So for fun back in my college days, I started writing tongue-in-cheek “reviews” of the movies, and I’ve kept it up ever since. When I launched SV, I collected them all on the page Star Trek Films: The Good, The Bad, and The Sublimely Ridiculous.

However — and as hard to believe as it is — there are some people who don’t appreciate fun being poked at the show. And last night, I heard from one of them in the form of a comment on the aforementioned page. The thing is, the comment is such a masterpiece of fannish outrage that I couldn’t simply approve the comment and have it languish at the bottom of the page; no, it deserved to be featured in a post all to itself.

What The Eye of Argon is to science fiction, what Stardust the Super Wizard is to comic book action heroes, what My Pal Foot Foot is to rock-n-roll, this comment is to Sotto Voce. It is that good.

With the identity of the commenter hidden for his own good, here in all its unedited, raw glory — with all typos and grammar preserved in amber — is the comment that arrived in my inbox last night:

From: Humor-Deprived Fanboy [virgin@parents-basement.com]
Subject: [Sotto Voce.] Please moderate: "Star Trek Films: The Good, The Bad, and The Sublimely Ridiculous"

Get over yourself already!!!!! What IS your problem?! Granted TMP pretty bad & extremely sloooooow!
Shatner's direction of #5 was all about him even tho he tried to shirk it off when he spoke to (Harve Bennett),
but the line was barely audible. What kills me is all you folks are more concerned w/ whether things match
technically that you technogeeks don't ACTUALLY WATCH THE STORIES AND JUST ENJOY THEM. I'm great at catching
continuity errors, but to take issue with sweaters and uniforms or Chekov's panel displays--OMG!! That is so
picayune, I don't even know where to begin!! 

Y advice to you and others like you is to take a chill pill, remember it's TV's beloved characters and they're
getting old--just like YOU!! Just enjoy, because they're going fast. Kelley was the oldest by a few months over
Doohan and they're gone. But we enjoyed them--we laughed, cried, got exasperated WITH THEM AND STILL KNEW IT
WAS FOR OUR ENJOYMENT!! Adore them while you can. The signatures on#6 was their way of saying goodbye. They
knew it was the end and Gene had only see a rough cut before his death 3 days later, and passing on the baton.
Star Trek, esp the original is ethereal & ephemeral. It will always be. If you want to gripe then gripe
about TMP uniforms--how horrible!! I was happy w/the changes, updates & sweaters!! So get off your soap box
and just enjoy it all; the experience!!!!!

I think it reaches sublimity at “picayune.”

There’s a sad postscript to this story, however. When I tried to reach Humor-Deprived Fanboy to thank him for the laughs, I was saddened to learn from his mom that he had just died of apoplexy after hearing that someone once made fun of Firefly on a discussion board.

Smashwords has managed to buy some time for its authors by opening a dialogue with PayPal to seek a less odious solution. A positive outcome could lead to a partial or even total rollback of PayPal’s demands. Go, Smashwords!

(Disclosure: My books, published under the Channel 37 banner, are available on Smashwords. As my books do not fall under the categories affected by the censorship, I have no financial stake in the outcome of the issue — only a moral one.)

I am a firm believer in the right of authors to write what they want to write, and of readers to choose what they want to read. This is not a decision that belongs in the hands of institutions that have the power to demand compliance with policies of convenience by threatening authors and writers with the ultimate economic sanction.

That’s not how America rolls.

In the coming days, Smashwords will be launching a call to action. In the meantime, here’s a list of things we can all do (via Smashwords):

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

Although erotica authors are being targeted, this is an issue that should concern all indie authors. It affects indies disproportionately because indies are the ones pushing the boundaries of fiction. Indies are the ones out there publishing without the (fading) protective patina of a “traditional publisher” to lend them legitimacy. We indies only have each other.

Several Smashwords authors have contacted me to stress that this censorship affects women disproportionately. Women write a lot of the erotica, and they’re also the primary consumers of erotica. They’re also the primary consumers of mainstream romance, which could also come under threat if PayPal and the credit card companies were to overly enforce their too-broad and too-nebulous obsenity clauses (I think this is unlikely, but at the same time, why would dubious consent be okay in mainstream romance but not okay in erotica? If your write paranormal, can your were-creatures not get it on with one another, or is that bestiality? The insanity needs to stop here. These are not questions an author, publisher or distributor of legal fiction should have to answer.).

All writers and their readers should stand up and voice their opposition to financial services companies censoring books. Authors should have the freedom to publish legal fiction, and readers should have the freedom to read what they want.

These corporations need to hear from you. Pick up the phone and call them. Email them. Start petitions. Sign petitions. Blog your opposition to censorship. Encourage your readers to do the same. Pass the word among your social networks. Contact your favorite bloggers and encourage them to follow this story. Contact your local newspaper and offer to let them interview you so they can hear a local author’s perspective on this story of international significance. If you have connections to mainstream media, encourage them to pick up on the story. Encourage them to call the credit card companies and pose this simple question, “PayPal says they’re trying to enforce the policies of credit card companies. Why are you censoring legal fiction?”

Below are links to the companies waiting to hear from you. Click the link and you’ll find their phone numbers, executive names and postal mailing addresses. Be polite, respectful and professional, and encourage your friends and followers to do the same. Let them know you want them out of the business of censoring legal fiction.

Tell the credit card companies you want them to give PayPal permission to sell your ebooks without censorship or discrimination. Let them know that PayPal’s policies are out of step with the major online ebook retailers who already accept your books as they are. Address your calls, emails (if you can find the email) and paper letters (yes paper!) to the executives. Post open letters to them on your blog, then tweet and Facebook hyperlinks to your letters. Force the credit card companies to join the discussion about censorship. And yes, express your feelings and opinions to PayPal as well. Don’t scream at them. Ask them to work on your behalf to protect you and your readers from censorship. Tell them how their proposed censorship will harm you and your fellow writers.

Visa:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=V+Profile

American Express:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=AXP+Profile

MasterCard:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=MA+Profile

Discover:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=DFS+Profile

Ebay (owns PayPal):
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=ebay+Profile

Add your voice today, and stand up for the rights of readers and writers everywhere!

The voice you save could be your own. Someday.

As my writer friends know (because I rarely shut up about it), I have been a huge fan of the action-adventure show Burn Notice ever since catching it midway through its second season. From a writing standpoint, the show was a master class. The dialogue was sharp without ever sliding into cliche, possessed of just the right amount of banter at just the right spots, deliciously clever in weaving the minimum of necessary exposition into conversation, and always delivered by top-notch actors who knew how to deliver, not simply recite, their lines.

You’ll notice that I’m using the past tense in describing the show. Well, that’s because this past week Season Five ended, and . . . I have been struggling to say this out loud, so here goes: it was a disaster. A season-long slow-motion derailment. There, I said it.

Heaven knows the core cast is still as brilliant (individually and as an ensemble) as they ever were, but no matter how they tried — and it sure looked like they were trying very, very hard — there was simply no way to make that flat, sawdust-flavored dialogue come alive. There was no way to act convincingly in front of those two-dimensional plots. Oh my ghawd, it was horrific to behold. From a glory to a tragedy in one season. I am in mourning.

When the season finale was over and after we had turned off the TV and sat in stunned silence for a few moments, Mrs. Sotto Voce finally broke the spell and asked the question that had been pounding in my head all season long: “Where did it go wrong?”

I thought about the last time I had watched a beloved show commit narrative seppuku: the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. And while I ran the two side-by-side in my head, I suddenly realized the answer:

It happens when the writers put the MacGuffins center stage.

A MacGuffin, in case you don’t know, is a plot contrivance that authors use to kick off the action and put the characters in motion. It can be an object that the protagonist wants to obtain, or a goal that he wants to reach, or a threat that forces him to act. But regardless of what the MacGuffin is, its purpose is to serve as a catalyst. Once the characters and the plot take over, the MacGuffin fades gracefully into the background, usually to be forgotten by Act Three. The story has simply moved beyond it by that point.

In Burn Notice, the MacGuffin is right there in the title. At the outset of the show, secret agent Michael Westen is in Nigeria on a mission when he is informed (in that immortal line) “We’ve got a burn notice on you. You’ve been blacklisted.” As a result, he is dumped in quirky, sexy, pastel-hued Miami where he must make a new life for himself putting his special-ops training to use helping ordinary people whose problems can’t be solved the usual way — i.e., legally. Along the way, Michael — who is notoriously bad at personal relationships — reluctantly must learn to rely on the help of his only remaining friends: his ex-girlfriend (a former gun-runner for the IRA), best friend (a washed-up ex-Navy SEAL with an eye for sugar mommas and a taste for mojitos), mother (a hypochondriac living in denial about her dysfunctional family), and another spy who Michael had accidentally burned (a straight-arrow who is probably the most psychologically well-adjusted one of them all).

I say all that for two reasons: 1) I love the simplicity of the premise, which is so basic that it can be recited in toto at the beginning of every episode, and 2) because it demonstrates the perfect application of a MacGuffin. Sure, the burn notice is what drove Michael to Miami, but it’s everything that follows that makes the show the show.

Of course, the writers didn’t drop the MacGuffin entirely — otherwise the show would need another title. But it was always tucked away neatly in the B-plot. For 75% of the show, you’d have the A-plot of the team helping some poor schlub who managed to get taken in by a scam or who had stumbled on a nasty piece of corporate espionage. But then once that was resolved, you’d get 10 minutes or so at the end of the episode with Michael following the latest clue to finding who burned him. And the writers could, and did, string those clues along forever. A shadowy executive is killed by a sultry operative who gets threatened by a clumsy bomber who was hired by a burned spy who was set up by a smarmy assassin who was hired to free a psycho killer who . . . you get the idea. It was always there simmering on the back burner, to be amped up for the season finale and then dropped from sight as soon as the next season kicked off.

Michael Westen’s quest to figure out who burned him was always part of the story, sure, but its primary purpose (at least in this writer’s view) was to complicate his relationships: the ex-girlfriend couldn’t figure out why he was so determined to get back in, his mother was mad at him for keeping his real life secret from her, and his buddies understood his motivation but wanted him to move on with his life before he self-destructed.

Great stuff. It practically writes itself, as long as you keep the proportions right.

For four seasons, they did. Brilliantly. But then suddenly, in Season Five, it was all about the burn notice. Realistically, the show — and the characters — had long since moved on from the need to have any serious closure on that issue. But alla sudden we’re dealing with internal CIA politics and conspiracy flow charts and blah blah blah, and the whole thing just dies right there on the screen in front of you, bleeding out its vital energy onto the sidewalk.

Throughout the season, the amount of screen time for the A and B plots gradually inverted until, in the season finale, the great Eric Roberts shows up as the bad guy du jour, and he gets, what, ten minutes of screen time because the rest of it is devoted to sitting around expositing about a plot that’s more hopelessly tangled than your grandmother’s Christmas lights? That’s the best they can do? Dean Cain was the other guest star, and he had like, what, five lines? The man used to have his own show, people. Surely we can do better than that.

So, here beginneth the lesson:

The sure signs of a Macguffin takeover are: 1) a complete loss of humor, 2) ridiculously complex story lines, and 3) characters speaking primarily in exposition. Plot, characters, and setting are all shoved tactlessly into the background.

Look at Battlestar Galactica. The MacGuffin there is pretty simple: the Cylons. They come in and blow everything up, forcing a ragtag band of survivors to flee into deep space in search of a new home — the mythical Planet Earth.

Wow. Bingo bango, there’s your catalyst. Now it’s time to go tell stories about how the survivors learn to rebuild their society out of rubble, feed and house thousands of starving refugees, find a workable military/civilian balance, and deal with the paranoia of knowing that your best friend could be a Cylon infiltrator. Every now and then, bring the Cylons back again to raise the tension and stir the pot a bit. The formula made for two seasons of brilliant television.

Then they started gazing deep into the navel of the whole Cylon backstory. Hours and hours of tedious exposition about the Cylons’ motivations and justifications and theology and class divisions and realpolitik and gross domestic product adjusted for inflation. For the love of all that is holy, who gives a flying ram’s damn? They’re the freakin’ Bad Guys, people. Their job is to show up and give the Good Guys something to shoot at and be heroic about.

And so what did we end up with? Utterly humorless characters consumed by their angst. Episodes that were nothing but scene sausages, stuffed with an hour’s worth of disconnected scenes and tied off on either end with credits. Characters spouting dialogue that sounded like verbatim transcripts of writers-room debates. Some people will point to the fact that the discussion-board fanboi went positively jizmatic over all that stuff as evidence that it was good television. I, on the other hand, point to that and say it was evidence that it was all just overblown fanfic.

That’s all I have to say about that for the moment. I have an article on deadline that isn’t going to finish itself, but I really needed to get this off my chest. All I can say is, if you’re a writer, be on the lookout for the three warning signs of MacGuffin Creep in your work. Don’t end up like Burn Notice or Battlestar Galactica. Your audience deserves better. If you’re tired of writing the story, don’t start eating your seed corn. Just sign off.

There’s always syndication.

The secret fantasy of every gearhead (myself certainly included). Notice the requisite messenger bag?

Ernest Hemingway once said that writers need a “built-in, shock-proof crap detector.” Well, I came away from that interview convinced that Tom Ahern has a drop-forged, precision-machined, jewel-movement, laser-leveled, multiaxis-oil-bearing, gyroscopically-aligned, atomic-clock-calibrated crap detector that can guide a missile to within a centimeter of its target before breakfast.

Anyway, enough gushing. One of the topics we covered was social media for nonprofits, and he had an interesting story to share. He had just come back from a conference in Australia where he’d met someone who was actually raising some serious money for his nonprofit using social media as his primary communications tool. His secret? He spends 80 hours a week on it, and has something fresh every 20 minutes or so. Presumably except when he’s passed out from exhaustion between cattle-proddings.

So this chart popped into my head, which when I described it Tom said was brilliant (he was probably just being too polite to tell me that he’s already written a dozen articles on the same idea). The theory is that our communications technologies are moving toward this reductio ad absurdum where it will take more and more content to get fewer and fewer eyeballs.

With physical media you have natural brakes on the flywheel. It takes time to lay out and print newspapers. It takes time to truck them to the places where they will be sold. Books, same thing plus the time it takes to deliver them from warehouses to the purchasers. There’s a lot of friction built into those systems that slow things down to a human-scale velocity. I put newspapers at the intersection because they seemed to hit that sweet spot of getting just the right amount of information to just enough people just often enough to make readers feel like they got what they needed and to make advertisers feel like their money was well spent.

Increase the level of abstraction by reducing or removing time (for printing) and space (for transport and storage), and you start letting off on the brakes. That was the miracle of radio and then TV. But with those you still had few channels and one-directional flow to slow things down. Add the infinite channels of the web, and then the feedback and self-distribution of social media, and now you have a virtually frictionless system. The trend is toward an infinitely large amount of information being pumped at an infinitely small number of eyes.

What did they used to call that? Oh yeah. Junk mail. Spam. At this rate, everything will become spam. (In the time it takes you to read this sentence, Seth Godin will have written and published Everything is Spam: How to Win in the Frictionless Economy and Cory Doctorow will have churned out at least one dystopian novella based on the idea. You’re welcome, fellas.)

Anyway, this is just a thought exercise. I don’t have any arguments or conclusions to make off of it yet. So don’t read too much into it, but please do think about it.

I followed the keynote via live blogs and Twitter, and several people commented on the moment; it sounded like a glitch. But when I went back to watch the full video of the event after Apple posted it, I suddenly felt certain that I was looking at something quite deliberate. I was watching Steve Jobs fulfill a secret, cherished dream. Somewhere along the line, so the feeling went, he had dreamt that he was on a stage, sitting comfortably with a magical computer made of glass with no keys, playing with it while the whole world watched. And that everything he had done since then was an effort to make that dream come true.

That Steve Jobs would dream about being on stage doesn’t sound farfetched. The man was possibly the most naturally gifted salesman of his generation, and he was deeply confident of his instincts and his talents. That he would dream of being alone at the center of the world’s attention fits too; like many great showmen, he was also an intensely private man who insisted on, and got, boundaries. That he would dream of a device unlike any other before it — well, that was his day job.

Whether or not my gut instinct was correct, and Steve Jobs really was fulfilling a personal dream onstage that day, I’ll probably never know. But that he knew his time was running out by then is plausible, making such a moment all the more urgent — and all the more special and poignant — regardless.

A teacher once told me, “You can measure the extent of an idea’s importance by the number of times people said ‘it can’t be done’ before it ended up being done anyway.” Steve Jobs wasn’t interested in what other people said could or couldn’t be done, no matter how loudly they insisted. I think that’s because he knew that most of the time, he was also right. To take risks and to be right — and to trust in one’s particular combination of those two traits — makes for an extraordinary life. You see this combo at work in the lives of our best artists, writers, statesmen, and inventors. It’s a particular combination that we used to celebrate and cultivate for making Great Men and Great Women.

We’ve just lost one of our Great Men. He took terrific risks, he was right most of the time, and I hope that he was able to fulfill all of his dreams in his insanely great time.

(Update: The Writer Underground recalls a unique personal encounter with Steve Jobs here: “Steve Jobs: the Earthquake has Stopped.”)

Feel free to redistribute.