Bean Bag

Regular readers of this column will already know that I have a real respect and support for LEOs. The Thin Blue Line catches a lot grief, and people not on it sometimes have a great deal of difficulty understanding how hard it is. Having a couple officers in my own family, and having known more than a few outside that, I've heard some horror stories, and being any kind of cop is often a thankless job. I wouldn't want to do it.

That said -- you ought to know me well enough by now that such a set-up isn't going to abolish the hot seat -- we have had a little problem locally about which I feel the need to speak ...

Here's the basic background.( If you want to read a more detailed account, go here.)

Recently a party let out one evening in Portland, and of a moment, the streets were full of kids, some of whom were known troublemakers. Local law was sent to make sure it didn't turn into a riot. So far, so good.

The kids -- some of whom were way too young to be out on their own at eleven o'clock at night -- started going their ways, and several of them took to the local light rail train, aka MAX.

Because some of these little darlings had raised ruckus on the buses and trains before, they had basically been kicked off and banned for their activities.

Portland PD spotted a couple of these supposed-to-be-excluded troublemakers on the train, knew who they were, and told them to exit.

Off the train, one of the girls got feisty. Words were exchanged, the officer on hand and his partner decided they were going to take her into custody, and she swung on them, hitting one in the face.

Apparently he missed the class on block and parry.

Now, let's be straight about this part -- this girl was not a petite powder puff, but a sizeable five-seven and about one-fifty. That makes a difference.

The officer took her down, she flailed and continued to resist, and so the officer's partner leaned in and helpfully popped her in the leg with a bean bag round from the special shotgun designed to shoot such things, which he just happened to be carrying.

Understand that these bean bags aren't the little patty-cake things you and your children toss around, but essentially a shotgun load wrapped in a sack so it thumps the hell out of whatever it hits. Shots to the torso are not to be taken any closer than fifteen feet, minimum, because less-than-lethal doesn't mean non-lethal and people have died from these things. But apparently, there aren't any department guidelines on thigh shots.

That shot calmed her right down. She eventually was trucked off to juvie hall and everybody went back to their business.

Here's the catch:

The girl was twelve years old.

The bean bag round was delivered at contact range. And the shooter was a guy already part of a major excessive force lawsuit in which a schizophrenic man (James Chasse) died after a pile-on, with twenty-six breaks in sixteen ribs, and other assorted thumpings, for the crime of suspicion of public urination. They hollered at him, he took off, they ran him down and he didn't want to go quietly.

Because he was paranoid.

Cops and doctors and nurses know about Excited Delirium, which can sky your body temp into the red zone and turn you into a screaming maniac. People die from this, they blow out arteries, burn up, but Chasse died from injuries received at the scene, medical examiner guessed knee drops, kicks, and what, no two ways about it, has to be considered a really bad beat-down, given that it fucking killed him.

The deputies at the jail turned him away when they brought him in -- Jeez, take him to the fuckin' hospital, dude, you ain't bringing him in here to die!

Which was, by then, too late. He died in the ambulance enroute.

It took the Chief three years to get around to finding there was no fault in the incident. Three years. No fault.

The Police Commissioner overruled the Chief and wanted to give the responsible officer a couple weeks off. Political? Yeah. Justified? When somebody dies as a result of police action, you have to ask why, and if it takes three years to answer the question? Something's wrong with the system. It doesn't smell good.

The Union went ballistic. They wrote articles in the local paper, talking about how everything was by the book and there was no fault involved.

I have to say, that if a full-grown man is turned into mushy kindling for suspicion that he pissed on the bushes and dies from the pounding? Something is wrong with that picture, crazy or not.

Pissing in public -- if he actually did -- is not generally a capital crime in this country.

A big part of the problem with serving and protecting the public is how you are viewed in that service. And part of that is the basic wonder with this latest episode: Yeah, she was a strapping child and all, but if two experienced police officers can't go hand-to-hand with one twelve-year-old girl without resorting to a bean bag shotgun, what does that say about them to the general public?

I'll tell you what it says: Maybe they ought to be in a different line of work. 'Cause they sure don't seem to be doing so well in this one. Maybe ... Parking Meter Patrol? Crossing guard? Flower arranging?

If you can't deal with an angry twelve-year-old girl, how are you gonna deal with a full grown crazed man? Oh, yeah, right. We covered that.

The Chief was going to sit the shooter on a desk and poke at it; the Police Commissioner overruled her again. Send him home. You can pay him, but get him off the job.

The Police Union is bellowing hither and yon about no confidence in the Chief and the Commish, and marching and making speeches. Do they really want to be drawing the line over this one? The girl wasn't armed, and no matter how you slice it, it doesn't make the local force look good if this is the place they choose to make a stand.

Stoned loon with a gun shooting at folks? Sure. Whatever you need. That happened in Hillsboro a couple days ago -- guy went nuts, drove down the road, filling the air with bullets. Killed a passenger in a car, and got killed himself when he stopped and started to shoot it out with the law. His bad, and that's why we want cops working the streets, to protect us from him.

Twelve-year-old bad girls who violate a bus exclusion? Bean bag shotgun at contact distance? Somebody needs to stop and think about this one. It just doesn't sound right.

Yeah, yeah, I wasn't there, I didn't see how fierce the pre-teen girl was, it's easy for me to be a Monday-morning quarterback, but c'mon. In some cases, what it looks like is going to be far more important than what it might actually be, and in this case, these two guys are going to be seen as stepping stupid, and I find it hard not to nod and agree when I hear that.

A Small Quiz

You need view only the first fifteen seconds of this vid ...

So, a short quiz. Here's the deal: Read the list of terms that follow, and immediately after you finish, quickly think of a city in the U.S. that most embodies them. (Those of you out of the country will doubtless have your own versions at home, but for the purposes of this exercise, think U.S. of A.)

Ready?

Q: Egotistical, vain, greedy, power-hungry, double-dealing, backstabbing, out-of-touch with reality, disloyal, ambitious, underhanded, sprinkled with a few pedophiles, wretched hive of scum and villainy ...

A: ?

I expect, based on my experience and observations, that you will name one of two cities, and rank them one, two, according your own beliefs.

1) Washington, D.C.

2) Hollywood, California.

I don't have that many dealings with D.C., and only a few more in Tinsel Town, but I'd have to agree with those choices ...

When net surfing, I usually make a pass by Nikki Finke's website, Deadline Hollywood.

Nikki exposes the oft times unsightly underbelly of LaLaLand. She's been called the spiritual heir of Hedda Hopper, or even Walter Winchell, and a lot of folks do not like to see the cats she unbags running around loose. When she caught the flu recently, people happily wished her dead on the comments pages.

Me, I like to know there are watchdogs about, and that some of what people want hidden needs to be outed, in the interests of public safety. She has a viewpoint and she doesn't mind expressing it, and agree with her or not, she's no shrinking violet.

Why I bring this up is not what Nikki has to say as much as what people who write in have to say about what she has to say. There are some bright, intelligent, clever folks posting there, and now and again, I am struck by just how sharp some of the Hollywood players are. Witty out the wazoo.

There are also some folks who are less witty, and downright mean-spirited and vile in their offerings, and it reminds me of something a collaborator on a movie script I once worked on said. I had to fly down there to SoCal for one reason or another, and him being local, I called him up before I took off. We had had some interesting experiences on the lot of one of the majors during a script notes meeting that had not all been pleasant. So, I said to him, I'm flying to L.A. this week. Anybody you want me to shoot while I'm down there?

To which he replied, Hey, just fire a round off in any direction. You are bound to hit somebody worth killing ...

Avatar Interactive Trailer

Check this out -- you can go to the Avatar site and download Adobe software and an "interactive" trailer, which shows the preview and hotspots where you can, using the AIR software, sky off on profiles of the main characters. Click on the Download Interactive Trailer button.

This is pretty cool stuff. And I have to say, from what I've seen, this movie is going to set a visual standard for CGI nobody else will be able to touch. Whatever you think about Jim Cameron, the man is one helluva moviemaker.

Holiday Looms Ominously

During the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, in 1997, the Cat-in-the-Hat balloon hit a lamp post and fell on folks, putting one woman, Kathleen Caronna, into a coma for more than a month. A few years ago, an airplane crashed into her apartment building, killing the student pilot, (a Yankees pitcher, Cory Lidle) and his instructor. The engine of the plane landed in the woman's bedroom. Fortunately, she wasn't home, but you have to wonder -- maybe some deity has it in for her ...

So, Thanksgiving is in a couple of days. For those of you not up on this aspect of U.S. history, this is a holiday that celebrates surviving in the new world, and achieving, with the help of the local indiginous people, a harvest and enough food so as not to starve. Not so celebratory for the indiginous folk, who eventually came, I am sure, to regret being so nice. It cost them.

Randy Newman had it:

Hide your wives and daughters, hide the groceries too/
The great nations of europe comin' through ...

But, it is what it is, and it comes with a full plate around here this year -- we have fifteen people lined up for turkey dinner at our house, kids, parents, grandparents, in-laws, as much family we have as is local, plus a couple of imports. First time, I believe, that all the grandparents have been to dinner at the same time.

My wife is taking the day off work tomorrow to cook. And I will be doing yard work, house-cleaning, and the like, today and tomorrow.

We've already moved all the furniture around, figured out what to do with the dogs and cat to keep them from being squashed under foot, and started moving things we don't want to see broken or hidden high enough to keep them from small and bored fingers. Our TV remote disappeared one Thanksgiving and stayed gone until Christmas. We are pretty certain the grandson who hid it in November simply fetched it from where he put it in December ...

What I'm thankful for is that this only happens once a year ...

Maggie's Farm

Writing for publication requires both author and audience. Each brings something to the table, and readers have their own sensibilities -- read "axes to grind -- whenever they pick up a book. This is especially true when you work in a shared universe, whether you are doing direct media tie-ins, such as the novelization of a movie, or original stories using franchised characters.

The joy of working on such farms are several: You get to put favorite characters through their paces. Do you know what Darth Vader thinks about while sitting in his hyperbaric chamber, or what Princess Leia looks like wet, just after she stepped out of the shower, or how Conan got his muscles, or where Batman learned martial arts?

How does Ripley feel about androids? How hard is it to plink a Predator? What do Predators think about when they are chasing a couple of future governors -- Ahnahl and Jessie -- around the Amazon rainforest? What countries would Indiana Jones consider moving to because they didn't have any snakes?

What kind of woman turned Sherlock Holmes away from misogyny and got his motor revving?

I know all that stuff. And if you know, it's because I told you.

Plus, the money is not bad, and there is the name-change. Before I wrote Shadows of the Empire, I was "Steve Perry." After that one came out, I was "New York Times Bestselling Author Steve Perry." A dozen times over since, not that it has made me rich ...

I got to read the script for Men in Black months before you saw the movie. I got to have breakfast with Leonard Nimoy, work with the ghost of Isaac Asimov, and some of the animation I wrote is still being shown somewhere in the world every week decades later.

On the other hand, you need look no farther than shared universes to see what axes readers bring with them. Much of my work in such arenas is of the two-and-a-half stars ranking, and usually because they fall into the one-star -- it sucked! or five-star it-was-awesome! categories.

If you find yourself in position to write in somebody's well-known universe -- and let's be upfront about that, chances are that isn't going to happen for most of you -- you need to know going in: No matter what you write. No matter how good it is, nor how happy you and your editors and publishers are with it, you are not going to please all the readers. Not going to happen.

"Princess Leia would never do that!" an outraged reader said to me in a letter. "Why do you say that the Aliens are only as smart as German Shepherd Dogs? You are wrong!" "You had Indy acting like he did in Crystal Skull. I hated Crystal Skull!"

This is part and parcel of the business. Fans build up characters in their minds, and endow them with a reality much more true to them than much of the world in which they live. They know them in ways they don't know their own families. And they get pissed off if you take their characters down a road they don't like. They will argue with you about it, and, in some cases, get further chapped if you don't think that what they think really matters.

Hardcore fanboys know what color the lint in their favorite character's pocket was last Tuesday, and they will argue about it until the cows come home. With writers, and with each other. If you go to a fan website and agree to answer questions about your book, have a look at the stats where it shows how many posts some of the fans have done there.

If you find yourself arguing about stuff in that universe with somebody who has posted fifteen thousand times in the last three years? Save yourself the effort. You can't win. They don't really want to hear what you have to say. They have already built their citadels and armored the walls. You ain't getting through to them.

I'm thrilled to have been involved in adding bits to the fictional lives of revered characters, and happy that most readers seemed to have enjoyed what I did. In the end, it has been worth it, but like most roads, there are the occasional potholes. If you have a chance to travel that road, don't say I didn't warn you.

You've Regressed a Long Way, Baby

Hey, I didn't make this up ...

Workin' in a Coal Mine

Back in full-court-press work mode the last few days. The project of which I spoke a few weeks back is going back and forth. My first draft went in, was read, annotated, and I'm fiddling with it.

Mostly, writing isn't that hard a job. It's not like real work. If you are doing spec stuff, you can pace yourself. Do ten pages on Monday, five on Tuesday, take off Wednesday to run errands and babysit, eight pages on Thursday.

If you agree upon a deadline that gives you six, nine months, a year, then you have plenty of time to get the work done. And even then, there is usually a bit of wiggle room.

Tight deadlines without wiggle room require something else. If it absolutely-positively has to be there on Saturday and you don't get it there? They don't come back to see you next time. The old joke is, "Do you want it good, or do you want it Tuesday?" For which the comeback is, "I want it good -- and I want it Tuesday ..."

I've turned work like this down several times because I knew I would have to put more effort into it than it was worth. The time-heuristic is, when taking on a project, to figure out how long you will need, then double that and add thirty percent for the shit -- because work always expands to fill time allotted.

If somebody comes to me and says, "We need a finished book on our desk in three months," I might can do that, assuming there's nothing else on my plate. But if the three months includes me having to write an outline, submit it, then wait for them to read it and approve it before I can start -- then do rewrites based on their notes? I can't.

Why? Because anywhere from two to four weeks comes off the top for that pre-writing-the-book process, and they don't count that. And any notes they offer on the draft for rewrites comes out of that ticking clock, too.

So maybe two months becomes my de facto deadline. I know people who can crank out a hundred thousand words in six weeks. Once upon a time, I could, but unless the money is going to be phenomenal, I'm not going to burn up my hands this way any more. Life is too short.

On a fast turnaround, you have to focus, get productive, and deliver the project, and that sometimes requires long hours of AIC (ass-in-chair). Anybody who does any kind of project work knows how this goes, it's not just writing.

Sitting down at eight-thirty a.m. and not getting up until six p.m. save to pee, or stretch, a sandwich at your desk, that's not uncommon. That is where the discipline part people who aren't writers wonder about comes in. Nobody stands behind your chair making sure the work gets done, either you crank or you don't.

Not enough that they believe you can do it. You have to know you can.

When I'm done with all this, I'll come back and detail the thing -- what it is, and how I addressed it. Meanwhile, it's back into the mine. (Can I get a chorus of "Sixteen Tons" here?)

Anniversary

Forty-three years she's been putting up with me. The woman is a saint ...

Again, Black Steel

Alan's new catalog is up. Click on the link, then the pictures, to see what he's offering.

Christmas is coming ...

Poor Phishing

These show up now and then, though my server's spam filter usually catches 'em. The first line offers a clue. The image looks pretty good at first glance. Until you read it:

"Because of unusual number (sic) of invalid login attempts on your account, we had (sic) believe that their (sic) might be some security problems on your account."

No shit?

When you make three spelling and grammatical errors in the first line of your phish email, it doesn't make you look really clever. As inept as the U.S. banking system has been of late, I can't believe they have fallen quite this low ...

Don't ever give anybody your banking passwords online. Your bank knows better than to ask, and anybody who does is trying to scam you.

Here's what the real B of A has to say about it:

Some things to keep in mind regarding fraudulent emails:

• Unlike phishing emails, we will never ask you to verify personal information in response to an email
• Most fake communications convey a sense of urgency by threatening discontinued service
• Many fraudulent emails contain misspellings, incorrect grammar, and poor punctuation
• Links within the fake email may appear valid, but deliver you to a fraudulent site
• Phishing emails often use generic salutations like “Dear Customer,” or “Dear account holder” instead of your name
• The address from which the email was sent is often not one from the company it claims to be.

A Quiet Night in the Recliner ...

Peaceable Kingdom: L. to R. -- Layla, Dianne, Ballou ...

Back from the optometrist, eyes dilated, and things closer or farther away than the fixed focus are fuzzy, he said alliteratively. Been a couple years since I got new specs and I'm due. Between eyes, teeth, and oh, yeah, ears, I'm rapidly becoming the six million dollar Steve. I'm thinking about having a laser built into my right middle finger to emphasize my point to bad drivers ...

Later, alligator.

Filmography

The IMDB -- International Movie Database -- has, I have just found, a list of my animation credits.

Sort of ...

Most of them are there. Most of them are collaborations -- with Reaves, Ted Pederson, even one with Steve Barnes.

A few aren't listed -- no Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos. There are some I got credit for and didn't do -- and they also mixed me up with the guy who used to write for Thundercats, also named "Steve Perry." For the record, I didn't write any Thundercats.

Format Error

Back in the good old typewriter days, you basically had a choice of two kinds of machine when it came to the look on a page: Pica, and Elite. The difference was in characters per inch: Pica gave you ten, Elite, twelve. There were other typefaces besides "typewriter," which is pretty close to courier font, but nobody used them to write fiction -- that was a fast way to get your manuscript bounced.

I was always a Pica man.

Estimating word counts on a manuscript back then was also simple. You'd take three or four pages out of a ms, do a total word count, then divide that by the number of pages. You didn't make exceptions for dialog or dense exposition, you just applied the number straight across.

A page of dialog has fewer words; however, they don't stuff three pages of dialog onto one to make the word count work -- the white space is part of the dialog. In the days when printers charged by the page, it didn't matter how many words were on sheet, the paper cost the same.

For most of my writing career, my manuscripts, with one-inch margins all the way around, I got 250 words per page. Made it easy to figure, and over the length of a novel, was pretty accurate. Four hundred pp? 100,000 words.

Then the computer thingees came along, and as they got more complicated, why, they figured it out for you. Five letters and a space = one "word." (Words like "if," "and," or "but," didn't count until you strung them together.

I'm not sure this is progress, but that's how it is.

On a typewriter, once you set your margins so you average ten words a line and twenty-five lines to a page, you never had to worry about it changing. Long as nobody else fiddled with your machine, you were golden. (And never once did my typewriter burp and tell me it couldn't find that page, that no such file existed.)

Computer programs, however, sometimes do funny things when you aren't looking ...

The book-in-progress has been swimming right along, flowing quickly. The pages have been adding up, I can see a running count, right up there in the corner. But since I use a 150% view on my word processor, so as to better, you know, see things, I don't get a whole page of text and the rulers on the screen at once, and I didn't realize that I -- or the gremlins that live in my system -- had somehow jiggered the margins on my novel template. So instead of getting 250/words/page, I was getting closer to 200/w/p.

That it was flowing so fast should have been a clue, but, alas, wasn't. So as I looked down and noticed that my first draft was almost done, and over 350 pp, I was pleased, since I was looking to bring the novel around 85,000 words, and that would give me a little room to trim and tighten things

So I ran a word count, to see how close I was ...

10,000 words short, that's how close.

Oh. That's no good at all.

So I opened the file at 100% view, saw right away that the body of the page was short, top and bottom, and, oh, my ...

Not a problem, in that I can go back and add new material in; it's just more work to do it that way than it is to cut it.

Lots easier to make a rope shorter than it is longer.

Do not trust your computer. It's waiting for a chance to get you.

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road ...

Went over to Amazon.com and stuck up a trio of short stories -- three for a dollar -- that I first posted here. Included are "Neighbors," "Adjust for Obstacles," and "Kill Switch." Regular readers here will have already seen these -- a deal with a devil, an off-the-wall science fiction piece, and one about what happens when love isn't enough. If they sell eight million Kindle™ copies, I'll make enough to buy lunch, but hey, it's the e-train, and I do want to get onboard.

I let people here read 'em for free, but if you want to re-read them, or see them on your Kindle™, you'll have to download 'em at Amazon.com.

Worth a buck? Yeah.

I'm waiting to hear back from Barnes & Noble, who will be doing e-bookery for their new toy, the Nook™, to see if they are gonna allow other than established publishers to offer material as Amazon.com does. Their email is currently swamped.

And the beat goes on ...