R Canepa

Note: this is the latest text for my About page.

When it comes to things I do, I write fiction and am a musician and beginning composer, among other things.

My general interests in no particular order are:

• myth and folklore;
• writing and storytelling;
• health and medicine (both physical and mental);
• thinking, organizing information, and making connections between ideas.

I avoid taking on new hobbies whenever possible.

The limit, you see, is time and energy.  I’ve been an English major, pre-med with emphasis on neurobiology, a middle school science teacher, a programmer.  They’re all interests of mine that I would pursue if only I had the time.  But there are (at minimum) two true things about the world and life in it:

* We have to make decisions
* Life and time will move on whether we make decisions or not

I can either float along, paralyzed with indecision and a fear of deciding, thus accepting by default whatever comes my way and kicks down the door, or I can make the effort to pursue something more.  Greatness and happiness are not passive affairs.

In the past, I wondered and worried about making the “right” decision, but now that I’m on the other side of about ten years of worry, I don’t think there’s a right decision at all.  Instead, what I’m left with is the responsibility to choose what I feel is best for me right now.

I’m working on accepting that I’m not limited to doing one thing ad nauseum for the rest of my life.  Not only is the workplace changing and people are turning over through companies and careers at an ever-increasing pace, but I’ve found that the “one thing” approach isn’t a fit for my personality.  The core of this new idea is that I can devote time to a passion, and then move on to another passion, without feeling like I can’t commit to anything or have failed or “wasn’t serious”.  Or I can work on two or more things simultaneously, and, given enough work, reach a level of happiness in each.

In this new world of mine, there is no more guilt about not sticking with something or “killing my darlings”, said darlings being all those projects I want to do, things I want to learn, and careers I want to pursue that will suffer when my attention turns elsewhere.  Moving in a new direction does not mean I don’t care about what has come before or that I can never return to it.  After all, each “right thing” felt like the right one at the time, and each contributes to “me” as a whole and hopefully helps me become a better person along the way.

When I started this blog, I intended on writing a new “about” page for each new year–and fell short of my goal in spectacular fashion.  This update is another attempt to start a habit that I tried to form a few years ago.

When I wrote my update in 2010, I was set in a creative space (as my many updates about writing will attest).  2012 will be a year of change and new directions.  I’m still working on what that “right for me right now” decision will be and where it will take me.

Another thing I’ve noticed during my romp through the episodes: they spent all sorts of time building up their characters, and then sometimes cheat them in their core characteristics for the sake of drama.

The biggest example of this is Worf.  In Worf, we have a trained warrior, from a warrior culture, whose body also apparently has backup organs to act as fail-safes. He’s tough and mindful, both of his duties and his environment.

Why, then, do people get the jump on him time and time again?   Why do his instincts and training inexplicably fail?  in the episode “Man of the People,” Worf and the captain have beamed down to stop something nefarious.  They’re confronted, and then the camera cuts to show Worf under phaser guard and being disarmed by two on-planet guards.  How did that even happen? Why didn’t he see them coming?

Even if someone did get the jump on him, he should be able to take more than one hit.  Why does he get knocked out with one blow to the back over and over?  The Klingon pain ceremony in the episode “The Icarus Factor” proved his endurance beyond any doubt.

These instances are frustrating as a viewer because I know, based on what I’ve seen before (based on characterizations over many episodes), that these things would never happen normally.  Instead, they’re just used to scoot the episode along to where the writers wanted it to go, and in the process, cheat both the viewer and the character.

Good storytelling renders a character’s strength meaningless or temporarily ineffective.  Don’t just chump-shot the warrior: give me a situation where he has to face an army, an enemy he can’t fight, a situation where he has to go against his instincts and surrender to save someone else.

Like many other people, I’ve been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from the beginning now that it’s available for streaming on Netflix.  Now that I’m far older and have some stories under my belt, I saw an interesting pattern in what the writers decided to do with their story lines.

So far, they fall into two basic structures.  I’ll call them the parallel structure and the nested structure.

The parallel structure is two separate story threads blended together that they then cut back and forth between during the course of the episode.  Usually, one of the two threads involves the “problem on the planet” type stuff.  Solve the dilemma, save the other spaceship, and so forth.  The second story thread is the one that the writer(s) can play with to achieve a different feel.  It could be humor-based, such as when Data is trying to learn how to be funny.  Or it can be character-based, such as when they investigate Worf’s background or the interaction between sets of characters.

The variations, of course, are nearly infinite.  What’s important is the idea of the two parallel threads: you can create tension by cutting back and forth between the two, and you can also get away with more when you use them together than if you were to use each separately.  The “Crisis on the planet” schtick might get stale faster if it’s not interwoven with something else.  There’s also something to be said for allowing a story some room and giving the viewer/reader a chance to breath before the tension cranks up again.  A whole episode of nothing but character background / investigation / fan service can get boring quick, too, especially if that character doesn’t happen to be the viewer’s favorite.  It also exhausts the pool that represents that character’s background story potential much faster.  Want to ensure a reader comes along for the entire ride?  Dribble the background, the stuff they want to know, in small bits throughout the entire arc.

In the nested structure, one story thread complicates another.  One of the best examples of this so far is in the Season 1 episode “The Big Goodbye,” where Picard and others get trapped in the holodeck right as the ship is supposed to make important diplomatic contact that only the captain can handle.  Either story thread could have been an episode by itself, but would have felt a bit anemic.  By complicating one situation with another situation, the tension rises.  After all, things are seldom easy or go as planned–especially if the writer has anything to say about it.

Within the nested structure is the reminder to not let things be easy on characters.  If the ship breaks down, and the crew just says, “oh, okay, then we’ll stop until it’s fixed,” there’s no episode, no conflict, nothing interesting going on.

The use of these two ideas, or vehicles, in a TV show makes me think they’d work well in short fiction.  I’ve added these to my writer’s toolbox and will try to pull them out every now and again.

My copy, circa 1995

I spent a fair amount of time during high school shuffling back and forth by plane between states to visit with my mother and father. My ultimate go-to book of all time is Belgarath the Sorcerer by David and Leigh Eddings.

This book wins for a few reasons.  They are one of my favorite authors (I’m glomping them together into one entity; I don’t think they’d mind) and largely responsible for my desire to write fantasy. Their stories have a light, humorous feel to them, and the banter between characters keeps things entertaining.  This book is also a follow-up to the ten-book series, retold from the POV of one of the most major characters responsible for orchestrating the whole shebang across a period of 7000 years, and so it’s a good sampler, so to speak, of parts of the overall story.  It’s also fairly long, which doesn’t hurt when you have to fly and kill time on long layovers.

I once had the idea to make hash marks on the inside cover, once for every time I read it, and am a little sad that I didn’t.  I’d have to put the count up around 20 at least.  You can’t tell in the picture, but the edges of the covers and the spine are covered in tape to make them more resilient. I did this to all of the books I bought in highschool–mass-market paperbacks were cheapest and I had to make them last.

One of the times I can remember where I didn’t read Belgarath was when my girlfriend at the time gave me her hardcover copy of The Dark Half to borrow for the trip.  Now that book is forever linked with her (we moved on, literally in my case, but keep in touch) and that time period. Behold the power of the blog/journal: I hadn’t thought about that in darn near forever.  I can still remember sitting in the airport with it and waiting for my dad to pick me up.

I also love finding used bookstores whenever I travel.  It has to be a used book store–chains are okay, but if you’ve been in one, you’ve been in them all.  And they get bonus points if they have a resident cat or two. I might go so far as to say that any proper used bookstore requires a cat.  Some good stores that come to mind are The Bookshop (Chapel Hill, NC) and Beckham’s Bookshop (French Quarter, New Orleans).

A habit I’ve fallen into is to search for Jonathan Carroll books while I’m there. Of course, I could just buy them from Amazon or the local place here at home, but there’s something pleasing in the ritual, in the hunting and finding of that trade paperback copy with a hand-penciled price, and in delaying the procession through the backlist of one of my favorite authors.  The only problem is figuring out how to support him directly. (Please oh please, support your favorite authors)

Like many others, I have a Kindle now, and so the interesting thing will be to see how it integrates into my travel reading.  Alas, Belgarath isn’t available in ebook form.  Would it still feel the same if it was?

* * * * *

How are books and travel linked for you?  Are there memories associated with the two?  What’s your go-to book for travel?

Note: I originally wrote this in mid-July, thought it was scheduled, found it wasn’t, and got too busy for a while to do anything about it.

I think I’ve identified which story I’ll be writing next, and have begun fleshing out my notes.  This process allows me to see just how much of the narrative I have figured out and areas that need work.  It was in this process, where I’m still working out who wants what, does what, why, and so forth, that I made an interesting discovery:  everything was couched in terms of “perhaps” and “maybe.”

To my horror (if only my horror had been more horror-like), I saw that I tend to do that fairly often.  Then I deleted all those possiblies, maybes and perhapses, and you know what?  The planning took on a much stronger feel.  It also made me analyze what I’d come up with to determine whether or not it’s any good or if I can do better.  Those “maybes” allow something to sit there on the page, in limbo, neither accepted nor rejected, and so I can never work with the indefinite.  By deleting them and saying, “by golly, this is the way it is,” I’m left to either accept it–and build on it–or come up with something better to replace it.

Writing is a humbling endeavor.  Three books written and I’m still learning all sorts of things.