Intelligence goes all in with the Daddy Issues onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Intelligence goes all in with the Daddy Issues

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Previously on Intelligence, we've had Phlox's fatherly relationship with Gabriel and Phlox, Jr.'s occasional problem with his father's insistence on that fact. So it seemed that the only people lacking a daddy-issues plot were the two female characters, Riley and Lillian. And last night, Lillian joined the club, and left Riley all on her own.

Spoilers ahead. . .

For most of this episode, I totally forgot the premise of this show. No, seriously — Gabriel and his brain chip were barely present. Which was totally fine, since those two things have repeatedly shown themselves to be the weakest parts of the show. The only real downside is that it's clear that the writers have NO IDEA what the chip is, does, or is worth.

So this episode's mission is the recovery of two girls who were kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel. One of the girls is the daughter of a Senator whose committee is about to give a satellite to the Mexican government. The drug lord, Hector, really hates the satellite, since it's going to help patrol the border and aid in policing the drug trade. Now, they mention how it'll do that maybe once, but Hector basically acts like the satellite's being tasked to follow him around, personally. He hates it like it shot his dog.

Lillian is shown the footage of the two girls being menaced that the Senator received. In a twist, the Senator never showed it to anyone. He received it and then pretended like nothing was wrong, clearly going to stop the satellite deal in order to save his wife. The footage is presented to Lillian by her father, Leland.

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Sidenote: I super-hope the similarity in their names was on purpose. I really hope that he lobbied his wife hard to name his child Leland regardless of gender, and managed to get "Lillian" as a compromise. From what we see of the dude, that's more than possible.

Riley and Gabriel are sent to Mexico, where they are instantly clocked by Hector as American agents. So he leaves them an excellent little gift: a dead body in the trunk of a car with a ringing cell phone in his mouth. Gabriel uses a rock to open the trunk, jolting me into remembering that he has millions of dollars worth of secret technology in his mind, and barely ever uses it. Hector tells them to look at the laptop he included with the dead body, and there is one of the girls clutching a live hand grenade. He also mentions the name "Obregon" in the call.

While Riley and Gabriel go to save the non-Senator's daughter, Lillian has a truly unbelievable deductive moment. Literally unbelievable. From the name "Obregon," Lillian's figured out that Hector was hinting that he worked with the U.S. government. And not just the government generally, but her father in particular. She says something about Obregon and his relationship with Pancho Villa, but it does not compute. She says something about remembering everything her father told her, including about the Mexican Revolution. I think we're supposed to get that the reference is one that her father's made, so that's how she knows Hector's worked with him, but I think it needed to be clearer.

But this confrontation is not yet done being just ridiculous. Lillian pours alcohol and demands to know what's going on. Leland explains that they made a deal with Hector: he gave them information on all the other drug lords, and they left him alone. This means that A) Since the Americans took out all the competition, Hector's now the biggest drug lord left and B) He sees the satellite deal as a violation of that deal. I'll give this show credit: that deal and its easy-to-predict consequences are totally something the American intelligence community would be capable of.

ON THE OTHER HAND: Lillian compares what happened to the CIA being shocked that the lion cub they raised bit them. To which her father very gravely responds, "Hakuna matata." Peter Coyote should have been allowed to drop a mic after delivering that line.

While Lillian's drinking and interrogating her father, Riley and Gabriel are trying to get clues to the where the senator's daughter is being held from the girl they saved. She tells them that it "Sounded like a jungle." There's a pause and Riley goes, "You've been very helpful." A+ hilarity, right there. They figure out the house had a subscription to a soccer channel — which Gabriel and the chip discover is popular in Mexico. Go home, Gabriel. You're the worst.

Leland offers Hector the codes to the satellite in exchange for the daughter. Hector, logically, points out that they can just change the codes. But he agrees to the deal. And Lillian is ordered to take the deal, so Riley and Gabriel go to collect the girl. Lillian is also the first to realize this is going to be a clusterfuck, and tells Riley to get back. Gabriel's acting as sniper back-up, because he's better at using the rifle than Riley. Gabriel manages to shoot exactly ONE of the kidnappers. THE WORST.

Riley refuses to leave the girl, so she gets abducted, too. Gabriel and his chip figure out where they are, and he goes in and saves them. Riley points a gun at Hector, but he's still technically a CIA asset, so she's not allowed to kill him.

Her father lectures about how the people Hector allowed them to take down were all worse than he was and that if they didn't make deals like this, there wouldn't be an intelligence field. And you'd think pragmatic Lillian would be all over that, but NOPE. Instead, she calls Hector. He's naked in bathtub with a beautiful woman and like a million candles. She's in a gown at the theater with her dad. Hector identifies her, which leads to the hilarious image of Leland bragging about his daughter to the drug lord he's pumping for information. And just as Hector brags about how he's pretty much untouchable because of his deal with the U.S., Lillian's all "You are not the only person we know in Mexico." And the lady sharing Hector's bath proceeds to stab him to death and leave.

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The good: 1) Hector was genuinely creepy when menacing the two girls. For a villain of the week, he was pretty great. 2) Leland and Lillian's relationship is fascinating. She's clearly a chip off the ol' Hakuna Matata, but I didn't get the sense she hungered for his approval, as is the cliche. Instead, she seemed like a regular child who happened to learn spycraft from her father, rather than how to ride her bike. Her talk with him really felt like her going "Oh my god, Dad. Be better at your job. You're embarrassing me." 3) The last scene was great, and Lillian is clearly the HBIC.

The bad: 1) No Phlox and son this week. That's a shame, since their humor is usually the best-written stuff on this show. 2) Gabriel remains a load, and his chip's abilities remain unimpressive. 3) It's hard to believe in the competence of your main characters, when they seem surprised by the popularity of SOCCER.

The unclassifiable: Leland and Lillian's confrontation about Hector. Marg Helgenberger and Peter Coyote are trying really hard, and they almost pull it off. But the Obregon logic leap is ridiculous. And "Hakuna Matata" may be the most amazing rejoinder ever. But in terms of believability, it fails. Super-entertaining, though not in the way intended. So I have no idea if it's good or bad, but I'd watch more along those lines.

Unfortunately, the promo for next week sounds like we're in for another "Man or machine?" anvillicious conversation. If anything, this week proved that everyone involved is capable of delivering a serviceable procedural. but no one's really sure what to do with the chip — the supposed defining characteristic of this show. I wonder if it's too late for them to reboot the series without the chip.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Intelligence goes all in with the Daddy Issues

Why is it so hard to write a decent ending? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why is it so hard to write a decent ending?

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Endings define stories. A great ending can make everything that's come before seem retroactively great. A weak ending can ruin everything. But why do they have to be so impossible to write? And is there any trick for crafting a strong ending that doesn't involve endless misery?

In a word, no. Not really.

I've written over 150 pieces of short fiction, and I've never had any where the ending didn't drive me nuts. Beginnings are hard, too — sometimes you have to rethink a beginning five or six ways before it stops feeling like a waste. But endings are way, way harder than beginnings for some reason. I'll often find myself deleting the final 15 paragraphs of a story a dozen times, trying to figure out a way to make it feel like less of a cop-out.

Just a few nights ago, I basically lay awake all night, trying to figure out how to make the final reveals in a particular story work dramatically, and make sense. I knew what had to happen, and what the main character needed to find out — but the sequence of those events was important, and so was the way in which they would happen.

In the morning, I had a brilliant idea for how to end the story — which turned out to suck, after I'd had a few cups of coffee and thought about it some more.

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Just look at the language we use to talk about endings. Nobody ever accuses the beginning of a story of being a "cop-out," or a "cheat," or of "falling flat." Beginnings don't have to pay off anything, or explain everything. The beginning of the story hooks us, and makes a bunch of promises — and then the ending has to deliver on all those promises. So perhaps it's not surprising that it's slightly easier to make promises than to deliver on them.

We expect a lot from endings — and we have every right to.

So there's no silver bullet for building the most awesome ending — other than the bullet that kills every one of your characters, allowing you to end the story with, "And then they all died. The end." — but maybe there are some ways to troubleshoot an ending that is refusing to gel?

Here are some things that have worked for me and for other writers I know:

Tear the whole thing up — and let your dreams die

You can come up with the ending in advance — but it still might not work. In fact, your problem may be that you're married to an ending that seemed really perfect and cool when you were outlining the story. And now that you've actually written the dang thing, suddenly your perfect ending is all wrong.

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Like I said above, I often find myself writing a dozen different endings for a story. And having an ending figured out in advance doesn't eliminate that step of the process, usually — even if I stick with the ending I originally had in mind, I have to figure out how to get there in a way that makes sense.

Apart from all the logistical plot issues that can come up while you write the story, your characters will have gotten more complicated and idiosyncratic, meaning that they can't necessarily jump through the hoops you lined up for them when you started out.

So the first step is often letting go of the idea that you already have the right ending, and committing to the awful process of reimagining the story's conclusion until you get one that clicks. And then open a brand new Word file and try to write a new ending, without referring to what you already had written down.

Simplify and trim

You might have one subplot too many, that all need to pay off in your final dozen paragraphs. You might have some themes or ideas that are actually extraneous to the story but which you fell in love with during the writing process, and you want those things to be resolved in your conclusion. You might have raised some questions early on in the story, because you thought they were cool, and now you have to shoehorn in the answers somewhere.

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Oftentimes, if the ending isn't clicking, it's because the rest of the story is too bloated or overstuffed — and the key to fixing the ending is to go back and pare down the first two acts. Or to figure out which things are actually important and in need of payoff, and which things you can let go of.

Think about what would actually happen in this situation

Often, if yourending isn't working, it's because it's unrealistic — either for common sense, or for your characters and setting as you established them earlier. Obviously, this is just a story, but the key to the "right" ending is often sitting and trying to imagine what would actually happen in a situation like this.

Not what would make a cool ending, or what would pay off all your buildup. What would actually happen, in real life.

Sometimes this just lets the air out of your awesome escapist fantasy, in which case it's probably not super helpful. But sometimes, trying to step back from the frame you've set up as a storyteller, and imagining how this could actually play out in reality, can be instructive. How would people really react if everything was falling apart at once? What would go through people's minds in this situation?

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The closer you can get to imagining this as a real event, that actually happens to people on the street in your town, the more grounded in reality the whole thing will be. But also, you might find yourself coming up with a surprising way for the characters to react and deal with their problems — because nothing is more surprising than reality.

Dive deeper into your characters' heads

When you outlined your story — if you outlined it, which isn't mandatory at all — you were thinking of it as a single entity, a bubble that you were crafting with some characters and settings inside it. But now that you've actually written the thing, your characters are more real. And similar to the previous item about trying to imagine how this would play out in real life, try imagining how your characters would actually deal with this.

And think of this a problem-solving exercise that you've set for your characters. They have to stop the Elf Prince from getting his hands on a magic lyre that will cause the atmosphere to turn to fairy smoke. Great. You've given them a challenge, and you've provided them with a series of obstacles, but also a set of tools.

Instead of coming up with a solution and shoving your characters towards it, try to imagine how they would actually set about solving the problem you've created. Put yourself in their shoes a bit, and try to figure out how you would really go about stopping the Elf Prince from playing the cursed lyre.

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Often a weak ending is symptomatic of not really understanding what your characters are going through, and how they'd really approach this situation. You have to go back and think about who these people really are, and what makes them tick.

Re-read your beginning

The conflict you set up at the beginning is — with notable exceptions — what you're seeking to resolve at the end. Especially in a short story. If you're stuck on the ending, maybe it's time to remind yourself of the promises and questions you set forth when you started.

What would yourending look like if it were your beginning, in reverse?

Front-load part of the resolution

Maybe you have a character who has to work out some emotional or psychological issue, and also solve some plot crisis. Ideally, you want both of those things to happen at the same exact moment, so that your hero is having an emotional epiphany and defeating the aliens in a single grand climax.

But epiphanies are complicated, and they take a lot of time and energy, and it's hard to have an epiphany at the same time as you're blowing up an alien spaceship. So sometimes you have to frontload part of the resolution to your story, so the epiphany happens first and your hero, newly unencumbered by emotional baggage, can go on to blow up the alien spaceship.

Or do it the other way around — the hero blows up the spaceship, and then realizes that she's learned something.

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This goes for plot reveals too. Sometimes you have to stagger the big reveals, so that the reveal you wanted to make at the end of the story actually comes closer to the middle. Maybe we find out that the ship's chief engineer is an alien spy at the midpoint, instead of during the final battle, because it's easy to get cluttered. Especially in short fiction, where the whole resolution is likely to be a handful of paragraphs in many cases.

Think about what your story means to you

You can't tell your readers what the story ought to mean to them — but you can know what your story means to you, and let that knowledge guide you. This is part of the whole business of writing a "sincere" draft. The right ending is often the one that is the most meaningful in terms of the story's overall themes and ideas, in your own head.

This is really the number one thing, for me — if I get stuck, I have to go back and ask why I was writing this story in the first place, and what I wanted to explore in it. What stuff from my own life or the world at large, or what bigger ideas. And the more I have a clear sense of what the larger or more personal questions are, the closer I can come to answering them in a way that satisfies me, personally.

And that's really the key — you can never create the "perfect" ending, or an ending that is guaranteed to satisfy everybody, everywhere. But you can know with a lot of certainty that you've created an ending that works for you personally, and that concludes the story you set out to tell. And most of the time, that's the ending that will make other people feel like you nailed it, too.

Want more free writing advice, that's worth every penny? Check out the "Free Advice" tag.

Images via SWallace99, modern fred, Martin Hayes and matangi.etsy on Flickr.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why is it so hard to write a decent ending?

The Emperor's Blades may be the year's breakout epic war fantasy onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Emperor's Blades may be the year's breakout epic war fantasy

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Brian Staveley's debut novel, The Emperor's Blades, opens with a chilling scene: a father turns on his daughter, afflicted with Rot. It sets up some disturbing backstory, and pulls us into the complicated world of the Annurian Empire where this story is set. It's a good opening for a promising fantasy debut.

Some spoilers below.

The ponderously-titled The Emperor's Blades, Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne Book 1 is set up to be this year's blockbuster fantasy title. Now that Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series has concluded, and with epic fantasy still going strong on television and the bestseller lists, it's clear that Tor Books needed something needs to fill the gap. Staveley's series steps up to the plate in good order to fill those particular shoes.

His story is a solid fantasy debut, filled to the brim with history, lore and potential, all the while while it avoids becoming a carbon copy of the doorstopper books inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Rather, it's a modern epic fantasy mixed in with a nice dose of Lovecraftian weirdness. This first book, the first of a projected trilogy, stands apart from the general epic fantasy scene by taking many of the typical elements and remixing them into a modern and excellent world that supports an intriguing story, one that doesn't abandon the main characters into a prophesy or into events entirely outside of their control.

In The Emperor's Blades, the Emperor of the Annurian Empire has been killed, apparently the victim of the Empire's political and religious workings. His three children are scattered around the empire: Kaden, the direct heir to the Unhewn Throne comes under the training of a new teacher at a remote Shin monastery in the Ashk'lan Mountains, Valyn, the younger son, is finishing up his training with the Kettral, an elite military unit that flies into battle with the help of giant hawks, and Adare, the Emperor's only daughter, remains at the capitol as the Minister of Finance, holding the empire's bureaucratic infrastructure together.

Kaden and Valyn take up a majority of the book, each of their arcs a solid coming of age story: Kaden has been sent to the Shin Monks for a reason: to empty his mind, in a sort of Dagobah/Jedi training regimen before taking the throne. His training is hard, demanding and ultimately transforms him over the course of his arc.

Valyn undergoes the same amount of abuse as he goes through training to become an elite Ketteral soldier. His training isn't unlike that of what one would expect from a Navy SEAL: it's harsh, with trainees undergoing years of training to make them the best they can be. He goes through a similar character arc, this one forged through the actions of his trainers and fellow cadets.

Finally, Adare's arc is criminally short, and arguably, the story arc that holds the entire story together. While she remains at the capitol, it's through her story that we get a greater sense of the world in which they inhabit, and where we discover that the plot that took down her and her brother's father was much greater and far more complicated. She's expertly drawn up and clever, and it's a shame that we didn't see more from her, something that will hopefully change in future entries to this series. I never get the sense that this is explicitly a gender issue; there's a number of rather well drawn female characters throughout the book and world. Rather, it feels like her story was a bit of an afterthought, conceived of or implemented after Kaden and Valyn's stories were well fleshed out. Their stories have a lot to them, and there's likely chapters and sections that could have been pared down quite.

Of the three storylines, Valyn's feels as though it's the most thought-out, and easily could have been a novel in and of itself. Staveley goes into great detail with the bird-borne soldiers, and comes up with a truly exciting final test that pushes Valyn to his limits. All the while, several of his fellow cadets have perished, leading Valyn to believe that he's also targeted by his father's assassin. As the two storylines come together, Staveley puts together some interesting twists and turns that led the plot to a somewhat unpredictable ending, and leaving us with an ending that makes it clear that this was just the beginning. Together, each of the stories come together by the novel's final act, with Valyn's training and arc leading up to help assist Kaden as he comes to some final moments of realization. By the end, however, it's clear that Adare's story cements both brothers together and provides context for their personal journeys. It's also at the end where the story's title becomes an important bit of information: the three last weapons of the late emperor.

This feels to me as though it's an important point to the entire book: how are people used? Everybody in the book plays their part, but two of the most notable characters display sociopathic tendencies. There's one of the Ketteral leaches, Balendin (the magical users in this world, who draw upon various 'wells' for their power), who's ability to leach off of emotions that play a pivotal role throughout, while Annick, a fellow Ketteral, is decidedly emotionless throughout the story as she goes about her job as a sniper. Furthermore, there's Kaden's training, through which he works to strip away emotion from the tasks before him, training for which he'll be putting to use later on, when he eventually assumes the Unhewn Throne. There's other examples as well: Humans are just the latest occupants to the world; they were preceded by the Csestriim, a long-lived, sociopathic race that fall millennia ago following a series of long wars with their children, humans.

Throughout the story, there's an argument between a single character's agency and the larger story surrounding them. The plot that took the Emperor had its own pawns, expertly maneuvering forces around the Royal family. At the same time, there's opposing forces aiding them. As the two male heirs find themselves fighting for their lives, they really face an emotional test that comes up with an ambiguous outcome. While this is happening, Adare discovers that each of their personal training and experiences have been calculated, thrown into the fray in an attempt to unhinge the plot. The outcome is unclear: Staveley clearly has more ready to tell us in his next book. What he's shown is an interesting, emotional take on fantasy characters, and it's one that I'll be interesting to see at its end.

The Emperor's Blades is a promising start to a new voice in fantasy, and despite the flaws, I like what Staveley has to say. He's constructed a fantastic and compelling fantasy world and has started an interesting story that rests on the strengths of its characters. He's proven to be an excellent author, and he's set up a compelling narrative. The next entry in the series, The Providence of Fire, is due out in 2015, and I already can't wait to see what happens.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Emperor's Blades may be the year's breakout epic war fantasy