Of course, were I ever to need tyres, these are the tyres I'd buy

At least the first one briefly flirts with highlighting some desirable quality of Kumho tyres in comparison to their competition.



These are, so far as I'm aware, the only adverts Kumho has ever run in the United States. They're on fairly constantly on Fox Soccer Channel, and the second one--the one that's currently in rotation--was on the main Fox network this weekend when they broadcast the Arsenal/Man United match.

I just find it fascinating how absolutely different they are. One is in a European urban centre; the other is on an isolated, apparently North American beach. One is about sophistication and refinement; the other is about youthful exuberance. One tells a story; the other is a snapshot. One looks like it was shot on low-budget videotape; the other looks like it was shot on film, slick and professional. One demands deliberately stylised artifice from its actors; the other goes for (and achieved) that candid, sort of found-footage effect that we'd often associate with a music video.

And yet they both have exactly the same emotional arc:

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I

Nothing new under the sun

The first time it happened was this summer, when I happened to catch a showing of the (great) 1940 British spy thriller Night Train to Munich on TMC.  Night Train to Munich is set in the days leading up to the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany in September 1939.  The Nazis kidnap a Czechoslovak scientist and his daughter, and to rescue them, a British secret agent (played by a strikingly young Rex Harrison) travels to Berlin, dons a Gestapo uniform and bluffs his way into Gestapo headquarters.

Of course, there's no way I could watch that scene and not instantly draw the connection to a similar episode in A Traitor's Loyalty, in which the protagonist, a British spy, travels to Berlin to hunt a British defector and, in order to get information, disguises himself as a Gestapo officer and enters Gestapo headquarters.

Then over the holidays, I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and, as is my wont, got home from the film and immediately looked it up on Wikipedia.  And therein I discovered that, in the book on which the movie's based, the codename that MI-6 gives to their star Soviet mole is Merlin.  In A Traitor's Loyalty, by the by, the hero used to be MI-6's star Nazi mole, and his codename back when he worked for MI-6 was Merlin.  (In A Traitor's Loyalty, which takes place in a world where the Nazis defeated the Soviets, the cold war is fought between NATO and Nazi Germany rather than NATO and Soviet Russia.)

(SPOILERS FOR HAYWIRE AND A TRAITOR'S LOYALTY AHEAD)

And then yesterday I saw Haywire.  At one point, in one small moment, after the heroine has had her employers turn against her, she searches her trusty rucksack and discovers, sewn into its lining, a small black device with an antenna on one end and a blinking red light on the other.  In A Traitor's Loyalty, when the hero realises his masters have been manipulating behind his back, he searches the car they gave him and discovers, sewn into the upholstery of the boot, a "small radio transistor with a red light blinking slowly at one end".

(END SPOILERS)

Your first reaction when you come across stuff like this--or my first reaction, at any rate--is to wince, to think that you're a horribly derivative writer incapable of thinking up an idea someone else hasn't thought of, and that you're about to be exposed as such before the world.

After a little while, though, you start getting a little bit of perspective.  You realise, first of all, that it isn't about having every element of your story be something no one's ever thought of before--it's about what you do with your story elements, combining them and presenting them in a way that people still find fresh and interesting.  Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code are both famously made up of a multiplicity of sources from elsewhere, but even those readers who could spot and tease out the inspirations for the stories' different elements still often found reading them very enjoyable.

Downtown Abbey could be summed up without much inaccuracy as a mashup of Pride and Prejudice and Upstairs Downstairs.  That was obvious to me within its first five minutes, but not only did it not do anything to dampen my appreciation of the show, it actually added another dimension to it for me.  I got to see how Downton took the premise of a country landowner who has fathered only daughters but whose estate is entailed upon the male line and how it treated that premise--doing some things that were similar to what Jane Austen did in Pride and Prejudice and some things that were very different.

And then the second thing you have to realise is that a lot you see, you only see because you're you--you're the author of the work in question.  The example from Haywire is a perfect incidence of that--I'd be stunned if anyone who were to see Haywire and read A Traitor's Loyalty noticed such a tiny coincidence.  It gets about five seconds of screen time in both works, and "secret homing device" and "a spy discovers his (or her) masters have been spying on him" are hardly such unique, distinctive tropes that your first thought when you encounter them is, "That's just like ...!"

Ditto the codename "Merlin"--it's such a minor point in both books (so minor in Tinker Tailor that it didn't even make it into the movie) and the contexts surrounding it are so very different that I think anyone who picked up on it would simply give me the undeserved credit of thinking I'd done it deliberately, as a respectful homage to the work of John le Carré.

(That's if they had the chance--I confess, I did email my editor and ask him to change the codename to Lancelot.  But A Traitor's Loyalty does still have a genuine homage to le Carré--there's a very minor character who's named after two characters in my favourite le Carré book, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.)

Your book is, of course, your baby, and as such, you've got a natural inclination to be highly sensitised to anything concerning it.  As authors we're taught early on about having to let go of one part of that--about detaching ourselves when we receive feedback and critique.  This is another part, I think.  It's a very human thing to draw connections and see patterns, and we're so close to our own books that it's inevitable for those to be what we draw the connections to.

I have a hypothesis that the reason I've started seeing elements of my story everywhere now is because the book is, essentially, now out of my hands--I no longer have the ability to make any significant changes to it.  In that sense, I've already let it go--I've had to.  And now I also have to let it go emotionally.

I

Cinema Sunday

This morning I went to see the new Steven Soderbergh movie, Haywire.  The plan was actually that I'd be seeing Contraband--according to Lisa's plan, I'd see the 10.30 showing of Contraband, and she and the kids would see the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie at 10.50.  Contraband is twenty minutes longer than Alvin and the Chipmunks, so it would work out perfectly.

Well, except that when we got to the ticket machine, we discovered Contraband didn't start till 11.40.  And that the Chipmunks started at 10.15.  (It was 10.13 when we discovered this.)  So I decided to see the 10.40 Haywire instead, while Lisa and the kids headed into Alvin and the Chipmunks.  As it turned out, they didn't miss anything, because instead of the Chipmunks, the cinema put The Iron Lady onscreen instead.  (They fixed that, of course, and then gave everyone in the auditorium a free future admission.)  This was in contrast to the theatre where I was sitting waiting for Haywire, where rather than start the wrong movie, they didn't start any movie at all--after that series of commercials-dressed-up-as-entertainment that cinemas show nowadays, we got five minutes of a screensaver on the screen, then ten minutes of sitting in the dark.  Presumably because whoever was in charge of getting the movie started was at the other end of the cinema, desperately trying to stop an auditorium full of six-year-olds having to watch Margaret Thatcher order the sinking of the General Belgrano.

It was a weird trip to the movies, is what I'm saying.  Weird enough that the discovery that there's actually a church that's located in one of our cinema's auditoria on Sundays becomes just a sidenote.

(The review that's about to follow is, I think, basically spoiler free.)

But so how, Haywire.  Good movie.  Utterly disposable, with a ridiculous plot--not a film I'll ever see again.  But an enjoyable, watchable, well-done thriller.  But what made the biggest impression on me by far was the directorial style.

Style seems an odd word to use here, because what that style amounts to is a heightening of the realism of certain aspects of the film (certain aspects only--other parts of the film remain as preposterous as they generally are in this sort of thriller); but style is exactly what it was.

The fight scenes.  There are four or five hand-to-hand combat scenes in the film, distinctively choreographed--since Haywire has been put out as a vehicle for its star, female retired mixed martial artist Gina Carano, this isn't much of a surprise.  The fights aren't filmed in any sort of spectacular way; they're presented matter-of-factly.  But impacts are emphasised in a way that highlights how painful they must be.

I don't mean that they're gory; as far as I recall, there isn't a single drop of blood spilled during them, though they'd certainly produced blood in real life.  But whenever someone gets their face slammed into a mirror, or a wall, or the zinc counter in a diner, there's a quick closeup of it that can't help but you make wince.

The movie's one car chase is probably the most realistic car chase I've ever seen--by which I mean, it's the slowest car chase I've ever seen.  It starts off making you think it's going to be a traditional high-speed chase: our heroine Carano is driving briskly down a long, straight US Highway in the middle of nowhere, surrounded on either side by a forest of bare, snow-covered trees, when she comes upon a police roadblock.  She slams on the brake and turns the wheel, and we get the traditional shot of the car spinning a hundred eight degrees as it stops, so that now she can slam on the accelerator and speed away.  Of course, the cops pursue her.

But a moment later, Carano turns off the highway onto a dirt path, and all pretence of a conventional, spectacle-laden car chase is abandoned.  She doesn't slam on the break as she turns, so that the car slides along the road into its turn.  Instead, she does exactly what all of us do when we play Grand Theft Auto or the like (which is, I think, about as close as any of us ever get to being in an actual high-speed chase)--she slows down when she's making the critical turn into a narrow space, to ensure that she takes it smoothly.

And once she's made the turn, the chase is now taking place on a snowy dirt road, only the width of a single vehicle, that twists its way through the trees--so the cars involved move damn slowly.

And last, there are two scenes in which the tension is drawn out far longer than we'd ordinarily expect.  In the first, Carano emerges from a building, spots a man across the street who may or may not be tailing her, then turns and walks down the busy city street.  The man starts walking parallel to her, and she and we know that he is following her.

What would normally happen, of course, is that she'd therefore take some action to lose him--dash down a side street or get into a car--and a chase would ensue.  But not here--because there's nowhere for us to go.  We stick with Carano as she walks, deliberately unhurried, the entire length of the city block, before finally turning the first time she comes to a corner.  Which is, of course, exactly how it would happen in real life, and it takes probably a full minute to play out onscreen.

There's another moment like this, late in the movie.  A bad guy is lounging on his patio, with a much younger, bikini-clad companion canoodling with him on a cabana.  There's a knock at the door, and the bikini bunny gets up and walks inside to go answer it.  She doesn't come back.

Of course, we know what's going on, and what danger the knock at the door and the woman's failure to return signals for the bad guy.  But Soderbergh draws it out beautifully--and all through a single shot.  It has the bad guy's face in the foreground on the right half of the screen, while on the left half of the screen we can see over his shoulder.  First we see the bikini buttocks departing, across the patio, then through the door into the kitchen, then disappearing through the kitchen doorway toward the front of the house.  And then we're left with just the empty kitchen, while the bad guy contentedly lights a cigar, then has something occur to him and shouts an instruction to the woman in the house, then frown slightly and look over his shoulder as he realises it's taking longer than he thought, then go back to puffing on his cigar, then finally realise that it's taking way too long and get up to go investigate.  Again, it takes as long as it would take in real life.

I don't want to give the impression that Haywire is some sort of cinema verité found-footage docudrama--the spy thriller genre's answer to The Conversation.  It's very much in the same boat with other identically-plotted movies like Hannah, The Bourne Identity and the first Mission Impossible film.  But even while playing in that fantasy world, it tips its hat toward reality, and I really liked that.

I

SOPA, PIPA and sopapillas

ETA: Within about two minutes of posting this, I watched an excellent summary of the current state of SOPA and PIPA pop up in my e-reader from Making Light.  A wonderful highlight of some of the bills' most egregious freedom of speech implications.

Yesterday, 18 January, was SOPA Blackout Day, when websites all across the Internet ideally went dark (like Wikipedia), or else put up educational messages (like Google), to raise awareness about the real threat to freedom of expression, and freedom in general, posed by SOPA and PIPA.

And it seems it worked.  On the tide of a groundswell of phone calls and emails, U.S. senators and members of Congress backed off SOPA and PIPA in large numbers.  Many, including even several of the bills' co-sponsors, explicitly turned against it, for which they're to be commended.  Others refused to formally renounce it, instead choosing to state that they have reservations about the bills in their current form, and are going to want to work on them some more to improve them; they probably aren't to be trusted on this issue and should have an eye kept on them until the matter comes to a vote.

What really caught my eye about the congressional renunciation of SOPA and PIPA, though, and what troubles me about it, was that it was a wholly Republican-led phenomenon.  It was predominantly Republicans who condemned the bills, Republican co-sponsors who loudly took their names off them; it was predominantly Democrats who tried to sound like they were distancing themselves from them while retaining the freedom of action to vote for them once public scrutiny has faded.

Call me socialist.  Call me progressive.  Call me liberal.  I embrace all three labels.  I'm a socialist because I believe that it is through society that we can best foster the flowering of the individual.  I'm a progressive because I believe in progress, in a future that's better than our present.  I'm a liberal because I believe in freedom and opportunity for everyone, and not just for the privileged.

What I've found is that very often--perhaps even always, though I shy away from absolute statements--those three different things boil down to one core issue: when the powerful wage war upon the weak, I side with the weak.

This is why I overwhelmingly find myself aligned more closely with Democrats than Republicans in American politics.  It's not that Democrats can be relied upon to side with the weak when the strong come after them, because they can't.  There's always a sizable faction of Dems aligning with the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party on the side of the strong.  But what voices there are consistently rising in support of the weak are Democratic voices.

We've seen it time and again over the past ten years.  The movement to roll back our civil liberties and stifle our freedom of action through things like the USA PATRIOT Act.  Efforts to decide whether marriage to the person you love is a right enjoyed by all Americans, or a privilege restricted only to the heterosexual portion of the population.  The debate over how the burden of adequately funding (or inadequately funding) our government should be distributed over the economic spectrum of our society.  Efforts to strip workers of the protections that trade unions provide them.  The fight to ensure that no one in America should have to choose between bankruptcy and illness.  Consistently, in all those national conversations, I've watched the Republican Party and a sizable faction of the Democratic Party on the side of the strong, while on the side of the weak are the other faction of the Democrats, either alone or buttressed by a small, fringe minority of Republicans calling themselves libertarians.

SOPA and PIPA are unambiguously attacks on the weak by the strong.  Everything in them stacks the deck against those without resources and in favour of those with them, from the way they punish someone simply for having an accusation made against them, to the provisions designed to ensure that, when the accusers actually are found to have deployed the laws unjustly and abusively, they're immune from suffering any penalty--like the penalty they will already have visited upon their target.

And today, it's the Republicans who stand with the weak, and the Democrats standing with the strong.

I'm a copyright holder.  I'm in exactly the demographic PIPA and SOPA claim to be protecting.  Copyright and copyright protection are important to me, both in terms of my own copyright and livelihood, and in terms of copyright as an intellectual principle.  And online piracy is a grave threat to copyright and needs to be combatted.  But PIPA and SOPA are not acceptable ways of doing that.  They would, in fact, greatly limit my ability to exploit my copyright, by restricting and penalising the free flow of discussion and ideas.

FiveThirtyEight presented an obvious reason why the congressional parties should align the way they seem to have here: ninety per cent of political contributions from Hollywood go to the Democratic Party.  Which raises another salient point about yesterday's win over SOPA and PIPA:

It's only temporary.

Truckloads of money will continue to trundle across the country from California to the District of Columbia.  And every provision in those bills will be back.  It might be under the same name; it might not.  Certainly, there'll be more circumspection about how it's reintroduced.  But if we're not prepared to act, again, against it, then it will come to pass.

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MarsCon

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

This weekend we headed down to Williamsburg for MarsCon.  I can't do a pictorial overview like I did for DragonCon, because there's much less spectacle and therefore fewer pictures.  But everyone had a great time.  Lisa, I think, liked it especially because it's such a smaller scale than DragonCon--there were about twelve hundred guests--and therefore she didn't have to deal with crowds, of which she's no fan.


Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

We went to a few things we wouldn't have gone to at DragonCon, like the bellydancing show and the charity auction (both at Boy's instigation), and really enjoyed ourselves.  Girl especially enjoyed herself at the auction--she figured out the game and started raising her hand every time a new bid was called for.  And the kids' programming we went to--a kids' science activity session and a how-to-draw Star Wars characters session--were small enough that the kids actually got to interact with the presenters.


Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

I was gratified at the profile Doctor Who had around the con.  The most common costumes were zombies, because that was this year's theme, and steampunk, because that's the trendy fashion nowadays.  But once we get into the specific franchise costumes, there were about four or five Star Wars costumes, four or five Star Trek costumes, and at least two dozen Doctor Who costumes.  Who was also the only TV/movie franchise to get its own dedicated panel, albeit one that was rather dampened by the one attendee who shouted down anyone who mentioned the programme's current production era without expressing hatred for Moffatt's approach to Doctor Who.


Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

So we'll be heading back again next year--and hopefully we'll have the sense to book a hotel room when we pre-register for the con, in which case the hotel won't be sold out by the time we go looking for a room.  As it was we stayed two miles up the road from the Holiday Inn where MarsCon was held, and yet somehow there two more Holiday Inns between us and them.  Seriously, three Holiday Inns in a two-mile stretch on one road.


Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

I

Aura of mystery

With all this research about Germany right after the end of the Second World War, one of the most striking and inescapable things about the period is the uncertainty that pervades it.  Everyone in Central Europe--both the native populations and the personnel of the four large Allied armies that were governing them--were profoundly aware of how little they knew about so much of what was going on in the world.  It filled their discourse and it was a huge factor in their actions.

It's an atmosphere that I think is important to capture in the book--it created an underlying sense of doubt around literally any decision people made when trying to reconstruct lives for themselves.  But there's a problem with that--all those great questions are questions to which we very publicly now know the answers.

A (very) abridged list of things we now know about 1 January 1946 that we did not know on 1 January 1946:

That Hitler was dead.
That Martin Bormann was (probably) dead.
That Adolf Eichmann was still alive, and on the way to fleeing to South America.
That Josef Mengele was still alive, and on the way to fleeing to South America.
That the Soviet Union would have the atomic bomb by the end of the 1940s.
That the bomb would come to be defined as a new class of weapon, and that it would not be used again, so that, for instance, North Korea was not subjected to an atomic bombing when she went to war with the Allies upon invading South Korea in 1950.
That by 1949, the three Western Powers would have merged their Zones of Occupation in Germany into a single joint zone (called Trizonia), then granted Trizonia independence as a new West German state.
That the Soviets would respond by creating a competing East German state out of their own Zone of Occupation.
That the inhabitants of the two heavily militarised German states would spend the forty years of their uneasy coexistence living under the cloud of knowing they'd be the first battlefield in the war between the Soviet Union and NATO that seemed the almost inescapable conclusion of the Cold War.
That within fifteen years, the two Germanies would be separated by a physical wall, and that siblings, spouses, and parents and children who lived on opposite sides of the wall would largely be left without the ability to see or communicate with each other for thirty years.
The whereabouts of billions of dollars worth of art, artefacts and currency that had been hidden or lost during the war.  (More billions of dollars worth of it is still missing.)  Much had been hidden by the Nazis--every year or so, we continue to get news stories of some of it being recovered--but other parts of it had been shrouded behind the Iron Curtain, such as Priam's Treasure.

Trying to summon up that atmosphere is a tricky business.  Certainly the first step is highlighting the much more personal questions that people didn't know the answer to--like whether missing loved ones were alive or dead; and if they would ever return from the liberated concentration camps, or from the detention camps in which the Allies held a huge number of Germans after the war, or from servitude in Siberia, or from the massive and bloody population shifts that both sides subjected millions of people to during and after the war.

But those local questions need to be compounded by the uncertainty that pervades the whole world in general, and doing so involves some fairly tricky manoeuvring.  "Is Hitler alive or dead?" or "Will all Europe be speaking Russian ten years from now?" are questions that could legitimately provoke suspense and unease in 1946, but to a reader in 2012 who already knows the answers, they're much less so.

I toyed with the idea of having certain things turn out to be different in the book than is actually true (having it turn out in the book that Hitler is alive and in hiding, for instance), so that the reader then couldn't be sure what they knew and what they didn't, but ultimately I rejected that idea--I thought I'd be breaking too many readers' suspension of disbelief if I did.

I got particularly resentful over Priam's Treasure.  I want to include a lost Second World War loot, and Priam's Treasure would have been perfect for my purposes--a priceless, high-concept hoard, that can easily be broken down into smaller, discrete units to use as currency.  Then I found out that it had been recovered in 1990, and that it wasn't the Nazis who looted it.  I haven't been able to find a replacement that works nearly as well.

(If anyone does have a favourite piece of Nazi loot that's vanished without a trace, let me know.)

Of course, it's true when writing of any historical period that you're writing of a time about which we now know things that people didn't know at the time.  But what sets post-war Central Europe apart, I think, is that it was a time when people were very much aware of how little they knew, and of how important the missing pieces of information were.

I

Fashionista

As Lisa tells the story, she was wandering through the men's department at Target, wondering what the kids could get me for Christmas, when Girl suddenly started shouting, "Elmo!  Dad, Elmo!  Elmo, Dad!"

She'd spotted a set of Elmo pyjamas (she's obsessed with Elmo despite never having seen an episode of Sesame Street) and had been able to tell that they were sized for me, and not for, say, Lisa.  So that became my Christmas present from Girl.

I often wear sweatpants at home, so I figured the pants could just be another pair of sweatpants to add to my rotation.  The shirt is essentially just a t-shirt, so I decided it would be the Elmo t-shirt that I, as a funky, ironic guy and a cool dad, happen to own and occasionally wear.

Boxing Day night, after Boy and I had got home from seeing Tintin, I went into the bedroom and changed into the Elmo pants, then headed out into the living room to see if Girl noticed.  She did--her face split into a huge grin.  And then it started.

"Elmo!  Dad, Elmo shirt!  Elmo t-shirt, peas!  Elmo shirt!"

"Do I ... have to wear the shirt as well?"  I was kind of surprised she even remembered that there was a shirt to go with them.

"Yes peas!  Elmo t-shirt, Dad!"

So I went into the bedroom and got the t-shirt and put it on over the t-shirt I was already wearing.  Half an hour or so later, I happened to be in the bedroom again, and I took the Elmo shirt off.  I headed back out to the living room and sat down at my computer.  Girl gave no reaction, and I figured she hadn't noticed.

A few moments later, though, she was at my side, and I assumed she wanted to sit in my lap.  Without really looking away from the computer screen, I reached out to pick her up.  But instead, she pressed a bundle of fabric into my hands.

The Elmo shirt.  Which she'd gone into the master bedroom to retrieve.

"Here go!  You're problem!"  (That's her mishmash of you're welcome and no problem.)

So I wore the shirt until she went to bed that night, because really, that was clearly the most painless option for everyone.

So glad I have a member of today's youth monitoring my look.  Now I'm dreading when she's thirteen and decides to give her mother and me makeovers.

I

The elephant on the front page

First Palin.  Then Trump.  Then Bachmann.  Gingrich.  Cain.  Perry.  Pinochet.  Gingrich again.  Pinochet again.  Now it's even Ron Paul.

Every time this happens, it's the same story, and I genuinely don't understand why it's treated as a unique event.  I don't understand why we're not getting exactly the same lede to start off the story every time: The economic and religious movements that drive the Republican Party have further confirmed their deep ambivalence between nominating an individual who will recapture the Presidency in 2012, and their desire that their nominee pass a checklist of discredited reactionary, oligarchic, plutocratic, anti-democratic, xenophobic, fascistic and borderline sociopathic positions on social and fiscal policy that would instantly disqualify any such nominee from receiving the vote of any rational, reflective voter considering the respective merits of the candidate.

Barack Obama should be profoundly vulnerable in the 2012 election.  He's consistently brushed off the political left, who were his most enthusiastic supporters during the 2008 campaign.  He's consistently failed the political centre by confusing "collaboration, consensus-building and intelligent conversation" with "complete abdication of leadership and authority".  And the political right will hate him as a matter of principle.

And yet he has to be a heavy favourite for re-election, because instead of genuine conservative candidates for the Presidency, the Republican public have proven themselves only interested a parade of religious zealots, anti-liberty fascists and economic fringists who keep shouting that the best way to end a global recession brought about by a decade of Randian plutocratic policy from Republican congresses is more Randian plutocratic policy.  They're so desperate to find someone like that to be their nominee that they glomp onto every new one that comes along, until they realise that, hey, this one's just as detestable to the American general electorate as the others have been.

Mainstream media don't preserve their neutrality by failing to point this out--they in fact abandon it.  When you deliberately ignore such a basic and important element of the story as the ridiculousness of the Republican primary field, and the desperate attempts of Republican primary voters to cling to economic and religious extremism, you slant the story in favour of ridiculousness and economic and religious extremism.

Of course, the Republicans have another candidate.  He's consistently the number two candidate whenever the latest fringe extremist jumps to the head of the pack, and he's consistently the number one candidate whenever the media and the Republican voters haven't yet found a new fringe extremist to get excited about.  Just as Barack Obama will in all likelihood be re-elected by default because the only candidates the Republican Party can find capable of winning the vote of a conservative primary voter all make moderate general election voters either collapse with laughter or shudder at the terror of them winning the Presidency, so too will Mitt Romney in all likelihood win the Republican nomination by default because the Republican Party can't find any candidates acceptable to conservative voters who aren't also laughter-inducing or terrifying to sane, moderate general election voters.

They don't like him because he doesn't pass their religion test, and they attack him for not being a fringe extremist, but in the end, Republican primary voters will hold their noses and vote for Mitt Romney.  Then they'll hold him up before the general election voters with an unmistakable attitude of, "We couldn't find anyone we actually like, so ... this is the best we could do.  Mitt 2012!  Yeah!"  With predictable results.

All in all, a whole lot of huff and puff and enough candidate debates that the cable news networks really should have started a weekly Republican Debate Tuesday show by now, and all done just to surrender a general election.

I

Titling and Titleation

Work proceeds apace on the outline, though admittedly it was slowed somewhat by a family visit last week.  It's also been slowed by the need to work out some kinks in the plotline, but exposing such kinks is, of course, the very point of doing such an in-depth outline.

Periodically, my mind turns to thinking about a title.  There are several I've thought about so far, some of which are rather more realistic possibilities than others:

A Fistful of Sterling
Berlin 1946
The Russian Sector
The Russian Officer
The Dead Russian
Zero Hour
The Zero Hour
Stunde Null

Certainly none of these have yet leapt out at me as the title; in fact, I have one of them as the title on the first page of my outline, while there's a different one in the header that appears on every page.  But they're a start.

I

It's always been solved before, but THIS WILL BE THE EXCEPTION

When I start working on the book, I know very little of the book.  A main character, a hook, an inciting incident, maybe a couple of supporting characters, maybe a scenario I'd like to come up somewhere in the middle of the book.  Isolated spots in a sea of blanks.

Filling in all those blanks, so that they first become isolated puddles in a sea of, er, filled-in stuff, and then disappear completely, isn't a steady progression.  For me, there'll be something that triggers an idea, and then that idea will lead to a whole sequence of things falling into place.  Three or four instances of stuff like this--the last one or two of which might not happen until I'm several thousand words into the first draft.

The funny thing about this, to me, is that until each of these revelations, I always have such an ominous certainty that there will be no more revelations coming, and that I will never figure out the ending of this book.

Like with the new book.  I came up with the idea a couple of months ago for it, and it started out with a pretty standard collection of new-idea attributes: a time period and setting, a protagonist, an inciting incident, a twist and a pair of love interests (one of them a heroine, the other a femme fatale.  Love triangle!  Woot!) I worked on it a bit and fleshed it out, adding a few more elements.  Then it sort of gelled the way it was, and for a month or so, that was all I knew about the book.  Just like always.

And yet, as a week or two or three passed without significant additions to the outline in my head, I began to think, Man, I've made a huge mistake with this.  It's a decent first twenty thousand words of a book, but there is clearly nowhere for the last eighty per cent of the book to go.

And then, two or three weeks ago, I sat down one weekend with an idea for another element of the book, and I found what felt like the whole story opening out before me.  It came in such a rush that I sat down and wrote down all the different ideas I had for the book, trying as much as possible to order them, and it came to three pages, or about two thousand words.

I then wrote a short outline incorporating them all, and that came to about three thousand words over five pages.  It got most of the way through the book--really, all that's left is the final climactic sequence, covering about the final quarter to the final third of the book, where everything gets resolved.

I'm now in the process of writing as in-depth of an outline as I can; it's so far thirteen thousand words long, and has reached up to the second page of my five-page outline.  My hope is that this in-depth outline will make the first draft proper pretty much just stream out of my fingers when I go to start it.

And along the way, I've even had an idea for something in that last sequence.  (There's no source for ideas as good as actually being writing.)  Yet.  I still have this feeling of I will never find a decent ending to this book.  I'm going to write seventy thousand words, and they will all be wasted.  Might as well just end it by fading to black.

I'd come up with a good, solid closing paragraph for this post, except I can't really think of one right now, and strongly suspect I never will.  Never mind that I've written nine hundred blog posts prior to this.  This is clearly the one I will never finish.

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