Category: Writer’s Blog

Several of my good friends are pretty obsessed with the TV series Doctor Who, from whence comes the partial quote titling this blog where the titular Doctor tries to explain how time and determinism work.

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually — from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint — it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.”

If that sounds like nonsense to you, well, yeah. In fact my quick summation of the premise behind Doctor Who is that “it’s about a master of time and space who is always rushing to get somewhere.”

I’ll let that sink in a moment.

My second summation of Doctor Who is that it’s one of the most successful framing devices ever created, which is why I feel it’s lasted and entertained generations of people in one form or another for more than half a century. Aside from a few constants, a writer for Doctor Who can dream up basically any story, set in any time and place, with any characters they choose. Why does the Sonic Screwdriver work on this door but not that one? Why is there any dramatic urgency in getting back to the T.A.R.D.I.S. “in time” to travel to a spot ten years in the past? Please, people. You are just prisoners of your linear, subjective viewpoints. Sit back and enjoy the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey ride.

In other words, seeking a sense of canon and continuity in Doctor Who is a good way to drive yourself mad, especially since the show itself cheerfully doesn’t give a damn. Writing for the show must be an exultant sense of freedom.

I’m honestly not sure I could handle that much freedom, in fact. But the fans of the show are so used to just accepting the idea that pretty much anything can happen at any time. Zombie Ranch, on the other hand, is a much more down to earth setting where (media interludes aside) the locales tend to be local and time progresses in linear fashion. The occasions I’ve gone “out of sync” with it have usually been through the device of a camera showing “recorded earlier” type footage. Today’s comic marks the culmination of me messing around with something a bit more risky, where I ended the last episode on the morning after the McCarty departure, then spent the pages of this episode so far rolling back and filling in the blanks of the night, until finally it’s come back around once again to Suzie spying the smoke. I didn’t really give any caption hints about all that until now, and it’s theoretically such a big departure from the usual progression that I risk confusing everyone. But theoretically, it’s also pretty fun to try something different.

I haven’t abandoned the idea of cause to effect — though presented out of order to the reader, things are still in order to the characters — but it was time to see how timey-wimey I could get.

Nervously, the cherubic little girl inched her way through the darkness of the old house on the hill. Somewhere along the way, she had become separated from the others trapped with her: the old professor, the little boy, the jock, and the bookworm co-ed.  She’d pulled a dusty spirit board out of the cobwebs, though not without something unseen and vicious trying to bite her. Where was everyone?

Then there was a call of triumph from the distance. The bookworm had uncovered one of the two artifacts needed to allow the rightful heir of the Romanescu family to reclaim their heritage. Too bad. It was, after all, a heritage the little girl’s family had usurped centuries before, and would kill to keep. The hired assassins she had already stationed throughout the rooms and corridors would see to that, ending the heir and any of the other fools who presumed to meddle…

The above represents a somewhat dramatized version of the first half of one of the games of Betrayal at House on the Hill that we played this weekend after impulse buying it based on watching this video. Dawn and I clicked on it just by randomly seeing Ashly Burch’s face, since we like the cut of her jib, but then the game began and we were intrigued. B-movie horror theme? Modular game board, built as the players progress so that it’s different every time? A massive twist at some point where one of the players turns out to be a traitor out to get the others?

Sure, plenty of other games have traitor scenarios, but two things intrigued me here. One, that depending on an intersection of how the twist is triggered, one of fifty different horror/suspense scenarios would be played out, with hidden victory conditions for the heroes and the traitor. Two, that the traitor doesn’t know they’re the traitor until it happens. In the game above, I was just an innocent little girl exploring a scary house, and then suddenly I was a schemingly ruthless Master of Assassins bent on killing the rightful heir to my family’s fortune before they could realize their destiny. Meanwhile my wife and the other players now had to try to conceal which of them was the heir while staying alive long enough to help them… well, I had hints and thoughts of what they were trying to do but in some ways I was as in the dark as they were, even though I didn’t share their terror of taking every step as if it might be their last. For the professor and co-ed, it was, and they died to knives in the dark, but the accursed little boy and the jock (the heir) lived just long enough to foil me!

It was probably just as well or the forces of Evil would have had a clean sweep, after the redneck torture zombies and werewolves had their way in our previous games. It meant I was on the losing side each time — *fist shake* — but the game lived up to its potential as a great storytelling exercise, a journey into the unknown as full of wonderment as it was full of terror. We have but barely scratched the surface of those fifty haunt scenarios and I can’t wait to try out more. And I love that unlike most games’ traitor scenarios, you are quite literally on the side of the angels… until you aren’t.

Because of its somewhat random nature on what the house looks like, what items are out and when the haunt begins (and what the haunt is), not every game of BaHotH is going feel balanced — the werewolf, for example, sprouted early and thus made chewtoys of us in short order. But the saving grace is that playing time tends to be manageably short and the mechanics and possibilities have enough lure that a not-so-satisfying game means you just play again and something entirely different happens.

In short, I do not regret a penny of our impulse buy, and if such things intrigue you as well, I’ll just close out by saying that as of this writing Amazon still has it on sale. Happy haunting!

Last week was pretty rough for a lot of people. Both David Bowie and Alan Rickman passed on, and that caused a lot of emotion.

Me? I looked at it as both having had long, awesome careers, and the thought that 69 years old is a respectable age to check out. Could they have done more? Sure. But I shed no tears. I didn’t know either man personally, so why should I? My aunt’s death last year, of course that affected me deeply. I knew her. I knew what she meant to me and our family, and that she had just retired that year but still had so many plans and things she wanted to accomplish. Most of all, I couldn’t help the grief in my gut which would well up occasionally even weeks or months afterwards.

But celebrities? Even ones who created works that really affected me, or seemed to be snatched away while they were still young, leaving that void where you feel like they gifted us with maybe only a small fraction of what could have been? I don’t think I’ve ever had a deep reaction to their deaths. Howard Ashman (the lyricist of Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, etc.) was a guy I considered a genius who was unfairly snatched away by AIDS at the age of 40 — younger than I am now — and so suddenly that the libretto for Aladdin had to be completed by Tim Rice. I remember being upset about that in 1991, wondering why a guy like Ashman was dead while Dan Quayle persisted in drawing breath, but I didn’t break down weeping in public the way I saw people do when Princess Diana died in 1997.

I guess it’s the idea that sometimes these people become our role models or affect our lives deeply enough that their departure hits us in emotionally gooey centers, even perhaps years or decades after we stop keeping track of them. We don’t know them. We never really knew them. We may never have even met them in person, or if we did, it was while being one of thousands at a concert or shaking hands and exchanging a few words in an autograph line — hardly the stuff of intimate familiarity. Yet the symbol of who they are in our heads and hearts remains a powerful thing, powerful enough to move many to tears even if my own ducts remain dry. Perhaps that makes me the weirdo.

In any case, the work of people like Rickman, and Bowie lives on, and what good work it is. I may not get mushy about it, but I admit I may have queued up and listened to “Under Pressure” a few times last week — and if there’s an afterlife, it’s cool to imagine Bowie and Freddie Mercury finally getting to do another duet, while Rickman gives one of his serene half-smiles in appreciation.

Well, in this case actually more of a syndrome of threes. A Trinity Syndrome.

Don’t have time or inclination to read that link? Well, it’s an interesting article from June 2014 which points out an interesting aspect of how a “strong female character” can end up ultimately unsatisfying in a narrative, because in the end she ends up being sidelined or subverted in favor of the male protagonist. It’s named after Carrie-Anne Moss’s character Trinity from The Matrix, who starts off presented to us as an ultimate badass but it’s all downhill from there as Neo comes into his own. Another example brought up in the article is Wyldstyle from The Lego Movie, again introduced as someone ultra-competent that the buffoonish Emmett is awed by — but she isn’t the Chosen One, he is, and so by the end she’s relegated to a supporting role.

When you start thinking about it this is a trope that reoccurs time and time again in fiction. The bumbling nebbish of a man meets some beautiful exotic badass woman who doesn’t have the time of day for him at the beginning, but by the end he’s eclipsed her, saved the day, and almost always wins her love and adoration in the bargain. If that sounds like a fantasy scenario, oh boy howdy is it. Is there anything inherently wrong with that? Well, perhaps not, except that it’s overwhelmingly shown in that particular gender balance.

You see, the only sci-fi/fantasy example I’ve really thought of that does the same thing in reverse is the anime series Sailor Moon, where it’s the young girl who’s the scatterbrained incompetent protagonist having to be rescued at first by the mysterious and handsome Tuxedo Mask, until she eventually discovers her true destiny and ends up saving the world (and him).

Not coincidentally (as far as I’m concerned), Sailor Moon was created and written by a woman.

See, this is one of those things that reinforces my thought that men and women aren’t really alien creatures who can’t possibly understand the way the “other” thinks, because the hero’s journey works for (and speaks to) both genders if given the chance. Also, perhaps unfortunately, the Trinity Syndrome could apply in both cases, but in movies at least we still overwhelmingly see it with the man on the upward arc while the woman stays static or regresses, and at root that’s because most writers are men, writing from a male point of view.

I don’t even think it’s consciously sexist in most cases, it’s just much easier to tell a classic hero’s journey tale where everyone else is (or becomes) support. And it still resonates — but yet I fully understand the frustration that can be inherent in seeing your identified representation sidelined, especially if they were introduced looking really cool to start with. So in your own tales when you’ve got your aspiring young lad setting out towards his destiny and he meets that ultra-cool lady, maybe go over those bullet point questions in the article:

1. After being introduced, does your Strong Female Character then fail to do anything fundamentally significant to the outcome of the plot? Anything at all?
2. If she does accomplish something plot-significant, is it primarily getting raped, beaten, or killed to motivate a male hero? Or deciding to have sex with/not have sex with/agreeing to date/deciding to break up with a male hero? Or nagging a male hero into growing up, or nagging him to stop being so heroic? Basically, does she only exist to service the male hero’s needs, development, or motivations?
3. Could your Strong Female Character be seamlessly replaced with a floor lamp with some useful information written on it to help a male hero?
4. Is a fundamental point of your plot that your Strong Female Character is the strongest, smartest, meanest, toughest, or most experienced character in the story—until the protagonist arrives?
5. …or worse, does he enter the story as a bumbling fuck-up, but spend the whole movie rapidly evolving past her, while she stays entirely static, and even cheers him on? Does your Strong Female Character exist primarily so the protagonist can impress her?
6. It’s nice if she’s hyper-cool, but does she only start off that way so a male hero will look even cooler by comparison when he rescues or surpasses her?
7. Is she so strong and capable that she’s never needed rescuing before now, but once the plot kicks into gear, she’s suddenly captured or threatened by the villain, and needs the hero’s intervention? Is breaking down her pride a fundamental part of the story?
8. Does she disappear entirely for the second half/third act of the film, for any reason other than because she’s doing something significant to the plot (besides being a hostage, or dying)?

It’s at least worth keeping under observation.

The year was 1980. The month, May, and a still quite young Clint was watching The Empire Strikes Back for the first time. Han Solo was my favorite, and he was proving his awesomeness with every moment — as opposed to that silly Luke who was doing all the boring stuff in the swamp with the muppet while Han dodged TIE fighters and asteroids and giant space worms.

And then, oh crap, Han got captured. And frozen in carbonite and handed over to Boba Fett. And that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was Fett’s ship taking off (with frozen Han still aboard) before Leia and Chewie and company got there. Luke had a pretty bad day, too, but in the end at least he got rescued and was safe and (mostly) sound with the rebel fleet. As the credits rolled, I realized with dawning horror that I would have to wait three years to find out the fate of my wise-cracking smuggler hero.

At the time, it was a terrible betrayal. The good guys could get in trouble, sure, but were supposed to *win* by the end of the show. That’s what Saturday morning cartoons taught! What was this cliffhanger bullshit (ooh, bad words)?

Well, here I am many years later understanding that cliffhanger bullshit is part and parcel of a lot of entertainment, including the comic I’m writing now. I’m probably one of the only folk who still smiles seeing Boba Fett fall into the Sarlacc, since there’s a small angry child inside me that definitely wanted (and still wants) that smug sonofabitch to suffer for 10,000 years for what happened to Han and the three years of agonizing uncertainty it led to in the heart of my youth.

And really, if Star Wars is meant to be in part a hearkening back to the serials of yore like Flash Gordon, then Empire represents perhaps the purest example of a “What will our heroes do now?! TUNE IN NEXT TIME!” setup. It’s still self-contained in its way, but they had the luxury of knowing there would be at least one more film to wrap up the adventure. That’s something you didn’t really have the guarantee of back in the day.

Today? That’s a different story in the wake of the Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potters, and other film franchises. Studios and stars are committing to multiple movies and writers are aware well in advance, and its let to an interesting escalation in the idea that not every plot point has to be tied in a bow by the time the credits roll. Now we’re even getting the final movies of a series split into two parts, and there might very well be cliffhanger bullshit involved. In a sense it’s getting to where it’s like the days of going to see Flash Gordon and Tarzan matinee serials in the theater have returned. Katniss just woke up to learn District 12 has been purged! TUNE IN NEXT TIME…

Is that a bad thing where feature length films are concerned as opposed to shorter fare? I’m still not sure. The development cycle has shortened to where oftentimes the movies are being filmed without much break between, so you’re not necessarily waiting for three years for your fix, not to mention all the Internet leaks and such to whet your appetite in the meanwhile. The latest example of this is, of course, The Force Awakens, which is rife with dangling plot threads and unanswered questions. Will Episode VIII scratch those itches, or just make them worse? J.J. Abrams has always been better with possibilities and potentials than resolutions, but his hand’s off the tiller now. I guess we’ll see what the next episode brings…

Comics in America used to have the stigma that they were for little kids, and arguably still do have that image for a lot of people despite all the mainstreaming of “geek culture” in recent years. This was, after all, why Frederick Wertham’s witch hunt in the 1950s gained so much traction; the idea that our innocent and unsuspecting youths were being corrupted by wicked and explicit material marketed directly to them. It didn’t seem like the idea of comics having and appealing to an adult audience ever dented that narrative, and the resulting uproar led to the creative straightjacket of the Comics Code Authority where the major companies self-censored and severely limited the sorts of stories they could tell.

Did that make all the comics stories of the Silver Age bad? Not really, any more than someone could claim (with a straight face) that the grim n’ gritty era of the 1990s made for universally higher quality storytelling. In fact it’s quite arguable that the pendulum swung too far in the other direction, where the industry decided comics were not, in fact, for kids, and the stores and marketing campaigns were in some cases actively hostile to the notion.

So anyhow, this brings us to our current times and the concept of the “all ages” book. Technically speaking you could see this as just another way to say it’s for kids, and some of them really are geared towards very young folks, with minimized possibility of content that might be offensive to their guardians and, shall we say, uncomplicated story concepts. But others are more along the lines of what you might see out of the better Pixar movies, where adults and children can both find equally appealing aspects to enjoy and the storytelling may actually be quite complex in its themes. There might even be subtle naughty bits, which to my knowledge the small children watching have not imploded from.

I might be biased. My uncle took me to see Airplane! during its original theatrical release in 1980, when I was still a rather wee lad. I didn’t get a lot of the parts the adults around me were laughing at, but it didn’t matter since there was plenty of other stuff I got just fine. Still, I recognize and respect that not everyone’s comfortable with exposing their tots to that “white zone shit.” When parents have occasionally stopped by our table to ask if Zombie Ranch is all right for kids, I answer honestly that it’s not meant as an all-ages offering, and while there is no sex or nudity in its pages, there are instances of blood, swearing, and the proverbial “intense situations.” When asked on listing sites, I classify this website as PG-13. Young kids are not really on my mind as the demographic.

So imagine my surprise when a few months ago we gifted my sister a copy of our trade paperback collection and later heard that our seven year old niece was very jealous and had (with her mom’s blessing) grabbed it the first chance she got and read it cover to cover. She’s a smart kid but loves her some Disney Princesses and Barbie, not really what you’d think of as your Fangoria type — and hey don’t laugh, Dawn was just that type at a tender young age thanks to her older brother. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for little girls (or boys) who don’t find a love of Fangoria and Barbie mutually exclusive, but I couldn’t help thinking my sister might be exaggerating things for our benefit.

Nah. At the top of my niece’s Christmas list this year was her own copy of the TPB, and I watched as she squealed in undisguised delight when she tore open the wrapping paper to find it signed personally to her by Uncle Clint and Auntie Dawn. Yesterday she was asking questions about why Muriel ended up getting so mad, and confiding in me that she was really sad when Popcorn got hurt, but happy again when she heard he was going to be okay. She declared Popcorn and Suzie were definitely her favorite characters, along with (zombified) Zeke as she imitated how she imagined he moaned and groaned. It was all exceedingly adorable.

And gratifying. Here we’d put together a story where I never really compromised on concepts or events towards  the consumption of a younger crowd. If we get right down to it I’ve actually always thought that to be a problematic way to write entertainment, because it so easily slides itself down to the mindset of “kids aren’t smart enough for this stuff.” I do believe kids are far smarter and more capable of nuanced understanding than we grownup folk often are willing to give them credit for, for instance I think the Harry Potter books–and prior to that, entries of “children’s literature” from authors like Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling and Roald Dahl–are repeated proof that it’s a mistake to think of children as any stupider than adults. What they lack is experience, and in the case of someone lacking experience, isn’t it more laudable to seek to broaden their horizons than narrow them?

But hey, I have to admit that when it came right down to it, I wasn’t interested in marketing Zombie Ranch to kids, either. Not everyone feels the way I do, and perhaps in the course of things I had my own unease on whether or not a kid picking up the book would find it at all interesting, much less navigate potentially troublesome waters of parental limits. I didn’t want to be fingered as the guy whose book taught their kid to say “shit” or “goddamnit,” or made it so they couldn’t sleep at night, right?

Maybe that’s why my niece’s positive reaction was a surprise to me. Should it have been? Should I form any kind of new perspective based on the example of one girl? A girl who happens to be a relative and already was predisposed to be affectionate towards us and our work? Maybe, maybe not–but her enjoyment is undeniably flattering, and does make me think that maybe again, at the end of the day, “all ages” entertainment may be a label best determined by the eyes of the consumer, whatever age they might be.

If you’ve ever said the phrase, “when you assume it makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me'” — first off, please punch yourself in the face. Society can’t function without a certain set of assumptions, such as the assumption that if I step out of my house I won’t be hit by a falling piece of space junk.

Second–at least where fiction and fictional characters are concerned–I may grudgingly admit you are right. For Exhibit A, I will present Schroeder from the Peanuts gang.

Who, you ask?

This guy.

For some reason, when I was reading Peanuts strips as a kid, it wasn’t Charlie Brown or Linus or Snoopy that I latched onto, it was this random blond kid with the toy piano. Schroeder. He just seemed so cool. Otherwise hard-as-nails, cynical Lucy was head-over-heels in love with the guy, yet he had no time for her nonsense. His idol was Beethoven, who is awesome. He had hair and didn’t suck his thumb. He was an artist. This, thought grade-school me, this is who I would want to be.

And then every animated special disappointed me, because Schroeder wasn’t a featured player. He was never meant to be. The bald kid and the thumb sucker and the bald kid’s dog were the axes upon which the Peanutsverse revolved. They were the ones who got to go to France, while Schroeder and the rest stayed home. Cool as he was, Schroeder was doomed to be an extra.

Oh the betrayal. How dare Charles Schulz treat my chosen personification in such manner? Well, he dared because, again, Schroeder was never really meant to be a focus. I ballooned his importance in my own head and my heartbreak was directly a result of that. Nevertheless, I still consumed and enjoyed the comic strips and cartoons, but man, to this day there’s that small, irrational part of me wishing Schroeder had been portrayed as important as I felt he was.

Exhibit B is going to venture into spoiler territory for a recent film release concerning a quaint little franchise called Star Wars. If that concerns you, I advise you to stop reading now. I’ll even throw in a very sad Luke so you’re less likely to accidentally see the next paragraphs.

Still here? All right, let’s talk about Captain Phasma. The stormtrooper leader played in the new film by imposing giantess (and Brienne of Tarth) Gwendolyn Christie.

You probably don’t need a reminder visual, but here’s one just in case:

Phasma is one of those characters that people obsessed about, forming assumptions of her character based on her appearance in early press releases, and possibly the Brienne tie-in. Did interviews with Christie and others use words like “badass” or did we coin them ourselves?

If you’ve seen the film you can probably guess where I’m going with this. Phasma in The Force Awakens looks good but does nothing. Well, arguably worse than nothing. She’s taken prisoner towards the end of the film and forced to lower Starkiller Base’s shields at gunpoint, then our heroes say they’re going to toss her down the garbage chute, and that’s the last we see of her.

Supposedly we’re promised that Phasma will return with a bigger impact in subsequent movies, but for now, she’s not even someone who put up much of a resistance when asked to basically open the gates to the enemy. People are complaining about that as a betrayal of the character.

Except, is it? Within the movie itself, was it ever established that Phasma is a die-for-the-cause badass? Couldn’t she just as easily be some unusually tall daughter of a First Order bigwig enjoying a cushy officer’s position, who isn’t really all that brave or stoic when the chips are down? That’s a well-known evil (or even good-yet-corrupt) archetype, after all.

The point is that she really didn’t have a character to betray, did she? To say that means you had preconceptions and assumptions based purely on her image and other metadata going in. And when the character didn’t seem to actually fit those assumptions, and/or wasn’t really as big a part of the narrative as you’d hoped, you felt let down. You felt, in my terms, Schroedered.

It’s not pleasant, but if we’re perfectly honest as fans, we have no more control over these matters than a fan fiction author who desperately wants Harry Potter and Draco to kiss. Now on my end, I was surprised by how Phasma ended up being shown to us in The Force Awakens, but on consideration I actually find the possibility of her having some more cowardly, mercenary aspects to her character more intriguing and compelling than, say, a flashy but ultimately bland badass like Darth Maul. I suppose in Phasma’s case a future film could still present her in a more kickass mold, but for the time being everyone wanting that will have to just buy her action figure and pretend.

If you google up the word “tic” you’ll see two major definitions:

1. a habitual spasmodic contraction of the muscles, most often in the face.
2. an idiosyncratic and habitual feature of a person’s behavior.

Wikipedia focuses entirely on the first. I’m going to talk about the second. In particular, applying the idea of tics to the work of fleshing out a character. Now, this is probably best done in moderation, but when it works out you get some very unique and very memorable results. In honor of a certain franchise re-emerging this week, I could bring up a certain shrunken green Jedi Master and his weird manner of speech — strange it was, yes? But forget it you will not! Identify him readily with it, you will.

Character habits don’t have to be vocal. The Caine Mutiny made a big deal out of Captain Queeg’s compulsive need to constantly swivel a pair of steel balls in his hand when he got nervous, which ends up being visual shorthand to show his degenerating mental state. The silent picture serial villain of yore twirls his mustache as he contemplates evil deeds.

But where comics are concerned, I think it’s mostly (and perhaps ironically, given the silent nature of the medium) in the speech. Sometimes it’s even done with the visuals of the speech, like the way the Endless in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman all have their own styles of font and word balloons, but it can also come through in the clipped, rough statements of a character like Rorshach in Watchmen.

People in real life have all sorts of tics, verbal and otherwise. In fiction I wouldn’t do it for it’s own sake, necessarily, since a lot of time verbal tics serve as filler and fictional conversation is a filtered, heightened thing that doesn’t have room for every “um”, “like”, or “know what I mean?” — except where that might reinforce character. I’m going to use Rosa as an example here. When Rosa asks a question, she often ends it by saying “yeah.” It’s not just, “So, now we bargain?” it’s “So, now we bargain, yeah?”

That’s a tic. And my intent with it was always to reinforce the “wheeler dealer” aspect of her character. After all, one of the first tricks they teach salespeople is that they want to get the customer saying “yes.” I could just as easily have Rosa ending her questions with “no?” but that introduces “no” into the conversation. Counterproductive! But on the other hand, it’s not really a calculated thing on her part — it’s calculated on mine.

Something else would be establishing certain ways characters speak and then trying to hold to that, unless the intent is to show that things are out of sorts. If Frank suddenly started speaking in paragraphs, something’s wrong, and hopefully it’s not because I screwed up and am shoving all those words out of his mouth for no good reason. Way back in Episode 1 I used a subtle exchange between Suzie and the cambot interviewing her to indicate she’s not all that comfortable with big words, and I do my best to keep that consistent. She’s not dumb, so where it pertains to her business she can get more complicated, or she can work things out from context, but she’s no Uncle Chuck in terms of just filling the air with all manner of multisyllabic vernacular and supposition. And even Chuck’s got nothing on some hyper-educated Safe Zone luminary like Iphigenia Langhorne who throws around the verbosity like her doctorate depended on it.

Call ’em mannerisms if you want if calling ’em tics makes you–well–twitchy. Like any utility in the writer’s toolbox, they’re best used carefully, but I find they can be extremely helpful to bring your characters to a consistent life.

Well, if you’ve read this week’s comic post, you’ll know already. Otherwise: we’re sick. Usually I’m able to bang out a blog post at least, but right now all I want to do is crawl back in bed until this cold runs its course, so I pray you’ll excuse this rare break from my spammy musings. Of course if you’re really feeling withdrawal, there’s over five years’ worth of Writer’s Blog archives to choose from at this point. Sometimes even I go back and read past stuff from time to time, even if it’s just to see how much my thoughts might have changed between now and then.

Bed now. See you next week.

I should some day check back through these blogs and see what my record is for writing entries without referencing the TV Tropes site. In any case, reset the count because today I have the Ascended Extra on my mind.

Now in purest terms, an Ascended Extra is one of the people in the background of a production. A “face in the crowd” that somehow for whatever reason ends up standing out from the crowd and coming to the forefront of the story. Examples would be Miles O’Brien, who didn’t even have a name when he first started appearing in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Felicity Smoak in Arrow was originally supposed to be a one-scene wonder just there for some hackety-hacking skills, and yet now she’s arguably the female lead. Frasier Crane was a background character in Cheers that became a regular and then the headliner of his own series.

The common thread is that these ascensions are unplanned, but due to the actor’s charisma or thematic necessities or what have you, they resonate enough with the showrunners and/or audience that forthcoming scripts are altered to bring them into the fold, and sometimes even the forefront.

What does this have to do with Zombie Ranch? Well, it’s not so much a cast member, it’s more that we literally have an Extras section in our archives where we dump all our filler comics after times that we’ve been on vacation or otherwise needed a break from the main story. Those filler comics are segregated because they’re not really meant as any sort of actual canon to the setting — but sometimes, the ideas in them keep harassing me.

Such it was with the idea of Grunt and Groan, which basically was Dawn saying, “I want to do a movie poster with a caveman and a zombie” and me shrugging and going, “Okay.” She was excited with the idea, which was good since one of our guest artists had unexpectedly canceled on us. Anyhow, the end result turned out to be so entertaining that when she wanted to revisit the idea with another bit of filler a few months later I agreed to help write dialogue for it.

I don’t remember at what point I decided Grunt and Groan would be an actual in-universe franchise, but it certainly fit with the sometimes ridiculous nature of the media saturated world we’d been portraying beyond the confines of the Z Ranch. Mars Adventure was but the tip of Gruntberg. I suppose I made that decision at least by the time we slapped it into the background on Uncle Chuck’s wall in Episode 9, but I feel this week’s comic truly confirms the ascension of Grunt and Groan beyond the filler comic ghetto and into main continuity.

I only wish I could have worked in the line about Groan being “twenty years past retirement.” Stupid zombie.

Planned obsolescence is the (arguably somewhat obnoxious) strategy pursued by companies where they intentionally put an expiration date on a product that shouldn’t necessarily need one, making it necessary for you to pay all over again for an updated model. Probably the best modern examples are Microsoft Windows and Apple’s iPhone series. Can you imagine the uproar if people had to replace their cars as often as an iProduct becomes nigh (or completely) unusable?

But let’s not discuss that. I want to talk about unplanned obsolescence, particularly where writers of science fiction are concerned. That’s basically where the flights of speculative technological fancy you’re structuring your tale around become either debunked or science fact (though perhaps not quite the way you presented it). This was the year Back to the Future of all things got re-examined to see how its vision of October 21, 2015 compared to our own. One word of consideration there beyond all the hoverboards and such: faxes. In the mid-1980s we were obsessed with faxing as the way of the future, and while it does still happen, it’s hardly our main means of exchanging information. In 2020 Blade Runner will no doubt be held up to the same examination, and it is unlikely we will have developed artificial humans capable of witnessing C-beams glitter near the Tannhauser Gate. We have, however, developed pocket-sized computers that can talk to anyone in the world with the touch of a few buttons.

21st Century authors can get into a bit of an existential crisis over the accelerated pace of development we’re in now. As a personal example, when we started Zombie Ranch in 2009, the idea of remote controlled drones that could hover around feeding live camera footage to an operator still seemed somewhat far-fetched. Six years later and you can buy them on Amazon, and the only bit that’s still in the realm of fancy seems to be our far more silent propulsion system that doesn’t sound like you’re being buzzed by a gigantic mosquito.

But here’s the thing. Sure, science fiction should at least in part be concerned about technology, or it wouldn’t be science fiction. On the other hand, it’s also fiction, and fiction concerns itself with stories, with characters and conflicts. With people (or AI or aliens who still illustrate or contrast some facet of human nature). Now, fears of the onrushing Singularity aside (talk about unplanned obsolescence!), it’s much less likely that the emotions, desires, and foibles of people will become obsolete, at least within the timeframe where fiction as we know it exists. Oedipus Rex retains its power to resonate with our own experiences nearly 2500 years after it was first written, even though its trappings of Greek culture and religion are hardly relevant to our lives.

So I feel Isaac Asimov had the right idea. His Robot series of stories all revolved around a conception of how artificial intelligence might develop in a particular way, but the stories themselves were always ultimately about how that affected humanity (including the nascent humanity of the robots). One day soon we may answer the question of Artificial Intelligence in a way different than Asimov envisioned, but even if the stories become inaccurate or irrelevant in their technical details, they will retain their dramatic power. Let the science feed the fiction without overwhelming it, and you may never need to worry about obsolescence at all.

When you’ve watched the original Star Wars as much as I have, and you have a propensity towards overthinking as much as I have, the thought can creep in unbidden:

What do wild Banthas eat?

I mean, look at the size of these bastards:

It looks like it should be an herbivore, but the desert world of Tatooine seems rather devoid of even the smallest grasses, much less trees and shrubs. For that matter, they’ve obviously been around long enough to become integral to the culture of the native Sand People, and yet if they are also native to Tatooine, what’s with all the hair? They look better suited to somewhere like Hoth. Was Tatooine once a much cooler and more floral place prior to some undefined climate cataclysm? If so, it seems like the Bantha should have been one of the creatures that died out in the aftermath of that.

The short answer to all this is, “Presenting a valid planetary ecosystem isn’t the point of Star Wars. Shut up and enjoy the movie.” It’s only because of the longevity and popularity of the film anyone might even grow to care, because it’s a good enough piece of entertainment to cook along and carry your immersion right through any logic gaps. I’m sure Banthas in the original production had no explanation beyond Rule of Cool, although that hasn’t stopped people from attempting more reasoned analyses in the decades since. Your mileage may vary on whether such reasonings deepen your understanding or are just so much unnecessary Voodoo Shark, a la the “midichlorians” concept introduced and then summarily abandoned after The Phantom Menace. Turns out most of us really didn’t give a crap how The Force might work from a biological standpoint and just wanted to see dudes shoot lightning and throw stuff.

Anyhow, back to ecosystems. Complicated stuff. Mess with any of it and you’re pretty much messing with all of it, and it’s difficult for even professional ecologists to predict the outcome, much less your average poor writer of speculative fiction. Mind you there are certain things that should seem obvious given even a little thought, like what should happen as a result of Stephenie Meyer deciding that the vampires of Twilight kill and feed only on apex predators of Washington state. I’m sure this is a conceit no doubt meant to make them seem nice since they not only stay away from humans but also only eat nasty, nasty mountain lions rather than cute little Bambi deer, and yet all I can think of is how the forests of Forks should be far more barren after several years of this and the resulting deersplosion it would cause. That doesn’t happen because it’s not important. Unfortunately, Twilight isn’t a good enough story for me to ignore it.

Now zombies… that’s a darn big change to introduce to an ecosystem. Talk about an invasive species! Your average zombie setting doesn’t touch on such things much, especially if it’s just an “apocalypse as it happens” scenario. In general the zombie phenomenon is limited strictly to humans, or perhaps humans and one other species (often also the plague vector) like in Black Sheep or Dead Meat. I’ve gone so far as to include the entire spectrum of Class Mammalia in my scope — which is huge, and has instantly ignited speculation on such matters as the zombie platypus and the zombie orca.

This has actually been my scope since the beginning, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it’s intimidating to consider all the implications, and it’s scary to officially “pull the trigger” and finally confirm it in the comic last week. How does the existence of zombie whales and seals affect the fishing industry? What about the ubiquitous rat? What would Forks look like after the mountain lions and deer are either wiped out or become the living dead? Sure, your usual zombie flick can cheerfully ignore these questions, but a big part of my setting is imagining a new equilibrium that’s settled in after a generation of crazy upheaval.

My sanity is preserved here by keeping the story focused for the most part on a very small setting with people who don’t necessarily care about the larger implications of how the world has changed, beyond what has affected them personally. My horse likes meat, but it’s still basically a horse, and its bite won’t make me a zombie; Suzie actually rattled off a ton of exposition in those few sentences. You could assume that what she says is specific to her case, but given the blasé attitude displayed towards a world full of things like zombified prairie dogs, I feel it’s pretty clear that other animals operate along the same lines. Zombie rats that could zombify people would be a nightmare, although it’s useful to keep in mind that the historical Black Death was spread mostly by their fleas and not the rats themselves. Beavers are considered a keystone species of their environment (I haven’t seen the Zombeavers movie but I’m going to hazard a guess they didn’t go into environmental impact), but the idea of removing them from the equation is still less of a potential upheaval than if all the honeybees on Earth started craving flesh instead of nectar.

Also, it’s an assumption to conclude that just because all mammals can become zombies means all mammals have become zombies. There’s another important bit of how all this works that I still haven’t spelled out yet, which is important for me because it lessens the scale of change, particularly where things like ocean-dwelling mammals are concerned. Does it make sense from a scientific standpoint? Maybe not, but it’s consistent with the vision we’ve presented so far and makes at least enough sense in context I like to think that if and when we do confirm it we’ll get a pass. Sometimes, like with the Bantha and The Force, it’s better unexplained. But it’s important we know The Force has its limits (no matter what Yoda says) so we know how it shapes the narrative, and that’s the real ecosystem a writer should first and foremost be concerned with: the ecosystem of the story.

I suppose it’s a writer thing, but I can be downright entertained by multiple meanings. For example, the verb “mining” could refer to the extraction of valuable resources, or it could refer to setting explosive booby traps ready to blow up in someone’s face.

As anyone who’s been around the Internet is no doubt aware, bringing up religion and/or spirituality is one of the most sure fire ways to set off a (figurative) explosion. And yet such matters are so intrinsic to the human condition that it’s a rare storyteller who doesn’t set foot in that minefield sooner or later. To go back to the other meaning, there are valuables there to be mined and brought forth. Judeo-Christendom alone has provided countless strikes of metaphorical bounty for writers throughout the centuries, not even counting instances of outright fan fiction like The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost (and those in turn have inspired quite a few spin-offs of their own). Shakespeare all but strip-mined Greek mythology for his plays, and now in latter days we strip-mine Shakespeare and posit “What if Puck was some rich dude’s executive assistant?”

Now would an Ancient Greek who believed in the Gods and Goddesses and lived their life accordingly find those representations of Puck blasphemous?  Better yet, would they have been offended by, say, how Homer represented Zeus and Poseidon?

 “Unlike practical Greek religious observance, Homer’s portrayals of [deities] suited his narrative purpose, being very different from the polytheistic ideals Greek society used. To wit, the Classical-era historian Herodotus says that Homer, and his contemporary, the poet Hesiod, were the first artists to name and describe their appearance and characters.“

Sounds a lot like what we do to this day when someone decides to represent God as George Burns or Morgan Freeman. I like to think that the reactions are similar, where a minority might take offense but the majority will recognize it as fiction and have no more problem with it than a professional computer programmer does with the average Hollywood hacking scene, unless it’s particularly insulting.

Anyhow, I don’t even want or need to bring personifications of myth or religion into Zombie Ranch, but I did feel that sooner or later I would want to touch on religious topics in a world-building sense, after establishing early on that Christianity in some form had survived the apocalypse. The easy mode most zombie (or apocalypse) stories seem to default to is splitting the world into two camps: atheistic amoral hooligans, or bloodthirsty religious fanatics — with the heroes caught somewhere in between, usually too busy trying to survive to really consider any theological questions.

Now do extremists exist? Sure. Do they get more traction in times of crisis? By the lessons of history, absolutely. Are they the whole story? Absolutely not. Cults like the Flagellants during the Black Death came and went, but the core Catholic Church endured. And because endurance in the face of disaster is one of my biggest themes, it was a more interesting answer to me that institutions like the Catholic Church could and would endure the zombie apocalypse, and a couple decades and councils later would have discussed and resolved some of the theological issues that the walking dead presented. I find the Catholic doctrine of spirit (or “rational soul”, present only in man) versus the material soul which motivates plants and animals to be a fascinating concept, and one which I could easily see being applied to the riddle of the zombie. I lay no claim to being a theologian, but I believe the Church skewing in the direction of incorporating the new facts of life (or unlife) in the Weird New West–with as little change to existing doctrine as possible–to be a plausible outcome.

Hopefully that doesn’t blow up in my face. If it does, well, them’s the breaks of mining, I suppose.

It’s one of the most common questions you’ll hear a writer asked at a convention panel or other public appearance: “Where do you get your ideas?”

And it’s one of the most common opinions amongst writers that this question is both pointless and silly. Neil Gaiman has been one of many to articulate why. Or as one of my friends likes to boil it down: “Ideas are easy. Execution is hard.”

I would suppose it’s not universally true or the question wouldn’t be so persistent and pervasive, but I have the same damn predicament as most writers I know: we are overflowing with ideas. It’s sitting down and forming a cohesive and entertaining story involving them that’s the difficult part. It’s chopping away unmercifully at all your cool ideas until there’s nothing left but a lean, mean tale-tellin’ machine. First drafts tend to have a lot more ideas spelled out in them — or at least mine sure do — but if you leave them as-is your story is in danger of turning into nothing but an infodump. And although Zombie Ranch does have its share of infodumps, the trick for me is always trying to walk the line of making them entertaining, and, in the cases where a character is involved, making sure what they’re saying sounds like something that would actually be coming out of their mouths. You should see some of the first-draft Suzie speeches in my notes. Or, well, no, you really shouldn’t. Even Frank has had times he waxed eloquent before I slapped at my typing hands and thought, “Yes, this is an awesome and informative speech, but realistically all Frank would say here is ‘Yup’.”

Well, anyhow, the point I’m attempting to meander my way towards is that there are cuts, and there are ideas that won’t fit, but it’s a rare case that I would advocate getting rid of them entirely. There’s a reason you thought they were awesome enough to bring down out of your head, right? Yeah, you looked back at it later and it didn’t work for the narrative, or the timing wasn’t right, or it was some seriously tin-eared dialogue to be trying to stuff into a character’s mouth. All of these are excellent signs they need to be altered or removed, so get rid of ’em — but then, I say keep ’em around somewhere. In a notebook, or an old version file. An idea junkyard. Some sort of fixed form record that’s not just careening around in your brain, even if it’s just to occasionally glance over them in the future and cringe in shame.

These are your outtakes, to use a film or television analogy. Sometimes they might even be complete enough to quality as “deleted scenes.” Have you ever checked out the extras on a DVD/Blu-Ray and watched the deleted scenes, or read an early draft script? Most of the time they’re not that great, but they can have interesting ideas in them, and sometimes a director or writer will take stuff from those scenes and use them in another installment of a franchise, or even a different story altogether.

I won’t claim that’s always a great thing, because Prometheus. But still, especially when you’re working with on ongoing setting and characters, keep your notes and your drafts around. With Zombie Ranch I’ve got that problem where I have more ideas for what to do and what to communicate than I may ever get around to having the opportunity to present, but occasionally it helps to go look through the junkyard and see if there are things from the past that might be able to have their turn in the sun.

So I have to be honest, at the conclusion of last Wednesday night’s literary reading I felt like a bit of a cheater. But for better or worse, a successful one. The zombies (or to be specific the zombie stories) carried the night against their vampire opponents, by a landslide vote of the audience. I can’t claim all the credit, since both the superlative Justin Robinson and an awesome lady by the name of Jade Chang were representing for Team Zombie. Jade self-admitted to us that she’d never really written a genre story before, much less a zombie story, so right away I felt relieved that I wasn’t the only “outsider” in terms of who they’d been recruiting. Also, by the end of her reading you could have fooled me, as she had come up with a captivating little tale of doomed romance in a world where the virus didn’t just affect animal, but vegetable and mineral as well, so that the first signs of its spread was watching *everything* around you dying and rotting/rusting away. Never mind the science on that, because that is a terrific visual.

Speaking of which, I ended up reading dead last, after Justin debuted his new zombie short story set in his City of Devils world (his publisher is having a contest this month! Go look!) and all the vampire authors had read as well. Given all my doubts, I suppose I should have been more nervous about intruding upon the world of prose with a comic book, but it probably helped that I had just watched five other authors read their stories out loud, occasionally having their own problems with the transition (like the need to sound out the “he said” “she said” proliferations in their text).

Now, I would be a damn liar to say that I presented my Zombie Ranch excerpt with no alterations. I’m also certain that many other parts of the book would have been far more problematic to adapt to a non-visual presentation. That’s probably a good thing; as I stated last week, if the visuals aren’t important at all to the storytelling, why use the comics format? But as I also stated, the beginning of Episode 3 was a place I always felt I may have gone too far towards the wordy side of the equation, and maybe here was an opportunity where I could turn that into a good thing.

I sat down at my word processor, dug up the old script, and went over it to see where I thought I might get away with an unembellished, unaltered reading, and where I might dab in an extra sentence or two between lines, just enough so that an audience could get the sense of where we were, what was happening, and (occasionally) who was talking. My theatrical training no doubt helped as I could alternate between a neutral narrative voice and then three more-or-less distinct voices for Muriel, the Sheriff and Deputy Jimmy. I also took the opportunity to inject some fun and visually vivid imagery into my purely narrative additions, like describing Muriel as akin to “a main battle tank wrapped in a picnic blanket.”

It worked. People listened, and laughed, and applauded when it was done, and I don’t think anyone got any more lost in their idea of what was happening than in the previous readings.

My favorite book that I ever read is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and while there are sections of that text that wax wonderfully descriptive and metaphorical in the way good prose excels at, there are other sections where he gets much more economical, establishing a setting and certain characters in that setting and then just letting them go. The scene depicting Clevinger’s court martial trial is one of the latter and it is funny and snappy and everything it needs to be despite Heller letting a lot of the dialogue go unanchored, with *just* enough narrative nudges here and there to address changes in who happens to be arguing. Someone has kindly posted an example excerpt here. Back in the day I can remember reading it out loud to my dad and others, with the only real problem being my trying not to join them in laughing while doing so. It’s perhaps extremely unsurprising that Heller later adapted the scene into a one-act play, but in any case, bless Mr. Heller for showing me at an early age that a novel doesn’t have to “act like a novel” all the time and can still be considered a classic.

So although I wouldn’t claim Zombie Ranch is a classic, I suppose I could interpret that last Wednesday proved to my satisfaction that a comic doesn’t always have to act like a comic. The old adage says that a picture is worth a thousand words, but perhaps sometimes you can get away with less on that exchange. You just have to pick them carefully.

I’ve said before that it is perfectly possible to have a comic with pictures and no words, but it’s not possible to have a comic with words and no pictures.

So what happens when I have to try and override my own proclamation? I’m about to find out.

Several months ago I was contacted by a lady who was recruiting writers to do readings for Lit Crawl L.A., in particular her segment of the event which was framed as a “Zombies vs. Vampires” competition.

If you’ve never been to a reading, it’s a situation where several authors will get up in front of an audience, one after another, and read out loud a short story or excerpt from one of their books. Often this takes place in a small club venue, where authors get to promote themselves while the clubs get to collect cover charges and drink money from the attendees.

Lit Crawl L.A. is envisioned as several readings at several different clubs within a certain stretch of North Hollywood. In this case she wanted six authors–three to a side–spinning their tales of vampires or zombies in five minutes or less. I’m not sure how victory will be determined at the end, but I’m perfectly willing to let the fangbangers have their way if necessary. Zombies aren’t known for their egos.

Now on the other hand, I have the unique situation where my zombie work happens to be in the form of a comic book, not the usual prose situation these events are tailored for. I was contacted based on a kind referral from a friend, but I immediately warned the organizer that in my case there were pictures involved, which could be awkward.

She figured that was fine, but from my end I now had to figure out a way to solve the issue of verbally presenting a comic book without sounding like a total dork, the way you might when trying to describe a Sunday funnies strip to someone (“…and then Marmaduke gets up on top of the dad with his food bowl in his mouth and the kid is watching and tells the other kid, ‘When he’s hungry, Marmaduke really bowls you over!…”). I pondered perhaps being able to project images on a wall as I read, but once I saw the venue those hopes were dashed.

In the end I decided that I could perhaps see about turning a weakness into a strength. The beginning of Episode 3 is something I’ve always felt a bit iffy on because it’s very wordy, particularly on the first page. Then there’s some arguably on point dialogue that in some cases repeats what’s there visually (“This is a nice viewpad.”, for example, as opposed to just “This is nice.”)

On the other hand, I like the flow of the dialogue and how it sounds, and I do have that background in drama where I might be able to differentiate between who’s talking by changing my voice. Would that really be any more awkward than prose authors having to get up there, continually mumbling actions or “he said”s under their breath?

If this works out it might just be interpretable as proof that we failed at comics for that particular stretch. Or it doesn’t work, which I guess would act as the opposite and prove we really did still need the pictures to tell the whole story. Or the really optimistic interpretation — that it’s just so cool it works either way!

We shall see, I suppose. We shall see what happens, when there’s nothing to see at all.

If you have no interest in my continuing recap of our experiences shipping Kickstarter rewards, I suppose it’s best you mosey on along, cuz it’s not over yet.

The United States Postal Service has a legendarily bad reputation, to the point it’s one of those symbols of government bureaucracy gone wrong, where surly and uncooperative clerks barely tolerate your presence before handing your fragile and irreplaceable packages off to a black void of delay, damage, and loss.

In truth–at least from my perspective–they ain’t so bad. Maybe it was the competition of courier services like FedEx and UPS, or the rise of email and other Internet services for communications, or a combination of both, but my experiences have generally been positive, both sending and receiving. So when it came time to choose shipping options for fulfillment of the Zombie Ranch kickstarter, the USPS remained on my list. In fact, in the end I ended up doing all my fulfillment shipments with them. Why? Well, like I said, I had no real horror stories, and the price was definitely right.

The pricing was odd because I remember hearing from people that the courier services were cheaper, but when I went to compare rates there was no contest, even on the economy options like UPS Ground. The courier international rates were even more shuddersome. Recently there was a change in rates because of the couriers starting to use “dimensional weight“, but our packages even for our high-end tiers shouldn’t have been big enough to trigger that; regardless, the numbers just weren’t good for our particular situation where we had nothing weighing over four pounds that needed delivery. The courier options seemed most suited towards heavy packages needing to go a long distance. And supposedly it was more reliable, but I’d had incidents refuting that with UPS at least.

Anyhow, I mentioned Media Mail in the last blog, which is how we ended up sending out all the books to our domestic backers (it’s not available internationally). About 30 books were shipped in cushioned envelopes, and out of those I so far know of only one SNAFU that has to be corrected, with all the rest arriving safely. Ditto for the separate high-tier swag shipments sent later by Priority Mail, all of which seem to have arrived without incident. That leaves the only question marks being the international packages and the tiny “secret stash” boxes we sent First Class Parcel, so we’ll see how they go, or don’t go as the case may be.

Now I’m not advocating this method for everyone, even though so far it’s worked out for us. In particular it’s probably insanity to use low-cost USPS services if you’re sending something unique and irreplaceable — in our case we have the luxury of having made sure we have backups, as well as dealing with a relatively small and patient group of contributors. If and when we do another Kickstarter we’ve definitely got some new lessons in mind and will be revisiting our options for fulfillment. Rates can change all the time, and if any of our international packages end up seriously delayed or lost, well, that’ll be a factor, too.

But considering shipping seems to be the number one place where Kickstarters end up “failing” in spite of success, fate so far is dealing us a kind, if not perfect hand, and we’re on track for our promised October fulfillment. People are getting the goodies they pledged for and enjoying them. So thank you, USPS — and may I not have jinxed anything by saying that.

Shipping. The part of the Kickstarter that’s probably the least awesome to think about. Some Kickstarter newbies don’t think about it at all, and end up deep in the red when all’s said and done because it wasn’t part of their budget estimate. I’m not talking about the shipping of getting the goods to your own door (though I’ve heard of people who didn’t even think about that) — it’s getting the goods from your door to the doors of all your backers.

I knew a few of those folks, and so when we launched our own first Kickstarter I was determined not to end up in the same straits. I wanted to build in some sort of shipping buffer into our goal and our tier rewards. The first problem of course is that it’s really hard to estimate, say, the size and weight of a package, when the products you’ll be sending aren’t even made yet. The second problem is you don’t want to scare people off from pledging by putting too much of the cost on them. The third is you can’t just eat all the cost yourself unless you happen to be wealthy enough to cover it, in which case why are you even doing a Kickstarter?

This is a particularly delicate dance in the case of International backers, because the moment a package has to cross a border you’re looking at quite a price hike, regardless of whether you’re using a courier service or not. In the end we went with the lowest cost option provided by our good old United States Postal Service, which still meant approximately $15 to ship to Canada and $20 to ship elsewhere.

Within the U.S. postage could still get fairly high on occasion, such as the tiers where we had to ship a t-shirt, poster, swag, and a set of our individual comics to someone on the opposite coast. Luckily in the end we didn’t have too many of those to deal with, but even with all my thought and preparation there was one thing that caught me by surprise, and that was meeting our stretch goal.

Don’t get me wrong, it was great to get the support! Our initial goal was $2200 and the stretch was $3700, at which point we promised that anyone who pledged at $30 or higher would get a free set of swag: “Uncle Chuck’s Secret Stash”. A little grab bag of Zombie Ranch stickers, temporary tattoos, buttons, etc. They wouldn’t weigh much or take up much room, and the extra money would be more than enough to get them made. No big deal.

Ah, except then we actually hit the stretch, and I suddenly realized that we now had a bunch of $30 tier backers I couldn’t just use Media Mail to send a book to and be done with it.

Media Mail is a low-cost domestic service the USPS offers for certain mailings like books, so long as no advertisements or other merchandise are present. We’d intentionally constructed the Kickstarter so that only at $25 and up did we have to start worrying about sending people non-digital rewards, and only at $40 and up did we have to start worrying about doing more than sending a book in a nicely padded envelope. Except oops, now we had swag to send.

Thankfully we had a buffer of extra funds to work with for just these unforeseen circumstances. Always, always try to ask for more than you think you’ll need (within reason, of course), because there will always be something you’ll overlook, and now what you thought was extra money is actually money you’ll end up needing to use. Heck, even if by some miracle you do calculate everything correctly down to the last dime, you never know when something’s going to get lost or damaged during shipping and will need to be replaced. We already had a bizarre incident like that where the envelope left our hands stuffed full of book and arrived at its destination slit open and empty.

Anyhow I’m going to save any further commentary until everyone gets their stuff. We sent most of the books a couple weeks ago and most everything else including the International shipments are going out this week. Oh yeah, be sure you budget in stuff like boxes and packing tape. Man have we gone through a lot of packing tape. Phew.

Excuse me while I go say a prayer to Hermes or whomever now. May they find their destinations, and may any postal or customs official who opens them for inspection remember to put the stuff back inside this time.

If you don’t recognize or remember the above quote, it’s from the end of Mad Max: Fury Road. Also, like Immortan Joe’s predecessor The Lord Humungus, I am gravely disappointed. Did I not make myself clear that you should see the film, and watch over and over?

All right, fine, I learned long ago not to expect everyone to be as nerdy as me in remembering the fine details of movies I love. I am a reasonable man.

No, actually, maybe that’s not true. This year my obsession with Fury Road drove me batshit crazy. I paid money to go camping out in the middle of the California desert in blazing heat and choking dust.

Let me tell you a little something about me, in case you don’t know: I Do Not Camp. I cannot remember the last time I slept in a tent before this past weekend. It’s happened sometime in my youth, but I’ve blocked it out since then and fully embraced the joys of civilization. Hell I don’t even like going to Renaissance Faires for more than a few hours, and I sure don’t want to dress up for one. This is one of the compromises Dawn has had to accept in our marriage; she likes roughing it, I do not.

And yet there I was earlier this year, purchasing two tickets for Wasteland Weekend, “The world’s largest post-apocalyptic festival”. It started out as a small group of Mad Max/Road Warrior enthusiasts who liked modifying their cars and motorbikes to resemble the guzzoline guzzling hot rods of the movies, eventually in 2010 becoming… well, how to describe it? The Ren Faire of the Post-Apocalypse? Burning Man for LARP nerds? Neither of those is really a fair comparison. The bare facts are that you drive out to the middle of the Mojave, where civilization cannot be seen on any horizon… you set up camp, put on something appropriately themed, and then hang out for three or four days with like-minded folks as an attempt is made to create an immersive (but fun) post-apocalyptic environment.

So, that happened this past weekend, and believe it or not I not only didn’t die or need to be medevac’d, I actually had fun. Enough fun I’m considering a return trip next year, and that despite this year’s festival occurring in record heat that had Dawn and I hiding away during the afternoon in an embrace of tradition of the siesta. Not in our tent, mind you… that’s a great way to cook yourself. Tarps and lawn chairs, scavenging what shade you can as the sun burns through its paces, and lots of water. Plenty of time to check out the sights in the morning and after the sun goes down.

And oh, what sights! The gate to Wasteland City (the fully themed area, as opposed to the main camping area which is thankfully a more lenient mix):

The costumes (even more impressive when you consider desert dust and 100 degree heat!):

The vehicles — each and every one fully operational for harsh conditions!

Yes, even this one (the legs moved as it rolled!)

All of course with the blessing of Immortan Joe!

What a weekend. What a lovely weekend! I won’t say I want to do it again right away, but despite all my usual proclivities I’m willing to do it again –“…in search of our better selves…”

Now before I get started on this rant: referring to the situation Dawn and I were dealing with for the past few weeks as a “game” might be misleading, at least if you approach it from the sense that games are meant to be fun.

One fine day, Dawn logged into her Facebook account to find a message stating that they required her to authenticate her name. She could do so right then or delay for a week. Since she was in the middle of important things, she chose to delay. A week later, she was again prompted. Checking Facebook’s guidelines, she scanned her driver’s license, blacked out the portion’s they didn’t need (or, frankly, had any business knowing), and uploaded the image.

And got back the message that Facebook could not verify her identity based on the documentation provided, at which point she was locked out of her account. In fact her entire profile was walled off. Events she had created were gone. Personal messages she’d sent, restricted. Instead of being “Married to Dawn Wolf”, I was now just listed as “Married.” According to Facebook, Dawn Wolf no longer existed until she satisfied them that she did.

A brief ray of hope occurred when Dawn uploaded her license again along with the staff ID from where she works, except that whoever was reviewing the situation decided to change her profile name to the full name on her ID without her consent. This despite Facebook’s stated intent of having people use the names they are known by in real life, which was exactly the case here. True, Dawn is her middle name, but it’s what she is known as both personally and professionally and it’s right there on her government issued ID. She can cash checks made out to Dawn Wolf using that ID. What, precisely, was the major malfunction here? The result of Dawn asking that the profile be changed back to what it was, was for Facebook to lock the account again, a state of affairs that persisted until just this past Monday morning, with all efforts being met either with silence or a stock form response and no resolution.

Welcome to the ongoing muddle of Facebook’s real name policy controversy. I’m probably not out of bounds to call it what it is: a debacle. Someone apparently decided that “Dawn Wolf” sounded like a fake name to them, and with a few clicks reported her profile to Facebook. Then, despite Facebook’s claims that a real person investigates each claim, the 10 seconds of research it would have taken to see, for example, “Married to Clinton Wolf”, was not taken, and instead the burden of proof placed on Dawn to verify her legal existence. Then a government-issued identification with that name printed right on it was not considered sufficient proof. Meanwhile in the wake of the drag queen controversy last year, Facebook reinstated “Lil Miss Hot Mess” and unequivocally indicated that a pseudonym of that nature was kosher and in keeping with their policies and further they were really, really sorry.

A few months later–on Columbus Day, for added insult to injury–hundreds of Native Americans were reported as “fake” by an anonymous party and locked out of their accounts. Again a big kerfuffle and some percentage of accounts reinstated after a lot of back and forth, though perhaps not all. Worse, it’s still happening.

Facebook has repeatedly defended the policy as one necessary to protect people from trolls creating fake accounts for harassment purposes, and yet the trolls have figured out a much better means of harassment. With a few clicks, they can get someone’s account suspended for weeks. Perhaps even forever, unless that person is prepared to jump through ill-defined hoops, fight a tide of form letters, and perhaps in the end is willing to accept having their full legal name posted (hello harassment!).

This is apparently what happened to Dawn, although we may never know for sure. Someone reported her name as fake. Who would dislike her enough to do that? I don’t know. What I do know is that we couldn’t get this resolved through any of the meager channels Facebook provided, finally having to resort to personal contacts I had inside the EFF, who luckily have been monitoring “real name” issues for years and in turn have the contacts inside Facebook to get shit done. People without those avenues are just at the mercy of a broken system, and it’s damn fortunate that I’m a secondary admin on all of our associated professional pages like the one for Zombie Ranch or we would have lost access the entire time it took to sort this out.

It may very well be that Facebook is telling the truth about having real people look into each reported fake account. I think it’s also a truth that having it be so easy to make such reports means they get bombarded with thousands each day, which would overwhelm such people to where they’re not going to be able to treat every instance with even the ten seconds of scrutiny it would have taken to confirm the report on Dawn was groundless. Flag the account, send off a form letter, boom, on to the next one. It’s a system that’s going to give the worst of both worlds: the impartial coldness of a computer coupled with the inexactitude and inconsistency of a human.

In a sense, this kind of thing is the firstiest of first-world problems — but on the other hand, damn it’s annoying when you end up arbitrarily on the wrong end of it. At least in the end we were able to get a better resolution than our Google Ads debacle a few years back. Let’s hope it stays that way.