TERRA NOVA COVERING OLD GROUND

Well, dear readers, it’s the start of the new television season and that buzz in everyone’s ears is the excitement surrounding Executive Producer Stephen Spielberg’s $20 million dino baby, “Terra Nova”.

I mean, geez, what’s not to like, right? It’s enough to make a science fiction fan drool. It’s got cool CGI cityscapes of a depleted, toxic Earth in the year 2149. It’s got an even cooler, sparkly, techie-looking particle-accelerator time-travel gate that takes its heroes back 85 million years “to set things right” so they can avoid this eco-disastrous future. And, oh, yeah, it’s got awesome CGI dinosaurs a la Jurassic Park to keep things interesting once our heroes get back in prehistoric times.

What it doesn’t have, alas, is an original idea anywhere in sight, or a writer capable of avoiding plot holes big enough to allow a T-Rex to plow through. (I’ll just blame Brannon Braga for that, even if it’s not all his fault.) Spielberg, it seems, was focused on the look of his show to the detriment of some other things. For just a few of the television/SF clichés we’re working with, try these: frontier family, disaffected teen, maverick cop, practically everything from “Lost in Space”, the “others” from “Lost”, all the dinosaur stuff and the ineffective fencing (it's coming, trust me on that one) from Jurassic Park, untrustworthy authority, grizzled commander and, well, I could go on, but you get the picture.

The Earth that sends these colonizers to the past is gasping its last, but somehow can afford to equip the teams with all the modern conveniences. They don’t have to build the least little thing using local resources. They even drive big mohawking vehicles powered by some kind of power cell. Think how much energy it would take to send those babies back in time! Of course, it’s not explained what powers the fuel cells or how they might be recharged. Same goes for the electricity that is in profligate use in the settlers’ compound. Guess maybe they have the whole solar thing figured out. If so, you wonder why the Earth is such a mess.

The only thing that saves the show for me is the presence of the wonderful Jason O’Mara in the role of maverick cop/dad Jim Shannon. He’s much better than his material, lending genuine emotion to his interactions in the family scenes, and providing a thinking woman’s action man as backup to Stephen Lang’s slightly off-kilter Commander Nathaniel Taylor. I’ve been a fan of O’Mara’s since his days on the short-lived “Life on Mars”. One day maybe he’ll get both the role and the attention he deserves. Until then I’ll just have to be content to see him in roles where he has plenty of opportunities to take his shirt off.

For somewhat similar reasons I’m interested to see how the new show “Person of Interest” turns out. Film actor Jim Caviezel (of Jesus of Nazareth fame) is the draw here, starring as a burnt-out Special Ops soldier recruited to intervene and prevent crimes such as murder or kidnapping before they happen. Again, not such a unique idea to think violent crime could be predicted and prevented by eliminating the “criminals” ahead of time. Phillip K. Dick wrote the short story that led to the movie in which Tom Cruise played a cop who becomes a victim of the system (Minority Report).

In this case the “system” is the security monitoring structure set up to scan cameras and communications after 9/11. According to the show’s premise, the network is designed to flag terrorist threats—certain statements, actions, etc. that represent a high security risk to the U.S. government and its citizens. Anything else the system picks up—kidnapping plans, or murder threats, for example, are considered irrelevant and discarded by the computer. The man who developed this elaborate, high-tech system for the government, played with appropriately nerdy elan by “Lost”’s Michael Emerson, can’t sleep at night thinking about all those potential victims. So he quits his government job, drops off the grid and goes looking for an equally disaffected Caviezel to save the people the computer casts off as “irrelevant”.

So the set-up is somewhere between “Quantum Leap” and “The Equalizer”, but with actors of the caliber of Caviezel and Emerson and writing of at least decent quality in the series opener, the show has promise.

Next week I’ll take a look at my returning faves “Fringe” and “Supernatural” and update you on my writing progress in Donna’s Journal.

Final Word on the Banana Man Saga

Colonial Forge High School Principal Karen Spillman tendered her resignation this week, following the controversy over her handling of an incident in which sophomore Bryan Thompson, aka "Banana Man", ran onto the football field at half-time dressed as a banana. Read the full story at http:\\fredericksburg.com

Cheers, Donna

BANANA MAN SLIPS NOOSE

Virginia teenager Bryan Thompson returned to school at Colonial Forge High School yesterday after serving out five days of his original ten-day suspension for running out onto the football field at half-time dressed as a banana.

Stafford County School Superintendent Randy Bridges overruled CFHS Principal Karen Spillman's disciplinary action for Thompson and several students at the school who had supported him by wearing yellow tee-shirts sporting "Free Banana Man" or "Free Speech" logos. As long as Thompson obeys school rules, the remaining five days of his suspension will be dropped and Spillman's threat of a year-long suspension can be dismissed as an empty one.

The Banana Man's return to school was uneventful, according to reports in the local newspaper, the FREE LANCE STAR. Apparently Thompson has vowed to behave himself, and he has had his 15 minutes of high school fame. I'm sure his mother and the school system's lawyers are all breathing huge sighs of relief.

Cheers, Donna

FREE BANANA MAN!

Okay, so maybe this subject is not quite the stuff of the stars. Or maybe it’s proof that we’re already living in that Orwellian future we feared and fought so furiously in the Sixties. The fight went out of us long ago, and it takes something stupid like this incident to remind us of how much we’ve lost.

It all started with a banana. Well, not precisely a banana, but a kid in a banana costume. The “costume” consisted of a bright yellow cape with a banana top. High school sophomore Bryan Thompson from a community close to my central Virginia home, thought it would be funny to don the "banana" and run out onto the football field at half-time. The crowd at the home game at Bryan’s school, Colonial Forge High, thought it was funny, too, and since there was no one else on the field at the time—no band performing, no plays being called—one would have thought this a harmless prank.

Apparently CFHS administrators thought differently. At the time, Bryan was briefly detained by a Stafford County sheriff’s deputy, but was not charged and was released to his mother’s custody at the field. The next day, however, CFHS Principal Karen Spillman suspended Bryan for ten days, with a recommendation that he be suspended for the rest of the school year. The charges: Disobedience of an administrator. Disrespectful behavior toward an administrator. Disruption of an activity. Refusal to follow directions of an administrator. Key word here appears to be “administrator”.

Witnesses say no one appeared to chase Bryan off the field and that when apprehended he was calm. He was laughing, however. Guess that constitutes “disrespect”. Also lack of judgment, but then Bryan suffers from high-functioning autism, which has gotten him in some mild trouble before in school, once for having a cell phone in class, once for creating a website that encouraged students to post “silly” pictures of themselves for the entertainment of their peers. Some have suggested his previous “crimes” have made him a three-time loser.

If the reaction to Bryan’s prank seems overdone, consider the school administration’s Draconian response to his schoolmates’ support. Yellow tee-shirts were confiscated from some students who were allegedly whipping them around as “rally flags”. Pep rallies have been banned. Parking passes have been suspended because someone scrawled “free banana man” on his car.

Two police cruisers were called to the school in advance of a feared student protest that never materialized. Bananas have been banned from the school. (Yes, you read that right. Apparently some radical wrote “Free banana man” on the fruit and passed it around.) Students have been commanded to remove yellow tee-shirts that not only refer to Bryan, or banana man, but also to free speech in general. The ACLU is now involved on the side of the students.

All of this could have been avoided if the school administrators had simply called Bryan and his mom into the school office on Monday morning and asked him not to do anything so silly again. Mom would have promised it would not have happened again. Bryan would have apologized and maybe given up the banana costume and within a week, life at Colonial Forge would have been back to normal. No. Instead it has become a Big Freakin’ Deal and one more example of how our lives have been circumscribed and http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifour freedom of expression curtailed.

Cooler heads may prevail and save Bryan a year’s suspension. I hope so. There is little doubt he will serve out his sentence of ten days (a sentence his mother is appealing). After all, he has DISRESPECTED AN ADMINISTRATOR! The weight of mindless bureaucracy is overwhelming in this age of administration, and even YouTube is powerless to lift it. Unless we all stand up as one, we will each be crushed beneath it in turn.

Check out the video of Banana Man's run and the latest news of Bryan's appeal at http:\\fredericksburg.com.

Cheers, Donna

Donna’s Journal

Action!
Actions we've taken as writers. Where are we? What are we doing?

I have finally come to that moment of truth in my current work in progress, the scene that reveals the true nature of my leading characters: the love scene. Maybe I should put that in all caps: THE LOVE SCENE. Yes, that’s better. I can’t overemphasize the importance of this crucial interaction between the hero and the heroine in defining who they are—not just for the reader, but for the writer in charge of shaping them.

For some reason, my hero and heroine are just not fully formed until I see how they respond together in bed. What they want from each other in that intimate setting is (or should be) a reflection of what they want from each other in the relationship—comfort, security, adventure, trust, freedom, a key for a prison, a cage for a demon, balm for pain, release for anger. And the traits revealed when the characters have their clothes off can be dramatically different from the ones they show when fully dressed. The gruff can be tender, the timid become bold, the weak grow strong and the strong are driven to their knees.

For some of my books, I had the key love scene—the first time the h/h make love—outlined in my mind before I ever began writing the rest of the story. I had the characters and the fantasy of their time together, and in some ways I built the relationship around that. (Is this too much information? Sorry! I did have a plot and all, too.) Sam and Rayna, the hero and heroine of Fools Rush In, my current WIP, were secondary characters in my two previous books. I should have had some idea of who they were. But I didn’t truly know them—their secrets, their needs, the things that brought them to each other--until I got them into bed together at last.

I’m still learning, so I won’t make any revelations here—S#$%&y First Drafts and all that. What I really hope, since I’m forced to work backward here, is that being together doesn’t change them! That is, being together can only change them into the characters we already know (since this is a prequel), and not into someone else. Tricky.

Of course, no book has just one great big LOVE SCENE and done! Well, actually there are plenty like that, but I hate those, and I certainly don’t write them. Ideally, the intimacy of the love scenes should progress as the relationship builds throughout the book until at the end the lovers are as close as they can possibly be, joined body and soul. First encounters are shadowed with secrets withheld, questions unasked, insecurities, lack of trust, even fear. Those internal conflicts which threaten to tear the lovers apart are often hiding in the background in that first scene, and quickly make an appearance as the characters reflect on what has just happened. As their commitment to each other solidifies, that, too, is reflected in more intimacy and openness in the later love scenes.

One other thing, since I seem to be talking rules now. I’m a firm believer in the school of thought that says the love/sex scenes in romance should contribute to the plot. In this case, of course, we’re referring to the emotional plot, but in romance, the emotional plot is equal to any other plot you have going—be that science fiction, suspense, historical or whatever. In my books, you had darn well better not skip the sex scenes or you will miss something significant between the lovers—a revelation, an important concession, an advance or a retreat on the road to commitment, or most often, the opening of a heart. Sex makes people vulnerable, and not just to diseases or pregnancy—that’s why we warn our teenagers not to engage in it frivolously. It’s dangerous. And very dramatic. That’s why it must be used to move the story forward.

And that’s why I use it to find out who my characters truly are.
Cheers, Donna