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There is a unique charm to playoff hockey, one that no other sports’ tournament can match. The NFL playoffs are too short for true hatred to build between opponents. MLB playoff games have an added element of tension, but don’t bring a corresponding increase in intensity. And the NBA playoffs… well, let’s just leave it at that. The NCAA Tournament inspires more of a frenzy among the populace as a whole, but again, the series are far too short for real organic animosity to build up. And most of all, in each of the above sports, the burden of rising intensity is on the fans. Fans get really excited about the playoffs, but the fundamental nature of the games don’t really change.

Playoff hockey is different. In every respect, playoff hockey is a different beast from its regular season counterpart. It is faster, more violent, and yet more disciplined. Players deliberately alter their style to adjust to a new set of rules and circumstances. Seemingly endless overtimes add a regular marathon element lacking in other sports, and every aspect of the game becomes more tense and measured. And because every series is best of seven, you get the added pleasure of seeing extended narratives emerge. You also get that element of hatred that develops between teams, which just doesn’t happen in other sports in quite the same way. And all of it is in the name of the Stanley Cup, the only trophy in sports worth winning. Sure, it’s great to say that you’re the World Series Champion or the Super Bowl Champion, but no one cares about the Commissioner’s Trophy or the Lombardi Trophy. Everyone cares about the Stanley Cup.

Clearly I am tired and don’t want to blog at length or coherently today, so I’ll leave you with that. Besides, I’m short on time anyway. The Pens are coming on soon.

I’ve just begun the revision process for my first novel. It’s a little daunting, I’ll admit. 238 pages lay before me, and I’ve no idea what will stay and what will go as I tear through the manuscript. Using an extremely scientific and not-at-all random series of post-it notes and scribbled guidelines, I’ve got a few thoughts on what needs to be changed, what characters need to be beefed up, what plot elements need to be dropped, and where prose needs to be simplified. I’m making slow progress, but I hope to be done with this draft by the end of May.

This is, I believe, the hardest phase of the writing process. I’ve gotten the story out on paper. Now I have to face the cold, hard reality that large swaths of the first draft are simply terrible. I mean terrible. Rationally, I can accept that, because let’s face it: first drafts suck. No first draft in the history of man has ever been any good. But emotionally it’s very difficult to go back and see that what you were so satisfied with the first time around was just godawful. That means discouragement, which you have to overcome to get to the next step in the process. I’m a little past that psychological summit, but I’m still deal with the fact that the first time through, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Now I’ve got to take a whole bunch of discordant plot threads and jumpy character arcs and smooth them out, tie them up, and make it look like I knew what I was doing.

The biggest challenge personally is reordering out character hierarchy. Some characters are clearly just there to support the main ones, and I need to make them stand alone and give them their own stories, their own motivations, and their own arcs. Now that’s not going to be easy, but as a fan of ensemble dramas, I have trouble just leaving characters in a supporting role. I’ll get it worked out eventually, but it’ll take a lot of time and a lot of thought.

After I get through this draft, I’ll be able to focus on making the novel sing, but right now, I’ve just got to buckled down and plow through it and hope that I like what I have when I’m done.

There is something wrong with NBC. This statement should not surprise or offend, as anyone who has watched the network over the last several years on a night that isn’t Thursday is already keenly aware of the network’s myriad problems. Take Heroes, for example. I maintain that Heroes was an entertaining television program for its first season, and a tolerable one for its second. Although the story never approached Lost-like levels of complexity, intrigue, and literary sophistication, it nevertheless presented characters vaguely resembling real people interacting in a world not unlike our own, dealing with the problems that superpowers could and would inevitably bring to them.

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I stumbled onto this video a while back. With the launch of the iPad imminent, I thought it was as good a time as any to drag it out, dust it off, and slap it up here as “content.” I’ve made my unabashed love for all things Apple well known to readers of this site (as well as to anyone who has ever met me, I think), so it’s no shock that I really enjoyed this thing. But what really

Have you ever liked a film ironically, only to look up a little while later and suddenly find that you have genuinely fallen in love with it? Of course you have. But what separates me from you normal people is that I do it with alarming regularity. I can’t even begin to count the number of terrible films that I honestly love with all of my heart. I can’t explain why or how I have fallen under the spell of these cinematic atrocities, but there’s no denying that they’ve got me for life.

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Wait! Let me explain!

By babies, of course, I mean fictional character that I have created and invested in emotionally. And by killing, I mean… well, killing. Yes, I’ve reached the point in my narrative where I have begun to off my main characters. Not all of them, of course. There’s still enough story to tell to justify keeping some of them around (for now… muahaha…). But I have begun to gradually eliminate certain characters in order to advance the plot and the emotional arcs of more important characters.

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I reached a personal milestone today – 200 pages. That’s right, I am now officially 200 pages into The Novel. (Is it appropriate to call it a novel? I feel like that implies some sort of class and prestige, and not at all the general pulp spectacle that I have been crafting, but I digress.) Even better, the finish line is in sight. I’ve got the major plot line to resolve, obviously, with all of the little character bits that are tied into it, and I’ve also got one major dangling plot thread that I need to address and figure out how to weave back into the whole of the narrative. It’s one of those bits that may be cut the second time around. The characters at the center of it were at one point in the planning stages relatively important to the plot, but as it developed, their stories and mine diverged from one another. But! As I said, personal milestone achieved. Now I just need to make that final push, and then, with a first draft in hand, I’ll actually be able to get a little rest. Huzzah!

I’ve reached that stage in the creative process where, on the verge of finishing draft one of the novel, I find myself struggling to force out the final sixty or so pages. I think the problem is twofold: first, I’ve already unintentionally turned my mind toward the first revision. It’s impossible not to think about the changes that I’m going to make when I go through the story again. That makes it significantly more difficult to focus on the draft at hand, especially when I find myself coming up with new ideas that, while appropriate for the late stages of the book given the way certain characters have developed, contradict already-established events that I’ll have to change the second time around. It’s frustrating to not be able to guide the story the way I’d like it to this time around, but that’s what I get for the way I write. I don’t like to lay out the whole story before I write it, because then I’m stuck trying to conform to an outline, and by extension, shutting out potential sources of inspiration and avenues of creativity. On the whole, I prefer my approach, but it is not without its consequences.

Second, independent of any next steps in the process, I’m just ready for this draft to be done. It’s a tremendous intellectual strain to force myself to write every day after work. Some days I hit my word goal, some days I don’t, but I am at least getting a couple of pages done every day, and I’m finally reaching the point of exhaustion. I need to finish this draft just so I have a draft finished, at which point I’ll be able to step away from the process for a couple of weeks before starting again. I’m honestly just ready to be done with the thing for a bit, but in order to do that, I have to finish it, as exhausting as that may be.

But I’m slowly but surely making my way to the finish line, and I hope to have a draft completed by the end of the month. Here’s hoping!

Good Lord, February is almost over. As a winterphile, that is extremely uncool. As a baseball fan, though, I feel unwarranted excitement building inside of me. I mean, I know that the Cubs have about as much chance of winning the World Series this year as Jimmy Carter does of winning a second term in the White House, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll be any less excited to watch them play. I’m actually considering purchasing an MLB.TV subscription so that I can actually watch the games, but I think that I’ll probably end up just making due with the MLB At Bat iPhone app that got me through last summer. Besides, if I have to choose between listening to Len & Bob and Pat & Ron, I’ll choose the latter every time.

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Moon is a film by Duncan Jones. It stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, an employee of a lunar mining company that harvests helium for energy use on Earth. Sam is alone on the Moon, with no direct human contact and only his robot GERTY to keep him company. At this point, the film could have become one of three things. It could have become some sort of space opera where Sam fights Moon Men over natural resources. It could have become a cerebral, elegant, and poignant science fiction film in the vein of 2001. Or it could have become Mystery Science Theater 3000. And despite my unabashed love of MST3K, I am please to report that Moon is one of the best pure science fiction films I’ve seen in quite a while.

The film is filled with beautiful imagery, an understated and effective score, and a very naturalistic and moving performance by Sam Rockwell. But the biggest reason to recommend Moon is the way that Jones approaches the subject matter. I hate to bash on Star Wars, but the series corrupted America’s concept of science fiction. Sci-fi has became a byword for action-adventure in space, and even when brave directors have tried to break out of that formula, they haven’t met with much success. Even films like The Matrix and its various knockoffs were simply “action-adventure IN THE FUTURE” or “action-adventure WITH COMPUTERS,” rather than classical 2001-style science fiction. With few exceptions, the genre on film was for a long period of time nothing more than simple variations on action-adventure.

But science fiction isn’t defined by explosions in space. Science fiction uses advances in technology to expose truths about the human condition and the way we adapt to brave new worlds. That’s why I’m thrilled to see a film like Moon so well received. It’s a film about a future that we can easily envision. What it does, like all great sci-fi, is explore the consequences of that future. And coupled with other recent projects like Caprica (yes, I know it’s not set in the future, but you get the point), it gives sci-fi fans a little bit of hope about tomorrow’s genre projects.

There’s nothing wrong with big budget blockbusters like Star Wars. Those are really enjoyable films. But every once in a while, a Moon is a welcome relief.