QWF shortlists The Circle Cast

I am proud to tell you that the Quebec Writer's Federation has shortlisted THE CIRCLE CAST for Best Children's and Young Adult Literature, along with my friend Alan Silberberg's MILO and Geneviève Côté's WITHOUT YOU.

Spectacular Optical

In which I am interviewed by Ariel Esteban Cayer about YOU ARE SO UNDEAD for Spectacular Optical, the magazine of the Fantasia Film Festival.

Upcoming: YASU screens at Toronto After Dark on Saturday, October 22, at 9:45 PM, just before War of the Dead.

Insanely Great

Just read the sad news that Steve Jobs is dead of cancer at 56.

Steve Jobs probably did more to make my life better than any stranger I can think of. I've been a Mac person since before there were Macs; I programmed on the Apple II+. I've had iPods and iPhones and now I even have an iPad.

It's worth remembering that Jobs and Wozniak made the first personal computer that really scored. There were personal computers before the Apple II, but you had to solder them together. There might have been others that you could buy off the shelf, but you didn't. And then, suddenly, there was a computer that you didn't need to have a computer science degree to use. (I actually did have a computer science degree, but I was never a hardcore hacker.)

It's worth remembering that before the Apple II, IBM didn't think anyone needed or wanted a personal computer. The Apple II forced them to go build the IBM PC, and license a crappy operating system called DOS from a guy named Bill Gates, who'd bought it from somebody else. It turned out everyone wanted a PC, of course, and the IBM name put an IBM, and not an Apple, in everybody's office. (No one ever got fired for buying IBM.) But before the Apple II, there was no IBM PC.

And then, the Mac. I remember the 1984 Olympics ad for the Mac, and then buying a Mac. Before the Mac, you had to know an awful lot of stuff to use a personal computer. Before, you had to know the exact name of a file in order to open it, and the exact name of the program you wanted to open it with; after, you just pointed at it on your desktop and double-clicked, and the Mac knew what program would open it. If you wanted to do something, you had to know the name of the command for what you wanted to do; after Mac, you had menus at the top of the screen. Jobs didn't invent the mouse, or drop-and-drag, or the trash bin, or the graphic user interface. Jobs and Wozniak more or less lifted that from Xerox PARC. But the boys at Xerox PARC weren't marketing it. Jobs and Woz put it in a computer anyone could buy.

Before the Mac, you had to print things out to see what they would look like printed out. Usually quite a few times. After Mac, you could see on the screen exactly what it looked like, and there was suddenly this thing called "desktop publishing."

Can you imagine?

A little later (after taking time out to found Pixar and redefine animated movies), Jobs and his company invented the iPod and iTunes, before which it was almost impossible to carry your entire music collection around in your pocket, and after which, it was a thing that every college student considers the bare minimum that her phone should do.

I don't think I have to tell you what the iPhone does. I'm not even sure anyone knows what the iPad will do.

Jobs didn't invent anything that couldn't have been invented sooner or later, maybe not as cleverly or as elegantly. (Windows is the proof of that: Gates took the Mac OS and had a version of it crafted that was less elegant and more user-abusive; he's now worth $56 billion.) What he did was shape the connectivity of our lives into something seamless and fun, by making electronics that were, in his famous phrase, "insanely great."

Every day, I sit in front of a Mac. If I go out, I carry my iPhone. There are so many things I don't have to think about; they just happen. My iPhone syncs with my computer. I can shoot a picture of someone I meet and attach it to their number and email in my address book, and somehow when they send me an email, I get that picture of them on the email. When I get in my car, it talks to my phone, so that if someone calls me, the car knows to kill the music I'm listening to (which is probably on my phone) and put the call through to the car's speakers.

Jobs didn't do all of that. But he pushed my world in that direction. He wanted everything to work smoothly and seemlessly. He had an esthetic that a hacker would enjoy. There's a story that, early in the design of the Apple II, Jobs spent a night redesigning the entire motherboard so that there would be half as many things to solder. It wasn't because soldering adds cost. It was because it would be more elegant to have fewer solder points.

Steve Jobs made technology cool. He brought the future to me, first in beige, then in black, then in polished aluminum, and finally on a glass touchscreen.

I love that man. I love his work. I'll miss him a little bit every time I flip my computer open to start my day.

What Secret Circle is Doing Right

On my other blog.

Monkey Points

Q. On page 239 you mentioned that writers usually get 5% of the net profits, which is sometimes called “points”, and that points are practically never worth anything, which is why they’re sometimes dubbed monkey points. Can you tell me what you mean by points not being worth anything? Are you saying that most movies don’t make profit at the box office and therefore there’s not extra money to pay the writer this bonus? That most movies made break even at best?

If you get a Net Profits definition in your contract, it is generally formulated so that you will never see a cent. Basically the studio takes a big overhead percentage, and then a big distribution fee, out of the film's revenues, and then set the remaining money against the film's cost, plus the marketing cost. (In other words, thanks to the distribution fee, they get paid twice for marketing the picture.) Many movies that obviously made money for the studio have never gone into net profit.

Q. Then what can I do?

Get something better than a Net Profits definition. We generally ask for an Adjusted Gross, which means the producer recoups the cost of the movie, and then we're entitled to start seeing money.

It's all about what contract language you negotiate, which is a function of how much clout you have (how much they want you), and how clever your agent or lawyer is.

WGC members also get a "distribution royalty" as part of the IPA. I have no idea what it is, but it can add up to a very nice chunk of change if your movie gets some decent play.

Terra Nova

We were very disappointed by Terra Nova; we got through the first hour but bailed shortly after. It bothered me that I didn't actually like any of the charactes. It bothered me more that the main character looks like he's going to be a cop; of course, it's a TV show, every TV show has to be about someone who solves crimes. It bothered me most that they're sending a colony of people from a ruined Earth to a pristine, Cretaceous Earth... and the script made that seem banal, ugly and tedious. I was not once surprised by something that happened. None of the characters were interesting, or seemed like they'd reward further watching. Nothing about the Terra Novan society surprised me. Nothing about the science surprised me. There was just nothing new in the show, after an hour.

I want my SF to surprise me. Wah.

Choices in games

I'm working on my MIGS talk, N+1 Screenwriting Tips for Game Writers. The part I'm working on is about allowing players to make choices that have consequences, particularly to the ending of the game.

The obvious recent example here is HEAVY RAIN, where your success or failure on missions leads you to a bunch of different possible outcomes. But I'm not a huge fan of HEAVY RAIN, which, as I am not the only person to have remarked, can seem more like a "choose your own adventure" than a game with excellent gameplay.

In DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION you can save or fail to save certain characters, and you can decide how to play (stealthy, non-stealthy pacifist, typically homicidal game hero). But the story really doesn't change except at the very end when you can choose one of four buttons to press to decide your values.

What are some emotionally powerful choices that you've been able to make in games that affected the outcome?

Chapters reading October 22

Looks like I'm going to be giving a reading of my novel THE CIRCLE CAST: THE LOST YEARS OF MORGAN LE FAY, at the Chapters Bayview Village, in Toronto (well, North York, really), on Saturday, October 22, at 2 pm. That should be fun! If you're in Toronto, come hear me read!

(I'm also screening my five minute teen vampire sex comedy, YOU ARE SO UNDEAD, at Toronto After Dark, that night at 9:30 pm!)