A few months ago, V shut down production to give the writers a chance to improve the scripts coming out of writer’s room. Before that Caprica was put on hold, according to some, to let the writer’s catch up and rethink the direction of the show. Further back still, Dollhouse suffered numerous writer’s room lock-downs and rewrites. And now, the same thing is being done with Flashforward.

Too many intelligent shows are falling quickly in quality after the first few episodes, those written external from the production process, and too many shows are experiencing staggered airing of new episodes because of the logjam in the writer’s room.

The lesson here, is that writing doesn’t work the same for all shows. When most television was episodic — that is, each episode was mostly independent — it was easy for a writer’s room to work on episodes as the season progressed. But with the new generation of television shows becoming increasingly serialized, writers need more time to make sure each episode fits into the overall story well, that the various threads are intertwining at a decent pace while maintaining suspense and tension.

It seems more and more obvious that networks should be ordering scripts well in advance of air date, before any production begins, in fact. Sopranos did something akin to that for the second half of its sixth season, taking a year and a half to, among other things, ensure the final season’s scripts were all high caliber. I’m not saying you need a year and a half off between seasons, but the precedent is there.

The danger with this is that the seasons as written would be immutable, if there’s a character that the audience loves and they’re killed halfway through the season well the audience might jump ship because their favourite character is dead. But this fixed structure is also a boon to the show, because quite frankly the whims of the audience are not the best compass for plot or character progression. Writers follow the audience’s whims because it means they might keep their audience, and in turn can continue to write their show. What needs to happen is for just one network to take a risk: get a spec script, interrogate the writer as to their plan for the show, and make sure they have an ongoing vision. Give the writer a full staff of writers and assistants and whatnot, that either the original writer or an experienced showrunner will guide, and let them write a full season.

That won’t happen, of course. And even if it did happen, there’s no guarantee the material produced will find an audience, so there’s no guarantee it would work. But something needs to happen. Somebody needs to try something; preferably not the abandonment of serialized television.

I haven’t blogged recently, not for a lack of thoughts worth blogging (though perhaps a doubt in my ability to express said bloggable thoughts adequately is encouraging the drought) but for a panoplic plethora of thoughts and ideas Infinite Jest is bringing to light. Reading this book is something which demands intense thought and concentration, and often leaves you drained, but in the best way possible. I’m still far behind the pack, so I don’t expect to be writing much here for a little while longer — though as Joe Hill noted on his twitter feed, these notes of delay are often shortly followed by frequent bursts of activity so let’s not say it’s impossible that I’ll be writing more before the end of the month.

I’ve always been fond of footnotes and endnotes, but two things have happened recently that have led to me grossly abusing endnotes: first, I installed a wordpress plugin that makes including endnotes much easier, though it unfortunately lacks support for referential endnotes and nested endnotes but I’m working on solving that in my spare time, and second, and almost certainly more importantly, I’ve started reading Infinite Jest.

David Foster Wallace said in an interview with Charlie Rose that footnotes become addicting, a fact to which I can attest. Sometimes, they ease the construction of a sentence, allowing me to include all the information I find pertinent without building a sentence as complex as might otherwise be needed. Other times the information I want to include has no purpose in the context of the post, though it is still worth noting, information that I think is important but would be unacceptably extraneous in the article proper. And then there are other times that endnotes are just fucking fun.

But even I’ve found the inundation of endnotes in my more recent posts a tad tiring. I can’t promise I’ll try to stop or at the very least reduce my endnote output. But I’ll try to try.

Infinite Jest is not a book to be taken on lightly. I knew what I was getting myself into when I decided to take part in Infinite Summer; Wallace’s magnum opus wears its heft on its sleeve. But when you begin to read about it, the barriers begin to grow in your mind.

It doesn’t help when the Infinite Summer blog provides a guide to reading Infinite Jest; even before reading the post you have a sudden realization that this is much more than just a long book.

Use bookmarks. Persevere to page 200. Trust the author. These are some of the maxims presented to the virginal reader of Infinite Jest. And they are not said in jest¹. This book is tough to get in to.

But luckily, there are a few keystones along the way, even before page 200, that signaled to me that this book had something to offer me.

The first keystone moment for me was the nightmare sequence beginning on page 61². This short two page sequence is centred around the idea of noticing in the curls and bends of your hardwood floor a face. This is an idea I thought of several months ago as an interesting starting off point for a short horror tale — one I never really started and certainly wouldn’t have written about as well as Wallace — but beyond that coincidence it was a shockingly good vignette into a realm of terror and emotion that demonstrated to me the range this book was capable. I had enjoyed sections prior to that one, but it wasn’t until then that the critical mass of enjoyment overcame the dread and awe this book engenders in the reader.

Since then, I’ve found many more sections, paragraphs, sentences, and even words that resonate with me. The book might be tough to get into, but once you’re there, you’re there. Which is a good thing because I’m still way behind according to the schedule so I can use the momentum.

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Footnotes

1. I didn’t want this to be a pun but unfortunately, the word jest works better than its synonyms in that context, so suck it haters. [↩]
2. I should have written about this over a month ago, but I’ve been woefully behind the Infinite Summer Schedule since almost day one so these digressions have been put on hold. [↩]

Wow. I didn’t know I had it in me. I had no idea I felt so strongly about the character development deficiencies in erotic novels.¹

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking part in the grand experiment that is Infinite Summer. But reading Infinite Jest, even in 75 pages per week chunks, can be draining. So recently, to kill some time avoiding reading Infinite Jest, I decided to read another book: Secretary’s Punishment.

A little back story is needed here. A few months ago I bought a few adult erotica books because I wondered how good the books were. If they weren’t well written I was thinking about writing my own, cashing in on my unremarkable writing capabilities. Now that I’ve read one of them, I thought I’d write up my thoughts.

The book centres on a young woman named Emily Robinson. She’s just moved to a new city, away from her abusive fiance, and just started a new job that she needs to keep or she won’t be able to stay in the new city away from her troubled past. The only problem is that her new job is as an administrative assistant (though he abhors the term and prefers the anachronistic ‘secretary’) to a demanding man named Edward Caudry, who has yet to find a secretary up to snuff.

That’s the basic premise. And while it’s a diaphanous one it’s enough to establish the early structure of the story. In a format both delightfully and disappointingly like the silver screen Secretary, whenever Emily makes a typo in the documents she writes up, Mr Caudry (as he is known exclusively for the first half of the novel) brings her into his office, has her bend down onto his desk, face pressed to the red-ink circled typos, and gives her an increasing number of spanks to her ass.

Obviously, it doesn’t start as that; it begins as an alternative to being summarily fired, which she accepts somewhat credulously due to her financial dire straits. Her arousal over the entire scenario forces her to masturbate in the bathroom of her office, until he begins to exert more and more control over her; he begins demanding that she not wear pantyhose, that she wear ‘approved’ panties (which he examines every morning), that she not orgasm when not in his presence (a simple demand given how readily she seems to orgasm from his spanks).

So there’s three aspects to this: is the story credulous? Is the writing arousing? And is the writing any good? Well, the story is, for the most part, believable. Though, the progression from a hostile work environment (the first day) to walking around the office without any panties, giving the boss a regular morning blowjob, taking of her skirt while seated at her desk, and some light-to-medium bondage (all by the end of the second week) is the most hastened aspect of the story. Each new day at the office was a new level to the dominance and submission, which to a degree works, but it is the most unbelievable and at times troubling part of the progression. Spreading it out over the course of even a month would’ve made it seem more realistic.

And, yeah, the writing is arousing. Well, for me anyways. The descriptions are very good, and the author tends not to use the annoying euphemisms — trouser-snake is one that comes to mind — that make most erotic writing tiring². Of course, generally speaking it’s not hard to arouse the male mind, even with simple prose. Mention a vagina, perhaps a clitoris, include reference to an orgasm rising within the woman’s loins and that’s really all it takes: rinse and repeat.

And the writing isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either. One thing that I pondered over as I read the book was if the spelling and grammatical mistakes in the book were intentional or not. I could imagine an inventive couple taking the book and using it in their own BDSM role-playing, highlighting the mistakes, and doling out spanks. Then, again the novel might just have had a shitty editer.

The book is mostly dialogue and descriptions of sex, with the rest internal monologue, almost all of which is dispensable. Does that mean I could write an erotic novel? Well, it’s not impossible. The skills required are little, and if this book is any indication of the genre, it’s in dire need of good characterization.

The novel is split in two halves with the first being written from the perspective of Emily and the second from that of Edward. The first half is fairly well written, with Emily at constant conflict with her confusing desire to be punished, to be controlled, to be dominated. It’s not high art, but the internal dialogue allows the reader to see the character slowly shifting from her rather innocent beginnings to her “true personality” as a submissive. It gives the story a little bit of class and respectability.

And most importantly, even though the story is ostensibly that of a boss taking advantage of his position to garner sexual favours from his assistant, the internal monologue keeps the story from feeling degrading or sexist. Which brings me to the second part of the novel, titled Edward.

The second half is much much worse than the first. The first flaw is taking on the persona of the male dominant Edward. For the first half of the novel he is portrayed as a masterful Dom, able to spot that she’s orgasmed in the bathroom, capable of bringing her to mindblowing orgasms with the slightest twitch of his fingers, perfectly gauged in the way he slowly brings her submissive side out. He was exactly the type of character from whose perspective you should never narrate, so already switching voice was a mistake for that reason.

The novel quickly takes us behind his veneer of self-assuredness into his neuroses about how far he should push her, caused by his last relationship in which he didn’t push his Sub far enough fast enough, and all sorts of things that bring him down to earth so to speak. I understand why the novel tried to do this; by humanizing him, it makes the final ending, with Emily and Edward in a stable relationship, a little more appealing. But the final ending could have been just as satisfying if he remained a cipher on the surface. Even the implication of Emily’s understanding of his inner machinations would have made it clear they were on level footing. This more explicit path is harder to swallow.

But that’s not the worst flaw. Much of the second half of the novel is like Hard Sci-Fi for fetishists, discussing the nuances of the relationship between a Dom and a Sub, the levels of power the must be exerted from both partners, how trust can be re-established when a Sub begins to fear their Dom. There are numerous scenes that reiterate these points in a very lecturey way, as if the author wanted to inform the perverts reading the book about BDSM³.

But after all that opinion, there’s a strange, for more than one reason, shift in the story near the end of the novel. The following paragraph appears not long after Edward has managed to coax Emily back into his life:

She was his girlfriend at that moment and Edward had a sudden revelation. The submissiveness was more like a game, he realized. Adriana [Ed: the ex who wanted more domination than Edward could offer] had never been the woman for him because she was a true submissive, one who required a strong, firm master to guide her. Edward was more like an actor who took on a role now and then. That didn’t mean he wasn’t a true Dom when the time came. It simply meant they didn’t have to live the life 24/7.

So once all the rules and boundaries of BDSM have been delicately laid out for the reader, Edward seems to abandon them as a lifestyle, instead twisting them into a game. That in itself is not surprising; aside from the most extreme scenarios, all BDSM is relegated to a subset of your life. But this shift is not made manifest in Edward’s demeanour in the remaining pages of the book. He has the realization that their Dom-Sub is closer to role-playing than it is to the full-on Dom-Sub lifestyle. Yet, he still has her work nude with her arms bound, he still has her spend her nights naked and giving him sexual acts when demanded of her, enforcing her diet and her wardrobe at all times. If it were truly just a game to him, they’d have a normal life, perhaps with innuendo and flirtation throughout the day, leading to some BDSM role-playing at night. But that’s not the situation the novel ends on.

And finally, there’s the closing paragraph:

“Now, I feel like two halves of the same coin. You challenge me, you love me, you take care of me.” Her eyes twinkling, she added, “What more could a girl want?”

Again, this isn’t visibly sexist. But, “a girl” might want many more things. Many girls might want independence, financial stability, someone to converse with, someone who “challenges” them in a form other than in their pain threshold. In fact the novel starts off with Emily leaving her abusive husband to fend for herself and it ends with her being completely controlled by another domineering man. But this time, we’re told, it’s a good thing. Maybe that’s what she wants. But it’s certainly not what “a girl” wants, it’s what “that girl” wants. A minor quibble, but as an ending to the story it sticks in my craw more than the less general alternative.

All this points to one inevitable conclusion: I need to write an erotic novel while ensuring the characters aren’t diminished or degraded for the sake of the sex and that the story concludes pleasantly and logically. Either that, or I need to write something of value, like one of the dozens of half-completed short-stories I have sitting around⁴. Either/or, really.

So where does that leave us? Well, I’m still a week and a half behind on the Infinite Summer schedule, and now I’m sexually and artistically frustrated. This was a great idea.

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Footnotes

1. For the record, this post, which is a far too serious about itself critique of an erotic novel, is written tongue firmly placed in cheek — though I won’t say which one. [↩]
2. Or at least subject to ridicule on television sitcoms [↩]
3. Or it’s the author’s attempt to legitimize some of the, in my opinion, sexist conclusions to the story [↩]
4. As an aside, I did write a story on Ficly not long ago, though the word limit (1024 characters) left me with a very ambiguous tale, one that even I have trouble grasping wholly [↩]

Dollhouse is a hard show to pin down. Through its run — I’m not implying anything by that phrasing, I still hold out hope that it will get a second season — it’s experimented with the implications of the technology at use on the show. It is, in many ways, one of the true science fiction shows remaining. This episode not only tinkered with virtually every form of mind-frakking, but it blew away all my issues with the way last week ended by taking the cliche and playing with it.

After Alpha and Echo headed off into the sunset, it all seemed very blasé as an explanation for the byzantine plans Alpha has concocted to test Echo. This was initially justified by the many personalities of Alpha; rather than Alpha’s goal being the imprinting of Echo with a Bonnie to his Clyde, it was simply the goal of one of his many minds. But that didn’t hold out for long. Alpha’s personalities start to break down and intermingle and the megalomaniac personality that embodies the Alpha mythos starts to once again take hold.

But even then, as revealed through flashback, Alpha is doing all of this because he “saw something” in Echo. Basically he had a crush on her and the psychopathic killer that grew up in his body had many bizarre ways of expressing that. As I was watching those scenes, I was reminded of the obsession that Ballard has with Caroline, and how little of it is based on anything he actually knows about her.

So, for the first half of this finale I was feeling a little let down by it all. First Ballard, and now Alpha; all the men in Echo’s life keep getting killed by candarian demons keep ending up being these cliches of male messiah-complexism. But then the second half won me over; once Alpha had imprinted Echo with all of her past personalities at once, thus creating an Omega to his Alpha, she didn’t follow his path to megalomania.

And all of that was basically getting around to the idea that an Active is more than an object. They’re more than a container. Alpha is not Alpha because he was overloaded by 48 personalities. And Echo did not become Omega because of what Alpha did to her. There’s a fundamental base to each person. You can call it a soul if you like, but it’s there no matter what Topher does. So Alpha was always broken, the composite event merely allowed him to express that brokenness. But as Echo has said before, she’s not broken.

The show is mixing its messages here though, because as the audience is seeing that Alpha went evil because Carl William Kraft was always evil, and Echo stayed sane because Caroline was, new Echo is saying just the opposite. “There’s no me, I’m just a container,” which I think belies the message the show’s trying to put across. And before she can further articulate her thoughts on the subject Alpha gets aggressive again, so it’s hard to see if she’d eventually realise that she is more than a container. Regardless, even if Caroline was hollowed out, little bits remained. So Boo-urns for sending mixed messages, but I suppose it would’ve been a less exciting hour if Echo spent the next five minutes examining the meaning of selfness and the permanence of the soul.

I also enjoyed the Boyd/Ballard hook up, and now that Ballard is working with the Dollhouse, I really hope the second season is greenlit so we can see more of them hanging together and hating on the evils of the Dollhouse while working for it. And speaking of Ballard, what he did in this episode also redeemed a lot of my annoyances regarding him. First off, he awesomely got the FBI to cancel their terrorist alert by telling Tanaka exactly what was going on in that building, and knowing it was just nuts enough to get Tanaka to call off the alert. And then, as the episode ended and he accepted his new position at the Dollhouse — which, by the way, it would be really awesome if he became Echo’s handler next year — under the condition that a certain special Active was given back her old self and her five-year debt paid in full: November.

Yes, Ballard finally realised that the Doll he needed to rescue wasn’t the one once called Caroline, but the one once called Madeline; the one he knew and genuinely cared for. I was really proud of Ballard in that moment. Even if it turns out in the second season (come on FOX, do it for me) that he chose November rather than Echo because he wanted Echo at the Dollhouse with him, he still made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons.

This episode also let Ballard be an awesome investigator since he was the one that figured out that who Alpha was before he was Alpha was the missing part of the equation.

One of the most interesting things in this episode was the reveal of Dr Saunders’ past. I’ve always imagined it was a possibility that she was a Doll, and it was broadly hinted at when it was mentioned earlier that she never leaves the Dollhouse, so the reveal wasn’t mind-blowing but it certainly put a twist on all her past interactions. As Whiskey, she was the number one Doll, and it was that popularity that led to Alpha slicing her face, in the hopes of making Echo number one, and in turn led to Alpha going in for a diagnostic and the accidental composite event.

Dr Saunders’ acceptance of her past is intriguing though. Since her first appearance, I’ve found her to be one of the most interesting characters and the way she’s dealt with what should be a soul-shattering experience only adds to that. Seriously, Amy Acker can do no wrong. She needs to have her own show.

The finale was great in ways I didn’t expect. I was disappointed by Alpha, though the problem was that the rest of the season built him up too well; it’s very hard to build up a character to those epic proportions and then successfully reveal them to the audience without disappointing in some way. Luckily, a lot of other directions the show took delighted me. Saunders’ revelation, Ballard’s new employer, and Echo’s awakening (and its persistence based on the closing shot of the season) all elevated Dollhouse to a new level and set up a drastically different, yet reminiscent, world for the second season. Which probably won’t happen.

But liking television comes with that risk. A movie has a set goal to tell the story it wants to tell. They can from time to time establish things that can be explored further in sequels but, for the most part, movies are self-enclosed, much like the Dollhouse. Television has to plan for more. Television has to tell an interesting and self-enclosed story while constantly writing a superstory above it all. If the larger story is flawed or uninteresting, you’ll get very little connection with the audience, but if the individual stories aren’t strong enough the audience won’t come back and get caught up in your universe. It’s a delicate tightrope that television writers have to constantly walk, and it’s something that I thought Dollhouse did very well. And even if the show doesn’t come back, we’ll still have that.