bit? Maybe.

The Rise of the Boring Character

"Boring" characters are experiencing a resurgence in fiction today. Okay, perhaps boring is the wrong word; these characters are only boring compared their more extreme brothers in fiction. But unlike so many other fictional characters, they don't break the rules, and they don't harbor unexplained hatred of authority figures. They might have nine to five jobs, and they might be decently groomed and wear unstylish, non-designer suits and ties. On the other hand, they're not the Everyman.

One of the earliest examples I can think of this is Sam in Return of the King (the movie). By all rights, he shouldn't be cool. He's not some badass like just about every other character in the movie, he has no special destiny, no real role other than helping his buddy (and making heartfelt speeches). Yet he ends up as the coolest guy in the film (although he is more Everyman than anything else).

(What might be the earliest example I can think of is the Internal Affairs guy from the TV show Fastlane; I think his name was Rollins or something. But he was a rather nerdy, an annoying by-the book-stickler, and he liked gospel music WITHOUT being religious. He was weird as hell, but he was also entertaining, and when he explained why he was such a pain in the ass, even likeable. However, I think my college buddy Dan and I were the ONLY ones who have ever seen that show.)

In the TV show White Collar, the two main characters are Neil, a young charismatic con artist (based on Frank Abignale, I believe), and Peter, the older, married FBI family man. It would have been incredibly easy to make Peter some boring guy, but he ends up being cooler than the cool criminal who likes to break all the rules. Why? Because he's effective. He doesn't need to violate regs or go behind his boss's back (well, sometimes, but it's generally to protect Neil) to get his job done.

The show Psych features a similar style of character; Lasiter is still straight-laced, but can be rather unstable.

In the TV show Community, in the season one episode The Science of Illusion, two of the characters become campus security officers. The ever genre-savvy show poses the question to them: which one will be the badass cop, and which will be the by-the books cop? This is one of those tropes that literally EVERYONE knows about. (By the way, I'm not ever going to link to TV Tropes. That site is a black hole!)

The correct answer is that the badass and the rules-lover are the same character, best personified by this guy, the greatest fictional cop known to mankind. :)

In the absolutely brilliant movie Hot Fuzz, supercop Nicholas Angel exemplifies this character (at least for MOST of the movie). By always following procedure, he essentially becomes unbeatable, a faceless soldier of an unmoving bureacracy, but in a good way. He can act with absolute moral clarity. When he acts, he's not just one man, but a representative of the entire police force. And if you take away all of that, he just becomes a guy with a gun.

That's where Dirty Harry fails.

Stories, or at least some stories, are moving away from using the freelancers, hired guns, and lone wolves to characters with more structure in their lives, and less kinds of insanity. These kinds of characters, the 'boring' characters, not only belong to organizations but use the principles of these organizations to accomplish their goals. I think this kind of movement is probably a good thing.

The important factor is that these characters need to be effective. A character whose principles or organization always stops him from success might seem noble, but in reality he's just stupid. I think I'll talk about a fictional character's competence, and how it's demonstrated, in my next blog post.

Who The Hell Do You Think I Am?

Before I begin this blog in earnest, I want to talk about my most favorite subject of all, myself :) I'm in my twenties and love books, movies, games, and stories of all kinds. I have a B.S. in Business,  and consider myself to be pretty damn smart (who doesn't?). And like the protagonist of Gurren Laggan, I have a tendency to use my own name as a statement about how great I am; you have my word that I was doing it first.

My tastes in books run to the so-called genre fiction, specifically fantasy and science fiction. I also like the occasional mystery or thriller, but my tastes in those genres don't run quite as deep. But as long as someone's getting killed in a book, I'm happy. :) And years of English classes have instilled in me a deep and lasting hatred of "literature," which are generally books that no one likes except critics and English professors. The closest I've ever come to reading a romance novel is Bujold's The Sharing Knife, which was surprisingly okay.

My favorite modern authors include Butcher, Bujold, Banks, Brust (why are there so many "B"s?), Sanderson, and Rothfuss. To be honest, I just assembled that list by looking over at one of my bookshelves. As far as older writers go, I like Vance, Zelazny, and Lieber, among others. These are just some of the books I own, and I've read countless more by taking advantage of my local library to actually check out books, instead of DVDs like everyone else who shows up there.

The book that has had the most influence on who I am, at least recently, was Memory. The main character asks himself questions about what he wants and how he lives his life throughout the novel, and as I read I asked myself similar questions, since our worldviews had some congruence.

As a side note, I also really enjoy Agatha Christie and similar "whodunnit" style novels, and I always figure out the killer by the end (except Death on the Nile, my favorite, and some very, very bad short stories). At some point, I'll explain how to figure out plot twists in advance, if you're so inclined. :)

My three "Desert Isle" books are Elantris, The Phoenix Guards, and No More Kings. The reason you've never heard of No More Kings is because it's a book I wrote, probably my favorite out of every one I've written. But it needs editing and a proper ending, and I figure the Desert Isle would give me plenty of time to work on that.

Also, I'm using the "Desert Isle" as a mechanism, so if you own list includes a book like How To Escape From a Desert Island, shame on you.

My favorite movies include Lord of the Rings, Big Trouble in Little China, Dark Knight, Star Wars, Hot Fuzz, and Ghostbusters. On a side note, I'm pumped about seeing DKR tonight at midnight, but sad that it will be the last Nolan Batman film. My favorite TV shows include Firefly, Farscape, Community, The Office, and seasons two, three, and four of Babylon 5. I have seen ONE episode of Star Trek (with KHAAAN!). I don't watch a lot of anime, but I try to catch the ones that are supposed to be pretty good.

I love games of all types, and more importantly I love to win games. I enjoy board games (there are ones made for adults, if you weren't aware), and my favorites include Battlestar Galactica, Dominion, Race For The Galaxy, and Rex, even though Fantasy Flight ruined my own plans to purchase the Dune license and sell my own copy of the original Avalon Hill classic. I also greatly enjoy RPGs.

I play video games, like every other non-Amish male in my age group. My tastes are pretty standard PC games like Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and League of Legends, as well enjoying the great co-op experience of Left 4 Dead. I love RPGs when they have strong stories, and get bored quickly with them when they don't. I think Bioware probably writes the best stories today, at least they did before Mass Effect 3, and if forced to answer I'd tell you that Six was the best Final Fantasy. There was a time when I was hella good at Counterstrike and Team Fortress.

I've written a few books over the years, none of them published, and they typically involve some element of the supernatural. I think some are pretty good, some aren't terrible, and they were all entertaining to write. I've also written a few short stories and the like.This blog is about more than my own (average at the absolute very best) writing, and I'll endeavor to keep any references to my own work to a minimum.

So this is probably an overly wordy expression of my tastes in books and other stories; as I said, I'm new to this blogging thing. But if you also like some of the things I like and want to read blog posts about them, you might want to check out this blog at a future date as I add more content to it. I think some of my future blog post titles, once I stop writing about myself, may be things like "The Rise of the Boring Character," "The Best Sidekick in the World," and "Classism in Fantasy." But hey, the future isn't written in stone.

I will not ever discuss, and have no interest in, politics, religion, or similar topics that have the tendency to be both boring and incredibly divisive. The exception to this is when I write about politics and religion within works of fiction, of course.

Inflicting My Opinions on the World

I've created this blog to express my opinions and thoughts on whatever interests me, specifically stories. My first love is books, of course, and the printed (or e-inked) word is still the greatest mechanism for telling compelling stories in the world. However, I also think that movies, television, and video games can create great characters and plots, and I'll be writing about whatever medium I want. Also, as an amateur writer myself, I enjoy talking about the process of writing. Basically, everything interests me (except poetry).

This is my first blog, well, ever. To be honest, I don't read many blogs; the only one I visit once a day is Seth Godin's, and he doesn't write about the things that I'm going to write about. I don't even use Facebook. Sure, it's a great way to keep in touch with people you might not otherwise see, but I'd prefer to hear what's going on in my friend's lives face-to-face. And how cool can Facebook be when everyone's parents use it?

I have a Twitter account, one that I first started just to vote for Day9 in the Shorty awards. When I was waiting for the Avengers to start and all I had was my phone, I started posting a few tweets. Over the past month or two, I haven't gained many followers, with the amusing exception of one the greatest characters on television, Dwight K. Schrute.

So despite the fact that I'm in my twenties and spend all day on a computer, I'm not all that tapped into social media or the blogosphere (Does anyone still call it that? Did they ever?) I'm not aware of all the standard conventions, or tricks to attract readership or build relationships with people who do read my blog, so if anyone has any advice, please don't hesitate to tell me.

Fortunately, my habit of never trying new food as a stubborn child doesn't apply to this, so here I am. I'm looking at this blog as a learning opportunity, a chance to try something I've never done before, and a way to increase my communication skills. I also hope to promote my own writing, as well as the writing of people I like, have some great and thoughtful discussions, and establish a personal brand. If that last phrase makes me sound like some kind of marketing robot, well, I did go to business school.

But the first idea for a blog germinated whenever I'd have a great discussion with somebody about some weird topic like the changes in fictional characterization from the 80s to the 90s to the 00s, or something similar, and I would want to share my thoughts further. Some people have even told me that I should have a blog, over the years (and not derogatorily, amazingly enough). Maybe blogs are out of style, but Twitter and its ilk don't really allow for the expression of complicated ideas.

I plan to write a post once ever two or three days at first, and will try to increase my posting frequency when I get better at this. Unlike some bloggers, I doubt all of my posts will be insightful, but I do try to be entertaining.

So in closing, take that world! Feel the bitter sting of my opinions! :)