You’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?”

Growing interest in long-form storytelling has encouraged Hollywood bloodsuckers to ask more novelists to help them. They want story and backstory for these eight-episode or longer stories the kids like these days.

One agent said, “We are selling more intellectual property to television than ever before. What you’re finding in both television and film now is a recognition that a great storyteller is a great storyteller, regardless of the medium.”

For example, PW points to Gillian Flynn, “who bargained to stay on as the screenwriter of the film adaptation of Gone Girl when it was optioned. Flynn is now signed on to write an adaptation of the British series Utopia for HBO, as well as a planned feature adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.”

Speaking about a screenplay for Strangers on a Train, Raymond Chandler said this:

When you read a story, you accept its implausibilities and extravagances, because they are no more fantastic than the conventions of the medium itself. But when you look at real people, moving against a real background, and hear them speaking real words, your imagination is anaesthetized. You accept what you see and hear, but you do not complement it from the resources of your own imagination. The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.

Thoughts thought this week:



Somebody mentioned androids — those all-but-human robots we see so often in modern science fiction — on Facebook.

I don’t think we’re likely ever to see androids.

Not because the technology is too complex (though it may be). But because the technology will probably be unnecessary.

We already have a source of perfect humanoid organisms that we can exploit as servants and slaves.

In time it will probably be possible to alter their brains to render them compliant, and no more intelligent than we want them to be.

The organisms I mean are unborn human beings. Aborted babies.

Legally, they have no standing as persons. So technically, it would not be illegal to enslave them. Is it very unlikely that in a utilitarian future, aborted babies will not be disposed of, as they are now, but recycled, as labor-saving devices?

Seems almost inevitable to me, unless our hearts are changed.

I’ve thought about working this idea into a story, but it’s too Science Fiction for me to handle properly.

Somebody’s probably already done it anyway.

SUFFRAJITSU, the tactics of the women who fought for their rights in Victorian and Edwardian England. Now in comic book form. More on the story of these Amazons here.

Took half a day off today, because I had an afternoon appointment with my surgeon. Almost one year from the date of my hip replacement, time to zap my groin area with carcinogenic radiation.

But first, stopped at Fat Nat’s Eggs, a small local chain that serves only breakfast and lunch, to try their hot beef sandwich. I’ve become kind of obsessed with hot beef sandwiches since the great one I had in Minot, ND a couple years ago. My review: It was good, especially the mashed potatoes. But I still give the edge to Keys Restaurant, another local chain but a longer drive from my home. Neither is quite up to that Minot place (whose name escapes me for a moment, but it starts with a “K”), though.

Then off to see the sawbones. We both agreed that my new hip and I are getting along fine. She asked me when I want the other one done, and I told her certainly not before my graduate work is done. I don’t care to repeat last year’s catch-up effort, which in memory is worse than the operation. She’s OK with that, knowing that she’ll probably get me sooner or later. Though she admitted that the X-rays showed some changes in the “manufacturer’s original parts” hip, and not negative ones.

I also congratulated her, having perceived, through my extraordinary writer’s powers of observation, that she was about 8 1/2 months pregnant.