Tag Archives: Firefly

The Time Conspiracy

Writing, , ,

For a long time now, I’ve been itching to take my four-story fan fiction saga that linked the Firefly, Castle, and Doctor Who universes, and combine them into a single volume. It’s called The Time Conspiracy.

It all started back in 2012 with my fanfic story, “Goodbye.” In that story, I introduced time travel to the Firefly universe because—hey! It’s me. After the events of the movie Serenity, Mal and company meet up with someone from their past who should be dead. And they’re not the only ones who have been seeing ghosts. Something is wrong, and it’s up to the crew of Serenity to put it right.

This story led, inevitably perhaps, to a couple of Firefly–Castle crossovers. In “A Firefly in the Castle”, Mal visits Castle’s Earth. In “Castle Serenity”, Castle and Beckett find themselves in the far future and join the crew of Serenity. In these stories, we learn that Mal and Castle are clones, inserted into their respective time streams to nudge events in a direction favourable to the Alliance.

The conclusion of the saga came with “Miranda” in 2016. This story brings the eleventh Doctor and Clara to the Firefly universe to get to the bottom of why the Alliance is meddling with time.

It’s interesting and gratifying to see how my writing improves along the way. And there are other things. The closing scene of “Castle Serenity” is, I think, the most touching thing I’ve written. To this day, it continues to makes me misty-eyed. And from a plotting perspective, “Miranda” is the most complex story I’ve written, telling its story while fitting into the events of “Castle Serenity” and the movie Serenity.

I also have to say that I’ve really enjoyed reading this adventure. I hope you do too.

To get your hands on the EPUB file, see my blog page, The Time Conspiracy.

He’s Dead, Jim

Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , , ,

The thing that most shocks people out of their skulls when they read George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is the abandon with which he kills off major characters. Characters so major that you’ve assumed all along that the series is about them.

Ask any writer, and I think they’ll tell you that their characters become a kind of family. After all, you come to know them so well that you hear their voices in your head. So killing them is not something done lightly. The question is, why kill off major characters at all?

One reason might be to reflect the times in which the characters live. If you read Charles Dickens, you’ll find it entirely possible in some books to lose count of the number of deaths. But consider: in the 1800’s, one in five children were dead by age five, and those who survived childhood could expect to be dead by forty. Death in those times was very much a part of life.

serenityAnother reason is what I call the Joss Whedon effect. Fans of the TV series Firefly were, to put it mildly, shocked that two major characters were killed in the follow-up movie, Serenity. The reason for this, as Joss Whedon explained in the movie commentary, was to place some doubt in the minds of the audience as to whether or not the remaining characters would survive. After all, in most stories, no matter how harrowing the action, the major characters generally pull through. The only real question is, how will they pull through? By killing two characters, Whedon shook us out of our complacency and really made us wonder not just how, but if our beloved characters would survive.

This line of thinking was prompted by a comment I received regarding one of my fanfic stories. “Western Castle” is an alternate universe version of Castle set in the wild west. In that story, I killed off one of the major characters. Why? Partly to achieve the Joss Whedon effect, so that the reader would wonder who would survive, and partly to resolve a minor plotting problem that would arise later on if the character didn’t die. The comment I received was to the effect that killing that character was painful to that reader. For a writer, that’s a nice compliment, tempered by the fact that I didn’t create the character in the first place, but still.

Regarding the death of major characters, the worst thing you can do is what is so commonly done in comic books: bringing supposedly dead characters back to life. This, of course, completely obliterates any drama around death. Rather, the reader will likely yawn and ask herself how long this time before the character comes back.

In The Avengers, Joss Whedon did it again, killing off a major character to better motivate the remaining heroes to come together. Painful, but forgivable. Less forgivable was bringing that character back to life in the TV series, Agents of Shield. From now on, any death in any Marvel Universe movie will be greeted by yawns, not tears.

If you use death, make it matter. Use the death to achieve a plot goal or to shake up readers’ expectations. And keep your characters dead once they’re dead. After all, you can only toy with your readers so long before they decide they don’t want to play any more.

Joss-speak

Writing, ,

Firefly, for those who don’t know, was a short-lived TV series that was broadcast in 2002. Set in the future sometime after Earth had been abandoned, it takes place in another solar system where terraforming has made many planets and moons inhabitable. While the central planets maintain a high degree of technology, the outer planets are quite primitive, living in much the same way as the settlers of the old west. After a failed war of independence, Malcolm Reynolds assembles a team to crew his Firefly-class ship, Serenity, performing jobs for a variety of clients, some legal, some less so.

It’s generally agreed that the series, developed by Joss Whedon, was brilliantly conceived and executed, and its premature demise is a source of woe for its legions of admirers.

Here’s the thing about writing Firefly fanfics: The inhabitants of the outer planets have a particular style of dialect that’s hard to capture. Some call it Joss-speak. To sensibly write Firefly, you have to re-watch some episodes to get into the rhythm of Joss-speak. Some examples:

It’s gettin’ too ruttin’ hot in here.

It’s the gorram law!

I aim to misbehave.

We just need a small crew, them as feel the need to be free.

Once you get into the zone and feel like you’re able to create dialogue that fits into the Firefly ‘verse, it can be hard to find your way back, and Joss-speak starts to leak out into real life. For instance it’s tempting to tell your spouse,

My car don’t crash. She crashes, you crashed her.

Or, you might aim to give your employees a dose of Joss-speak when they misbehave.

What in the sphincter of hell are you playin’ at?

On finding your favourite show is on TV when you’re feelin’ a need for simple comfort, you might say,

Shiny!

And so it goes. In the acting world, they call it method acting when you live and breathe the role, even off set.

Is there such a thing as method writing?