Fiction Forge Indy
Welcome to Fiction Forge Indy! We are a group of four writers in Indianapolis that love to talk about anything that has to do with writing. We all met at the Indiana Writers Center and come from four very different backgrounds with interests in Fantasy, Mystery, Humor, Romance, and Historical Fiction. Prepare to be informed and entertained! Oh --and by the way, we hope you share your thoughts on the craft of writing, too.
Monday, September 23, 2024
Hollywood's Bloated Ending Problem--a quick Romulus note
Sunday, September 1, 2024
Romulus?
I wrote a couple of blogs about Aliens.
Revisting this because Nick and I just went to see Alien: Romulus.
The Frankenstein theme and ideology that ripples through our culture fascinates me. I think Jurassic Park stated this well:
Ahh. Jeff Goldblum.
Sure, Jurassic Park, Terminator, and Aliens explore this driving passion: man creates a monster that can destroy him.
One of the wonderful ways that the Alien movies does this is in the dual monsters. Certainly, and perhaps most obviously, man created the aliens (or develops them). The aliens continue to become more demonic and more terrible, evolving into plagues that infect humans.
But the other monsters that the Alien movies use are the synthetics. This is such a lovely tension: the synthetics in the movies have cloaked motives and desires, and in the most recent movies (Prometheus and Covenant), some synthetics are almost as monstrous and horrible as the aliens--of course, in much different ways. The synthetics have incredible characters and tension.
Both the aliens and the synthetics are marvelous and amazing monsters, created by humans, yet the humans do not fully understand the potential devastation or destruction they cause.
The opening of Covenant was beautiful. In about 2 1/2 minutes, we meet the two main characters, learn their relationship, understand the strange tension between them, and see no aliens.
This opening is brilliant, lovely, and terrifying. I probably could watch another 10 minutes of this. I want more.
Now we get to Romulus.
Huh.
The opening in Romulus is quite strangely, none of these things. Sure, no aliens. The opening includes too many characters, too much artificial and unnecessary character development, and dark scenes with no beauty or cloaked tension.
Perhaps the most disappointing character is the synthetic, Andy. Andy is simple, almost ridiculously so. Some of the other characters tease him, and Andy appears hurt, but this does not quite make sense. When the powerful lead woman (girl, doesn't hold a candle to Sigourney Weaver) reprograms Andy, his motives are still obvious--this does not lend to any real tension. The other characters learn about his motives quickly.
I am keeping this very brief because I wish to focus on the incredible Frankenstonian theme. This does not get old. We continue to reuse this theme because, I believe, we fear this in our own lives and own world. Whether we fear the power of AI taking over our world or the bureauchratic systems controlling our lives, this theme is just as poignant and applicable today.
And yes, I will watch any Alien movie.
Monday, July 15, 2024
Isaac Asimov may be turning in his grave!
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Revisiting Fight Club
After listening to the interview with Chuck Palahniuk (reshared November 18, 2023), I reread Fight Club. If you haven’t listened to this interview, it’s worth it. He’s fascinating.
I recall reading Fight Club 20 years ago and thinking that, aside from the ending (which was actually better than the movie), most of the book was similar to the movie. Strange, but the movie adapted the book well with the voice-over narration and the unreliable narrator. It worked well.
On my most recent reading of Fight Club, however, I focused on Palahniuk’s use of rhetoric and rhythm.
Bob’s big arms were closed around to hold me inside, and I was squeezed in the dark between Bob’s new sweating tits that hang enormous, the way we think of God’s as big. Going around the church basement full of men, each night we met: this is Art, this is Paul, this is Bob; Bob’s big shoulders made me think of the horizon….
Bob’s shoulders inhale themselves up in a long draw, then drop, drop, drop in jerking sobs. Draw themselves up. Drop, drop, drop.
I’ve been coming here every week for two years, and every week Bob wraps his arms around me, and I cry.
Fight Club, 16-17
Bob, Chloe, the nameless boss, Marla. Yes, the movie gave them mass exposure, but the book describes them with metaphors, rhetorical repetition, and yes, a bit of music.
Add in violence and the lost generation and a crazy narrator, and no wonder this book is such a crazy success. Funny, when I first read this, I knew the writing was smooth and easy, but I’m developing a deeper appreciation his the complexity of his style.
Sunday, December 31, 2023
So You Wanna Be A Writer by Charles Bukowski
Saturday, November 18, 2023
Novelist interview-Chuck Palahniuk
Sunday, September 24, 2023
Everything You Need to Know About Writing Workshops from ShaelinWrites
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
The Contemplation of Gabby's Name, or A Dirge to Gabby
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
Our cat, Gabby, died a couple of weeks ago.
We didn’t name Gabby. She came with that name, and I never thought it suited her. I thought she should have a stronger, more unique name. T.S. Eliot comes to mind. She certainly would engage in some sort of rapt contemplation of thought. Maybe even about her name.
I think Gabby had at least a few other names that we only guessed at.
Nick called her Crazy Cavewoman Bat-Killer from time to time. She earned this name for the murderous, merciless killings about which we bragged (mice and bats primarily).
Certainly, she was Dumpster Diver, too, for her veracious appetite and demand for any human scraps we would share with her. She even dug into our trash for meat wrappers, cat food cans, and certainly anything that smelled like fish.
She was Snuggler, too, because of how she would sleep on my head, hogging the pillow, so I fell asleep with her warm body smushed next to my face. Funny, after I fell asleep, she would get up and wander off to sleep in the kitchen almost as if she just wanted to make sure I had gotten to sleep.
She was Reading Companion. I would sit in my favorite green chair, and within minutes, she would snuggle next to me. Even now as I write, I sit to one side of the chair, leaving space for her to join me.
If you are not a cat person or a pet person, I expect you not to understand. We anthropomorphize our animals and sometimes treat them better than people.
But I miss my little, Cavewoman, Bat-killer, Dumpster Diver, Puppers, and whatever her Ineffable Name is—the name that was much more dignified and wilder than Gabby.
Saturday, July 22, 2023
The First Guy To Ever Write Fiction--reshare from Ryan George
Saturday, July 1, 2023
Estes is a Rotating Thing: a Desire... a River... and a Moment Before a Fire
Desire Will Take Me Over A Mountain: Whatever you can give
In the high desert I swam rivers of brine, sand, and sheen; the burn was unforgiving and blinding; the path of uprooted stones that cracked bones and scraped flesh led me recklessly between stabbing, dry thorns of Time.
-----------------
One thought settled beyond where the sun goes to set
One thought to renew at dawn a tempest to catch;
I long for you -- a taste of you, but whatever you can give, Man;
I’d take.
----------------
Above the timberline I failed a hundred times, to move; instead, I sublimed to the vacuum of primigenial you; my breath the permafrost I must cross to fall, to tumble over the other side at breakneck speed.
----------------
Failing to grasp what’s obvious to me
these events of our past on this rotating thing;
I wish for clarity -- a reasoned transaction with you; yet, whatever you may give, Man;
I’d take.
----------------
I carried some hope and sure; I'd admit it's unsteady in my head
either you hand me some rope to settle this thought; or laid it down in your bed;
When I reach for your hand -- or fall into your scorn; whatever you might give, Man;
I’d take.
RS Wireman |
Big Thompson
Big Thompson
Spirits stumble and slip
A river of hurt
in ‘76
The Gift is to Know a Moment When Living in the Moment: Just Before the Firestorm
Just before the firestorm came -- and you can smell it and sense it’s nearing -- the highland still died and still lived as it had always done before my primate foot had settled on the ancient and new clays in the moraine. Yet, the talent of the hominid is not only to mark, deliberate and judge a moment, but to reserve it and all the philosophical axons to physical memory for reflection-- to stimulate the moment again... and whether it hurts them in the long run or renews the spirit daily. A moment captured before a big fire could touch a valley some weeks later is an attempt to contextualize reality from sky to stone to smoke to bone to shoe prints on a worn, rocky, and rooted elk-horse-homo sapiens sapiens trail.
The moment moves like the elk and bends like the grass and, yes; flows away from the river and against the wind like the entirety of an afternoon on Earth. And it makes sense to those that can be made aware. Though the human memory will generalize it or fade it across time the quantifications and the intensity of a moment and its colors, the brain of a man will have successfully metamorphosed its data into raw emotions of knowing: knowing, knowing, knowing what beauty, significance, and the pending end of that moment -- and all these things at once: the burnt smoke remnants of life that hovered above us and then some miles away made brown the dusk of nurturing light that feed the green at our knees as it leaves us behind our multi-dimensional mountainscape.
RS Wireman |
stretched us and quantified us in increments of altitude as we
hiked, rested, drank, listened, smelled, exhaled, observed
while we climbed ever so carefully with each step carried along with
the flow of time to bring us, give us, measure us, as we tie ourselves to a day.
in just ten hours in the mountains: Bear Lake, Dream Lake, Haiyaha Lake; and more
where time is expended as the Universe prefers: as if an illusion, but as real as it could ever be;
as the flow of these precious moments is forever the chilled dew of sunrise… the dry smoldering sunfall... the desire to do it all over again if blessed with the breath.
Prologues - The On-going Debate
Saturday, June 24, 2023
Online groups meet IN PERSON
Our writing group met informally in-person back in May. I intended to write about this because I have a couple of quick thoughts about this fantastic evening.
Food, beer, conversation, and loveliness ensued.
Funny, when we met regularly in-person (pre-Covid, of course), we knew each other better, chatted more, bonded more. Online, we may focus more on the submissions, but I think we lack the comraderie that makes a writing group bond and connect in meaningful and lasting ways.
Tom and I talked a bit about the benefits of meeting online versus meeting in person.
Tom likes the online meetings because we stay more focused and finish on time.
This is certainly true. He has a valid point about this.
I miss the face-to-face interaction. Pre-Covid, we would hold our meetings but chat after. Sometimes for a long time.
We certainly talked about our projects and writing, but we knew bits and pieces about each others' lives, too. In a strange way, we felt like a tighter community back then. The relationships within the group seem stronger and more enduring.
And while I mean no disrespect to the people that have joined the group since Covid, I do not feel the bond that I have with the others.
But meeting in a restaurant, to talk about writing, to see how tall and good looking they are (they are all good looking online, but even more attractive in person), and to share a bit of our lives seems to strengthen the community in ways that Zoom cannot do.
Couple more thoughts on this to come....