Part 2 in a series about the development of SO YOU CREATED A WORMHOLE, from idea to proposal to book contract to shelves.

Once you start to realize what the hell it is you’re going to be writing, you might start to wonder how best to sell it.

Co-writer super best friend Nick Hurwitch and I landed at that spot once we started developing the idea of the structure of So You Created a Wormhole. Having written a little bit of the book — an introduction, namely, plus a detailed outline of what we planned to cover within the book — I started looking into what we would need to accomplish before writing the entire manuscript.

I’m not entirely sure where I came upon this knowledge, because I feel it’s not really known that works of non-fiction have a different process than that of the standard novel when it comes to selling books to publishers. Novels are a full-manuscript affair, with the book written out ahead of time and then sold as a completed work. Non-fiction isn’t like that. How I came to determine that, I have no idea, but I decided to do a little research to figure out what we should be writing, if not the complete book we intended to make.

As it turns out, there is a process for non-fiction books (of which So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler’s Guide to Time Travel is one, just barely) that’s different from fiction. That process begins not with a manuscript, but with a proposal. As we discovered thanks to Google, the proposal includes a lot of information about the book that stretches beyond what’s in the actual book.

Here’s an interesting thing you don’t often hear about publishing: Authors are among the largest marketing forces for their books that there is. A primary component of our proposal had to do not with the book itself, but with the work we’d be willing to put in outside of the book to promote it. Luckily, being well-connected journalist-type guys, Nick and I had quite a few media contacts we’d made over the years in internships and at school. That likely helped our chances incredibly.

Our proposal included the following:

• An overview, which started with three or four sort of “narrative” paragraphs in the tone of the book, followed by a summary of the entire plan: our tone, our idea, what we planned to cover and how we planned to cover it.
• A marketing and promotion section, in which we discussed our media contacts, our social networking outreach, and all the other things we planned to leverage to get the book in front of eyeballs. Early on we included the idea of doing a webisode series based on the book, which we’ve just started working on in the last week.
• An about the authors rundown explaining who the hell we are and why the hell someone should give us a publishing contract, basically. We explained our qualifications and the grunt work already done to make the book happen.
• A chapter overview that ran down the table of contents for the book and everything we were planning to cover in each chapter.
• Three sample chapters meant to illustrate what we were actually envisioning. This was especially important because So You Created a Wormhole is actually like two projects: a textbook up front, explaining time travel as seen in films and books such as Back to the Future and The Terminator; and an era-by-era field survival guide at the back. As such, we included two textbook chapters and a survival guide chapter to fully illustrate what we were planning.

That was basically it. That proposal was used to pitch the book to agents (we eventually landed with the incredible Brandi Bowles of Foundry Literary and Media) and, after that, to publishers.

Building the proposal wasn’t anything special, either, beyond the work it took. We spent about a month putting it together, including the additional sample chapter work we had to do (some of which was already finished by that point). To find out what the proposal entailed, we just googled it. There’s a fairly standard format for these sorts of things, which is easily replicated.

This link is a good example of the nonfic proposal format, and it’s basically what Nick and I used when we created our own.

I’m think I’ll post our actual proposal here in the next day or two, along with a few tips that helped us along the way.

Part 1 in a series about the development of SO YOU CREATED A WORMHOLE, from idea to proposal to book contract to shelves.

When tracing back the genesis of the project that would eventually become SO YOU CREATED A WORMHOLE: THE TIME TRAVELER’S GUIDE TO TIME TRAVEL, I suppose the very beginning would be my obsession with zombie fiction.

Way back in 2008, co-writer and hetero-lifemate Nick Hurwitch gave me Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide. After reading it, it was striking how true to concept Brooks stayed with the whole thing. I’ve heard the book described as being tongue-in-cheek hilarious, and you can read it that way if you want. You can also read it as being a serious take on the idea of being in the center of a zombie holocaust, given how methodical and logical the book is. It plays both ways.

Soon after I found myself watching the Denzel Washington film Deja Vu*, also at Nick’s suggestion. Being a big fan of time travel, I was excited to get into it, but I found it lacking in some ways.

It’s hard to explain (time travel is like that), but allow me a crack at it:

There’s a scene early in the film in which Washington, an investigator, goes to the home of a woman who was killed in a terrorist attack, looking for clues to the incident. I’m a little hazy on the details, but one element stuck with me: a message written in colored magnets on the refrigerator door, which reads, “You can save her.”

Incredibly obvious to all of us watching is that this is a time travel film and that message was undoubtedly left by Washington. And sure enough, later in the movie, he goes back in time, meets the woman, goes to her house and leaves all the clues he himself found the first time through, when he was back in the future. He even creates the message on the fridge, knowing that in the future, his other self will show up to do the investigation.

If you’re following along, you should be seeing that by creating the message for himself and leaving the clues he’s already seen in the future, Washington in the past is creating and matching all the events as they happened in the first pass through the timeline. Timeline A, in which his first time through the house was when he was investigating in the future, is being replicated by Timeline B, in which he goes to the past, because Washington isn’t changing everything. Up to this point, everything we’ve seen may as well be predestined. We’ve been to the future — we know the outcome of this chain of events. He’s setting up the antecedents to an ending we already have.

How, then, is Washington able to change the timeline and save the girl by the end of the movie? By all accounts, he should have the exact same outcome this time through as he did the last time through — terrorist attack goes off, Denzel Washington comes to investigate. But it changes because it’s a movie and the writers needed it to change, the laws of causality and time travel be damned.

Long and short: everyone does this. Hollywood movies (and many books) routinely skip the nitty gritty of time travel in order to wrap up the story and keep the plot flowing forward. It can (sometimes) make for a fun popcorn movie, but it seriously lacks depth. The contention I came away with, having been thinking about it, was that no one has ever really done time travel well, except for Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis in Back to the Future.

Having just finished reading a humorous guidebook, I called Nick a day or two later and laid an idea on him: a guide to time travel. A good one, one that explained all the concepts, one that ripped apart the corner-cutting that always goes on in movies.

We would sit on the idea for two years after twisting it some in the early going. I wrote a nebulous, labyrinthine introduction to the hypothetical book, discussing the idea of the reader having read the book in the future and returned to bring it to the past, purposely confusing the tenses and the pronouns so it was never clear which “you” was “you” and which “you” was the other “you.” It was fun, and it was kind of funny, and after Nick came back with some more ideas of how the book would actually play out, we started developing an outline.

Time passed and the idea was in incubation until I finally moved to Los Angeles in early 2009. By the end of that year, we had a working book proposal. It took a while to develop, and we had no idea what we were doing. More on that next time.

*I could also bitch for a while about The Butterfly Effect if you want.

Sometime around July, I started to write an entry in this blog to restart it. As you might have guessed, I never finished that entry.

That entry opened with a short discussion of lowered priorities, the balancing of making money and writing in blogs that no one reads, et cetera and so on. I also played the “I was writing a book” card, which kind of excuses me, I guess. Except we finished writing that book in April. I’ve had a few short flurries of activity since then in the editing process, concerning copy edits, content edits, cover choices and promo materials, but nothing to warrant not having written here for so long.

Let’s face it. I was lazy. I also read A Game of Thrones, A Storm of Swords (when something becomes a TV show or a movie, that’s often when I find out about it) and some other stuff. I’ve played a lot of video games for work. Skyrim is a thing that sucks up some of my time. I have a lot of excuses, I’ve written a lot of words, and I’ve neglected this thing I’ve created. I have a tendency to do that. I’m a terrible father and an easily distracted god.

But I usually come back, eventually, and here we are. And I have a plan to dedicate a large chunk of what goes on in this space to detailing our book-writing process in some hopefully useful detail. I’ll also be filling these … pages? I dunno … with the same kinds of opinion dribble that I used to. Probably fewer reviews though, given that I do those for a living now. You can read a great deal of my paid writing over at GameFront.com and Appolicious.com. I surrender much of my time to those two things.

Okay, on to something worth reading. Maybe.

Something Worth Reading

So check this out: So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler’s Guide to Time Travel has, among other things, a cover. We also built a website that’s right here. All this crap is coming along.

It’s also a surprisingly huge amount of crap to do. You might think, “I have a great idea for a book. I’m going to write it.” Little do you know that the book-writing part, at least in the case of (what we loosely term) nonfiction, is maybe 70 percent of the total process — I don’t know, I haven’t completed the total process yet. Co-writer hetero-lifemate Nick Hurwitch and I dedicated roughly four to five months to writing the book itself — we signed our book contract in late November and finished by the  middle of April.

The rest of the time, we’ve been working on peripheral stuff, trying to make a universe of funny to rotate around our book. We’ve already built portions of the growing fiction, like a website meant to be that of the governing agency of time travel, QUAN+UM. We’re also trying to be as funny as possible daily on The Time Travel Guide’s Twitter feed, @timetravelguide, and building slowly our Facebook presence.

It’s an interestingly high degree of crap to do, actually. A lot of promotion is done by the author in publishing — something you don’t really ever hear but kind of makes sense — and something worth  noting is that telling a publisher how what you’re going to do to help them sell your book is a key part of getting a book contract these days. You’re your own marketing department. You need to be if you care at all about what you’re doing.

So that’s part of what this is, actually. This is me trying to make myself more available, Google-able, and interesting, whenever possible. It’s back to blogging, but before I could find myself writing something interesting, I had to write this.

There. Done. You’re welcome.

Six a.m. on a Sunday. That’s what it takes this week – and this is the first week.

I feel like I’m going to puke.

Make a coffee run. Return home. Send the girlfriend off for her 10k this morning, which I’m unable to attend because apparently runners are not expected to have people who would like to be there to see them run. Come home; avoid waking up sleeping guests in the living room. Headphones. iTunes. Facebook. Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Facebook game I ashamedly play.

Aaand finally: Chapter 2, about 4,000 words in. This being the first new chapter of The Book. The Book for which, you last read, we were shopping around the Great Book Proposal. The Book which Nick Hurwitch and I are now being paid to write. By a publisher, which is real.

A lot has happened since then. The book proposal suffered some major rewrites, additions, manipulations, mutilations and rewrites. That sample chapter at the end of the last blog post I put down for this? Didn’t even make it into the proposal at the end. Might not even make it into the book.

I’ll write some details about the book proposal and our process in the future, because it’s going to take me a while. I’ll also drop our finalized proposal, and all the addendum stuff we ended up creating at the eleventh hour, for your perusal. I’m not sure that our example will help any other writers, but it can’t hurt. Unless it can. In which case, sorry, our bad.

So meanwhile, several months later, the book is, yes, frakkin’ sold. We’ve got a publisher. They want to publish it. It’s going to be published.

Meanwhile, writing partner, hetero-lifemate and superbestfriend Nick Hurwitch and I have our work cut out for us. We’re currently in the process of auditioning illustrators to help us put together the textbook-survival guide-field manual-nonfiction humor science text we’re hoping to make. Oh, and we also need to self-educate in several different schools of theoretical physics.

However, for the first time ever, I’m a self-sustaining professional writer, with no other stopgaps or occupations propping me up. The safety nets are gone, but somehow I’ve managed to fall directly into doing what I’ve always wanted to do, and I get to make a decent-ish living doing it. Copy editing is no longer my full-time job: I’m now a freelance, professional blogger and author. Now there’s nothing and nobody in the way – except me.

Yikes.

The more time I spend with Twitter, the more I realize it has the potential to be single greatest achievement of the Internet to date. No, dude – I’m totally serious.

Beyond the more amazing achievements of Twitter – broadcasting the struggles of people in oppressed parts of the world, for example – it every single day brings people closer together. And not in that Facebook “we were friends in high school and now we can occasionally check out pictures of one another’s dogs” way, in which there’s as much relationship expansion as there is total could-care-less ignoring of other people going on. Twitter is a conversation, and only a conversation, between groups of people. Twitter is a chance to have a conversation with virtually anyone, and in many ways, your ability to take part in that conversation is moderated only by your ability to have something interesting to say.

I’m speaking, of course, about following famous people on Twitter.

And not all of them, obviously. A famous person’s tweets don’t necessarily have any more merit than the comments of a man on a bus talking to himself. But some of them do. And you can speak directly to those people with interesting comments. And they can speak directly to you. Think about that: it’s unprecedented in history that I can converse with actors or authors in near-real time, any time I want, about whatever I want. Even less so that I can see what these people consider worth sharing with the rest of the world beyond their work, that I can hear their opinions, or that I can see them as people.

Roger Ebert’s Twitter use is incredibly rich and extends far beyond who he is as a film critic. Susan Orleans’ includes as many comments about daily life and living in it as it does about writing. John Cusack is an extremely opinionated, liberal guy, who throws grammar and spelling to the wind.

Twitter adds a crazy degree of three-dimensionality to people who once were closed off from the rest of us unwashed miscreants. Imagine if Winston Churchill or Albert Einstein or Ghandi had lived during the revolution that is Twitter. Think about how much we could have learned about the people we consider the heroes of our culture – or of any culture.

Hell, I’ll get to the point. There’s an old adage: never meet your heroes. It goes to the fact that you can think someone is incredible, but when you actually meet them in person, they very likely can and will disappoint you. Aw, shucks, you realize – L. Ron Hubbard is human. Religion ruined.

That saying ought to be abridged, however. It should really go, “Never meet your heroes, unless they tweet.”

A few weeks ago I attended an event at Universal Studios Hollywood to promote the SyFy channel show “Caprica.” The show just entered the second half of its first season and is trying to garner a bigger viewership in order to push into a second season. It’s worth watching, if you don’t. I just paid a lot more than I probably should have to get it on DVD, merely for the chance to support the project.

But then, good TV will do that to you.

Part of why I have such a respect for “Caprica” is that the people involved in it were responsible for the recent “Battlestar Galactica,” which is among the best shows that’s ever been on TV. I was excited to go to the “Caprica” event not because of the screening of the premiere episode of Season 1.5, although that was cool, but because of the people from the show that attended. Among the participants were several of the writers, the show’s creator, Ron Moore, and executive producer Jane Espenson.

Moore was one of the driving forces behind “Galactica” and Espenson was a big part of that show, too. While I attended the event, I got the opportunity to shake Moore’s hand – which was a big deal. Way better than that: I spent roughly five minutes conversing with Espenson. Both these peopel are heroes of mine, working in a field I’d love to be a part of.

FYI: the first adage about meeting your heroes can be wrong because if your heroes tweet, it’s almost like you met them already. People who tweet, also, tend to be awesome.

Moore’s not on Twitter, but Jane Espenson tweets quite a bit. She also occasionally writes for her blog, which is chiefly about making it in television writing. Espenson was extremely cool, funny, and immediately helpful. Maybe it’s because most of the fans who come up to her to speak about “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Battlestar Galactica,” or “Firefly” know of her because they’re writers too. But she instantly diverted from me praising her work and started talking about me, what I do, what I can do to be successful in writing for TV.

Heading back to my chair, I was struck by the relatively tiny experience of giving a third dimension to these people who previously had existed to me only in DVD commentary and 140-character spurts. Ron Moore was extremely gracious for the five seconds I spent shaking his hand and telling him how much his work had affected me. And Jane Espenson, was, well…

She was exactly as cool in life as on Twitter.

Allow me to pimp my latest Top 10 list for FileFront: the 10 Greatest Game Power-Ups to Have in Real Life.

I’m extremely proud of the list – I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve yet written as a freelancer for the video game website. So you should go read it, especially because it took me almost two weeks to make it happen. And it almost didn’t.

Because if you think about it, not looking at the list first, can you name 10 decent, non-all-Mario power-ups to make a list about? I almost couldn’t.

This one was an intense struggle. First off, what one might not think about, and what I didn’t consider when I pitched the idea and then asked to write it, is that most modern video games don’t include power-ups. Shields, hearts, 1-ups, invincibility items – they aren’t really included in games like Splinter Cell, Alan Wake, or Heavy Rain.

Here’s a good place to define what I mean by “power-up.” For the most part, a power-up is the kind of thing you find in the course of the game, which you pick up to get powered up momentarily. Think Mario’s mushroom. We’re not talking about the boomerang in The Legend of Zelda, or other sorts of equipment – mostly, it’s things you can find or earn and then lose.

This isn’t the hard-and-fast rule, because like I said, it was halfway to impossible to think of 10 (or even five) power-ups with any diversity, much less apply them to reality in a funny way. So there are a few things that toe the line and one or two that go straight over. But I figure, I think it’s funny so screw you, Gentle Reader.

I wracked my brain and the brains of my friends for a good week before I was able to put together the list. I also spent much of that time cruising the Internet for any sort of power-up lists. You know what there are a lot of out there? Repetitious, boring video game-related best-of lists. Like really self-indulgent ones. Best power-ups? Like, the best items you can pick up in a game? What do you take away from that, the feeling of, “oh yeah, that was a great power-up” and go about your day?

My list, on the other hand, has no real purpose in video gaming – its one job is to be entertaining, and I was certainly entertained in the writing of it, even if it was back-breaking to try to put it together in the early stages.

Anyway, eventually after scouring through lists, polling people, and generally discarding all suggestions, I came up with the list as it stands. I also had to help get some images together, so the images for Nos. 4-1 – those are mine.

Yes, the terrible photoshopping is purposeful.

The List: http://news.filefront.com/10-greatest-game-power-ups-to-have-in-real-life-list/

I’ve become something of an expert on Dead Rising 2, the upcoming massive zombie sequel from Capcom. I’ll be walking through the game next week (it really is huge, so it’ll take a while), and I did the walkthrough and the review for the piece of prequel downloadable content that launched a few weeks ago, Dead Rising 2: Case Zero.

Most interestingly, I attended the Greene’s Hardware Store promo event in Silverlake, down the street from my apartment, a couple of weeks ago. Yes, I am 8-Bit put on the event. Yes, I am friends with everyone in that company. Yes, it was purely coincidental, and totally professional, that I attended in the capacity that I did.

I actually got to cover Greene’s Hardware as a working journalist for FileFront. During the course of the event, I played the game (check out the hands-on preview I did for FileFront here) and spoke with Josh Bridge, an executive producer at developer Blue Castle.

Questioning a game producer is a tough thing. For one, all the information he wants to give you is already available. It’s on the Internet and other people have picked it up, and if it’s not on the Internet, he refuses to give it up because he’s not authorized. Consider the fact that I asked Bridge about additional DLC for DR2, given the ludicrous sales Case Zero racked up. Bridge wouldn’t tell me on Friday, and by Tuesday, another DLC episode (but for the previous game) had been announced.

But Bridge and I had a good conversation about the game and what went into making it, and one particularly interesting point came up when I asked him about the inspiration for the DR2. “Clearly, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead had a big influence on the first game,” I said as means of segue into my question.

“Yeah. So much so that he sued us,” Bridge returned, quickly.

Which I feel like I must have known. But if I didn’t know it – I should have.

Some background at this point: it wasn’t George Romero who sued Capcom over the original Dead Rising, which centered on survivors fighting zombies in an enormous shopping mall (and there the similarities between it and Romero’s film end). It was actually the company that owned the copyright on the film, The MKR Group, that initiated the lawsuit and stated that Dead Rising infringed on the intellectual property that was Dawn of the Dead. (Articles have suggested Romero wasn’t even aware of the lawsuit, but based on what I’ve seen of the man, he’d probably be a little flattered – mostly he wouldn’t care.)

A U.S. magistrate eventually sided with Capcom and threw the case out. You can read a pretty great rundown of the judgment here, but the crux of Judge Richard Seeborg’s ruling was this: the film is about surviving zombies in a mall. So is the game. But the movie is also about consumerism, barbarism and race relations. The game is about smashing zombie skulls.

And note that my comments here are not to say that Dead Rising is especially deep. It’s not. Its story is decidedly Japanese – Japanese-written video game stories, and especially Capcom’s, tend to be convoluted and science fictiony, but with emphasis on the fiction rather than the science. Dead Rising is a little weird.

But the judge’s ruling also seems to undermine the very possibility that Dead Rising could be making a real comment. I agree that the two stories are diverse enough that one is not a product of the other (the judge notes that one cannot own the concept of zombies in a mall), but DR makes comments of its own – not the least of which have to do with voyeurism (the protagonist is a photojournalist) and the vulture-like nature of photography. The player is rewarded for catching dangerous and sometimes awful scenes of zombies through their lens. Among those reward-doling moments are scenes in which someone is getting mangled by said zombies.

Is Dead Rising an incredible achievement of satire (or even comparable to Romero’s film)? No. Should it be totally written off as being nothing but zombie-squashing mayhem? I really don’t think so.

Hell, we’ve already talked about art in video games. I won’t rehash. Suffice to say, the patent dismissal of the case, even though I agree with the outcome, is irritating.

Back to Dead Rising 2. Having spent some time with the game, I can tell you that you can feel some influence on it. If you wanted to go Romero, I can point out aspects that feel a lot like Land of the Dead. But a major interaction in the game – driven by the addition of having to make money to buy zombification-staving drugs – is a gladiator-like game show the likes of which has popped up in several films. I got a distinct feel of The Running Man from the game.

Say what you will about influence and expression. The Schwarzenegger Running Man is not exactly high-concept (though I love the Richard Bachman/Stephen King novel on which it is based). And maybe the intention of Dead Rising 2 was to snag a cool concept and work it into a video game. It certainly wouldn’t be the first or last time that has happened.

But when I talked with Bridge, he mentioned all the zombie movies he and his fellow developers had consumed. And you simply cannot be a zombie fan without being aware of the inherent comment involved in the medium (thank you, George Romero). So I would really, really hope Blue Castle and Capcom had more on their minds than splattered blood in designing their game show, Terror is Reality. It has lots to say about TV and the way people treat one another and the way disaster and circumstances change morality.

Yes, all of that has been said before in a similar way. That’s not the point. The experience is inherently different when you’re a participant, even a virtual one.

But even if Blue Castle and Capcom really were pandering to the lowest common denominator, don’t they get spill-over art points from “influence,” because their work reminds me of someone else’s, and the point that that work made about our world? Doesn’t the item become art if art is my takeaway from it?

The way I see it, Judge Seeborg was wrong, and killing zombies can be satirical and poignant even without ripping off Romero or King. I’ll let you know how I feel about it after I’ve played Dead Rising 2 for realsies.

I had a really great time making the 15 God-Awful Video Game Commercials list for FileFront last week. It basically amounted to scouring YouTube for several hilarious hours, watching some of the most ridiculous TV spots ever put to film with the hopes of selling a video game to, seemingly, whoever the hell might be interested in buying one.

Seriously, it appears as though prior to the turn of the millennium, nobody in the industry had a clue as to how to sell their product. They were stabbing madly in the dark with jingles and goofy scripts and awful footage, hoping that someone might be dumb enough to buy what the companies were selling.

Even the ads for some of the best games ever – notably, The Legend of Zelda, which defined a great many childhoods – are uproariously terrible.

The list originally was supposed to include 10 spots, but I just couldn’t bring myself to trim down to so few. The number I finally settled on, 15, was a painful line in the sand. I had to quit or it was going to consume an entire day, and even though it was really fun, let’s be honest – I wasn’t getting paid that much to do it. Other projects needed my time, too.

Still, there were a few I had to pass on, and I’m including them here for no other reason than that they deserve to be seen and I’d like to watch them again. Consider the following items 16-20, or 15 God-Awful Video Game Commercials (Honorable Mentions).

20. Zelda Puppets, Will Someone Please Sell Me Those

This one isn’t actually that bad – especially for Japan. In fact, I kind of love it. Really, it’s pretty brilliant, deceptively and purposefully hoaky, and perfect for inducing a desire to check out the game that spawned this loving commercial.

Also, if you were looking for the most awesome possible Zelda memorabilia, you found it in the form of those puppets.

19. Ask Your Mom to Help You Play This Awful Game

Parental assistance may be required to play E.T. on the Atari 2600, perhaps because it is largely considered to be the worst game ever made. It sold dismally, and there’s an urban legend in the industry that after making it, the game’s creators, unable to sell thousands of copies, dug a hole in the desert and dumped them in just to be rid of this horrible piece of interactive history.

It’s easy to see why. Apart from no part of the movie really being interesting enough to be the crux of an interactive adventure, if you check out the screens, you see why the game requires the aid of someone who isn’t a five-year-old. It’s nearly undecipherable. Apparently E.T. is that tan blob, and those green spikes might be the forest. Then again, that could be a radioactive torture room, which probably would be more entertaining, considering the film.

18. Yes. Someone, Please Call an Exterminator

I’m all for this commercial’s wry and hilarious use of old movie footage, and it wouldn’t be that bad except for the woefully inadequate rubber centipedes, and the acting that goes with them.

Really this one’s just fun to watch.

17. Nintendo, Where We Hire Mental Patients to Pretend to be Actors

Super-awkward situation to put grown adults into. Especially that one nurse at the end with the big needle. Her rubber face is a bit frightening. Although, I guess that was the idea. At no point does this commercial actually make me want to go play a Kirby game, though, and Kirby Superstar was sort of amazing.

Also, that doctor? Yeah, he’s the psychiatrist (psychologist?) from the Terminator movies. Following that, he starred in this ludicrous Kirby commercial where they roll that fat kid through those double doors. So…bummer.

16. Case in Point. See Above.

I wanted to include this one in the original list – it should be there, it’s absolutely god-awful – but there were just so many terrible and sad Zelda commercials that this one had to get bumped. It not only didn’t include any rapping, it also didn’t make fun of the key demographic of Zelda players by dropping two clear stereotypes into the commercial.

However, this one is so bad it’s irritating. The fact that anyone asked an adult human to perform in this spot is kind of demeaning to all of us as a species. This ad should be held up with all those unethical psychological experiments of the 1930s, under the banner, “We do not do this to other human beings.”

It took me a while to get hold of this game, thanks to a hiccup in some unknown, probably wasteland-bound Best Buy warehouse with a single phone line to connect it to the Internet. It took me longer to get through it, as things like Comic Con, Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, Kane & Lynch 2, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Case Zero again, PAX, and StarCraft II – you know, work –  popped up. Not to mention real non-game-related life.

However, I finally hammered the last few levels of “Splinter Cell: Conviction” a day or so ago. Immediately following that, I pulled up the “Splinter Cell: Conviction” Wikipedia page to figure out what the hell was going on in the story.

Partially this was my fault. I’ve been on a protracted play arc that’s lasted about a month when “Conviction” is, at best, probably 10 hours long (and that really feels like a high estimate). As I mentioned before, spending a lot of time playing games as a freelance writer means a lot less time for games for pleasure.

Upon completing this new “Splinter Cell,” the fifth in the series and sixth if you count that tiny round turd Ubisoft dropped for the PSP a while back, I was struck by how underwhelming it was. I mean, I just stopped the end of America, after all, in quite an awesome feat of marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat and general badassery. Shouldn’t I feel more…I dunno, just more, about it?

But that’s common. The problem with “Splinter Cell” is that, for all that Jack Bauer-esque political intrigue and traitors in the organization and all the usual tropes, the games usually boil down to main character Sam Fisher getting into position to put one bullet into the head of one particular mass murdering bastard. The games do a pretty good job of making those moments, as quick as they may be, fairly cool – if not a bit melodramatic.

The problem with “Conviction,” and really the last four “Splinter Cell” games, is that it fails to meet the high bar set by the original “Splinter Cell.” There have been games that have come close in terms of style – “Double Agent,” notably, was ambitious, and the new gameplay of “Conviction” makes the game easy to drop into with little experience. But no game has had the power of story or purpose that the first did. And that, really is the series’ ultimate downfall.

Sam Fisher is a phenomenal character, and many of the other characters in the “Splinter Cell” games are great as well. But the games suffer without villains with good reasons to do the things they do.

When I say “good” reasons, I have to qualify that as being original, non-cliche reasons. There are plenty of movies and books about terrorists and mass-murderers holding U.S. cities ransom – it happens all the time, and it’s tired. It’s especially tired if the people doing the ransoming want 1.) revenge against America, 2.) obscene amounts of money, or 3.) some combination of the two. And that’s not to discount everyone’s favorite reason – 4.) the dude is both evil and crazy.

“Splinter Cell” hasn’t had a good villain for a long time. “Conviction” is made worse – a lot worse – because it’s starting to slip into the long-view “what will our next three games be about” trap of creating plot lines and not finishing them. We get all kinds of bad guys, in the typical “conspiracy,” and most of the people pursued throughout the game are actually low-level functionaries in the bigger picture. It’s just not that engaging.

What the “Splinter Cell” series needs a swift kick in the plot. Back to the drawing board. Fisher is out in the world, his major motivations for the last few games removed, and he’s been battered by the country he previously served. We really need a story for Fisher – a story about him. Not one that’s level after level of Fisher completing mission objectives, even if they’re more personal than they used to be – a story in which Fisher is the guy running his own missions. One in which he’s no longer a tool in the histrionics of the world, but a man, finding his place and his meaning.

It’s the story “Splinter Cell” should have told this time around. Instead it chose to create a big anti-Fisher conspiracy that Sam gets dragged through with almost no moorings, tossing out names and iconic places with little grounding. Yes, the White House and Washington Monument are cool-looking. No, that’s not a good enough reason to make them centerpieces in this game.

Ubisoft has done some interesting stuff adjusting the way “Splinter Cell” plays. If it can put that same ambition into the stories the games tell, it’ll drag Sam Fisher’s next mission out of the unfortunate rut the series has been stuck in for the last several years.

Let me qualify the following statements by saying that there are things I really liked about Inception, and if it had been made by virtually any other person, I would be more forgiving.

But this is something written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and therefore its flaws are all the more glaring. As a story, Inception is all setup and no payoff, all concept and no heart – all science, no humanity.

By now I’m sure you’ve heard all you need to about the film. Inception is about entering dreams in order to steal information from a person’s subconscious. Leonardo DiCaprio and his squad of dream-raiders do this for a living. They’re very good, but it’s highly illegal.

The dreams have a ton of rules (much more than the similar but comparably less complicated[!] world of The Matrix). Get killed in a dream and you wake up. Dream time is faster than real time. You’ll never remember the beginning of a dream, and you need an object to carry around with you so that you can hold it and feel if it is different than the object is in reality, and thusly know if you’re in the dream world or the real world. You can’t change too much in a dream or the dreamer’s subconscious will rise up and attack you. Pain in a dream is as real as anywhere else.

Imagine all this mess as the first half an hour of a film.

Okay, now that we have most(!) of the rules in-hand, we can begin the actual going into dreams thing. DiCaprio’s team, which eventually consists of a hilarious Tom Hardy, the extremely stalwart Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the somewhat-naggy Ellen Page (with others who are similarly boring), wants to invade a guy’s dream, go into a dream within a dream within a dream to confuse his mind, and plant an idea so the guy thinks it’s his idea.

This has only ever been done once, supposedly, and it’s so difficult that puts everyone in danger of dying in the dream and being sent to “limbo,” a dream state so deep that it will feel like an entire lifetime passes before the people trapped there eventually wake up.

But for all that, we’re not even to the story yet, which is the major, fatal flaw of Inception. For all that time wasted establishing the rules of dreamland (which, I must protest, seems counterintuitive to the whole nature of dreaming – how can there be so many rules? I have dreams in which I alternately perform in stage plays, run from zombies and battle aliens.), the actual characters are sorely shallow.

It might be that there’s not very much to work with, but the performances turned in by the various players (all of whom have proven to be extremely talented throughout their youngish careers) are similarly puddle-sized. DiCaprio’s character Cobb is tortured by his wife’s death and a subconscious echo of her that harasses him and others in the shared dreams. DiCaprio interprets this as having a single, hard-set furrowed brow pretty much at all times. He spends the entire movie insisting on the reality he sees, shirking Echo-Wife’s pleading that he stay with her in dreamland, and rarely expands beyond this one emotional state. His motivation (“I just want my kids back!”) is what pushes him to do “this one last job.” It would help if “this one last job” was more dangerous and therefore difficult or trying, or Cobb’s pain at missing his kids anywhere near palpable.

For someone so supposedly desperate to return to his home and family, in fact, Cobb seems to have made exactly zero progress to that end up to the start of the movie. Then, suddenly, it is all-consuming. Sorry, but that doesn’t play.

Gordon-Levitt has almost nothing to do. One wonders at points why he’s even in the movie (until the fight sequence in the hotel – and the other fight sequence in the hotel – which are absolutely phenomenal), as his character is so one-beat and straight-laced that he never even raises his voice during the span of the film. I’ve seen Al Gore show more emotion.

But that’s just it – there’s nothing to get emotional about. It’s a job; they’re doing it, it needs to be done, no one needs to be all that invested in it. Cobb is supposed to be upset, but stoic – but with very little up and down, the whole thing grows tiresome. In too many ways, Inception becomes a much smarter and cooler Ocean’s 11. But even George Clooney’s Danny Ocean had a more believable and characteristic drive than Cobb ever achieves (and meanwhile, Gordon-Levitt has no motivation as a character whatsoever).

Then there’s Ellen Page. Her character fills the role of “dream maze constructor” on the team, but really, she’s DiCaprio’s conscience and guide in the labyrinth of the dreams (her name’s Ariadne – also the woman of Greek myth who helps Theseus get out of King Minos’ labyrinth, for anyone who hasn’t already been informed of that little tidbit by every other writer in the universe). Really, there’s little if any reason for her to be in the film other than this one glaring plot device: she needs to pull DiCaprio back from the brink later in the film.

As such, Ariadne never becomes more than a nagging almost-extortionist for Cobb. She “discovers his (not very well-kept) secret” about his evil Echo-Wife, and she insists on being in the dream world because supposedly evil Echo-Wife could threaten all the other dream-raiders, and so of everyone available, Ellen Page is best suited to help out. The whole Echo-Wife threat never materializes, Ariadne never really does anything in the whole “dream-heist” plot line, and her character never evolves into anything even resembling a rounded person.

All these complaints are a result of story sacrificed on the altar of special effect. Inception does some dynamite things with dream-sets: blowing them apart, flooding them, spinning them around, collapsing them and folding them in on themselves. There are a few really great moments because of this.

But it’s much more like watching a tech demo at times, or visiting a theme park attraction, than a real true-to-itself story. For all that dream-building, the movie never feels like a dream. For all the people who populate it (and really are very ho-hum about the entire concept), they never feel like living, breathing people doing something extraordinary and making it through by the skin of their teeth. At no point is there ever that deep breath of almost-failure or character-in-peril, and Inception is all the worse for losing the subsequent sigh of relief following success.

Christopher Nolan is the kind of storyteller who can infuse a complex and twisting story with a real and deep emotional draw – the kind of guy who can take the concept of Batman and create The Dark Knight, easily the most engaging and human conception of any superhero ever on film.

Many of Nolan’s works rank among my favorites similar reasons. The Prestige, for example, is a story about magic and science and tricks, but really it is about two men obsessively trying to destroy each other and in the process define themselves. Memento explores a man’s means of creating his identity through his actions when he can’t remember them, and the lies he (and we) tell in order to maintain that self-image – especially to himself (ourselves).

What’s Inception’s theme? What’s its message? What does it accomplish for being made, and what do we take away from it?

The answer is nothing, unfortunately. Which is the lament of Inception – because relatively, it is so bad and it could have been so good. It should have been on par with Nolan’s other works, and could easily have gone from blockbuster to transcendent.

Inception is more on par with the works of Michael Bay or M. Night Shyamalan than the rest of the Nolan canon (though it definitely rises above those ranks rather than fall amid them). It is often stunning and an envelope-pusher in terms of special effects – and in that respect, in terms of spectacle and advancements in filmmaking, worth seeing. But this isn’t good storytelling, because it isn’t good story. The “telling” part may be sprinting ahead, but the rest is scrambling – and failing – to catch up.