I don’t believe in “writer’s block.” Sure, there are times a writer doesn’t want to write or isn’t happy with what they’re writing or is simply distracted by life from getting the writing done. But it’s been my experience that if you listen to that bit of your brain that tells you, for whatever reason, that right now isn’t the time to be trying to squeeze words out of it onto the page, you’ll be a much happier and, ultimately, more productive writer. If it ain’t coming to you, stop, get up, walk away, and don’t think about it. Take a walk, read a book, go see a movie, browse internet porn, watch some episodes of Father Knows Best (well…he did!)–do anything except try and force yourself to write. Odds are, when you come back to it a few hours later or the next day, you’ll be just fine and the words will, if not flow, at least come without all the angst and teeth gnashing.

Your mileage, as the kids say today, may vary.

In fact, in the case of my Crazy 8 Press novel The Same Old Story, my own mileage varied somewhat from the “few hours later or the next day” average. By several years.

It all started more than fifteen years ago, sparked by stories I had heard over the years of a, shall we say, bit of financial hanky-panky involving a certain editor at a particular comic book company. It was, not to give away too much of the story, an ingenious bit of bookkeeping legerdemain that allowed said certain editor to repeatedly bill his employer and get paid for the same stories, over and over again, without ever having to worry about having to produce those stories for publication. There’s a mystery novel in that, I thought; I just had to wait for it to reveal itself to me.

Unless you’re a comic book fan like me (and most of the rest of the Crazy 8 crew for that matter), you’ve probably never heard of Joe Maneely or Robert Kanigher. Maneely was an artist known mainly for his work at Marvel Comics from 1949 until the time of his death in 1958, when he accidentally fell between the cars of a moving commuter train on his way home to New Jersey from New York. Kanigher was a writer, predominantly for DC Comics, beginning in 1945 and going on to become one of the industry’s most prolific scripters until his death in 2002. Other than both laboring in the same industry, Maneely and Kanigher had little in common; Joe was, by all accounts, well-respected and liked. Bob was, as I knew from personal experience, pedantic, pompous, unpredictable, and often unpleasant. He was also one of the most interesting characters I ever met and I had spent hours in my younger days being talked at by him in the halls of DC Comics.

It occurred to me that Maneely’s death was a great jumping off point for that mystery novel set in the world of the comic book biz. It also occurred to me that, from all reports, no one would have wanted to kill this guy. I could, however, imagine many people having numerous reasons for wanting to throw Kanigher under the wheels of a train. So….I had the aforementioned financial hi-jinks, Maneely’s accidental death by railroad, and a great victim in a fictionalized version of Kanigher.

(And please let me stress here that neither Kanigher nor Maneely were in any way, shape, or form involved in the real-life editorial fraud. The Same Old Story is a total fabrication that uses bits and pieces of actual events and people to create a whole new story.)

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place when I figured out book’s structure, a way of telling a story within a story that allowed me to dive into the mind of my point of view character, pulp magazine/comic book writer Max Wiser and play with the idea of how writers build fiction from fact and, in the process of cooking up that creative stew, sometimes lose sight of which is which. At that point, maybe a dozen years ago, I started writing. I figured I had my story, its structure, my characters and their motives all worked out. How tough could it be?

The first 15,000 words or so weren’t tough at all. But after that, it was like I’d slammed face first into a translucent glass wall. I could kind’a, sort’a see where I wanted to go, but I was damned if I could find a way over, around, or through that barrier to actually get there. Disregarding my own advise at first, I sat there for a lot of hours looking at the blinking cursor and trying to imagine what word, let alone entire sentences or paragraphs, should come next. Finally, I shoved those 15,000 words into the metaphorical drawer and decided to just let it marinate in my mind for a while longer. It wasn’t that I was having trouble writing–during this time I wrote a couple hundred thousand words on other projects, comic books, short stories, articles, essays, non-fiction books, even a couple of other novels, both based on licensed properties (although neither were ever published, not because of any quality issues but due to financial reverses on the part of one publisher and congenital stupidity on the part of the other). I just couldn’t write this book. And I tried and tried again. And again. I’d periodically open the file and reread those 15,000 words, searching for the flaw, plot hole, or misstep that I thought just had to be there and was keeping me from moving on. But I couldn’t find the problem. Nor could I find the next words to move the story forward.

What I had started with such enthusiasm and high hopes had turned into this obnoxious little creature that gnawed at my creative bone, whittling it down to a thin, fragile strand with all the tensile strength of a piece of No. 2 spaghetti. It was like an insect that buzzes around your ear that you never quite see and can’t swat away. I started to believe that if I couldn’t write this book, my first really serious go at an original novel (as opposed to those licensed properties in which the emotional investment isn’t anywhere near as high), I’d probably never be able to write one. I even considered just deleting the frickin’ thing and forgetting about it. It wasn’t happening, so why spend any more time torturing myself with the sad reality that I just wasn’t up to the task?

I was feeling really sorry for myself. I kept it to myself, but deep down, The Same Old Story was a crushing disappointment that I couldn’t shake.

And then, in the summer of 2007, came unemployment. I had left my editorial position at DC Comics in early 2006 to become Executive Editor of the fake news tabloid Weekly World News, but a year and a half later, the paper folded (see “congenital stupidity, corporate”) and I was thrown, for the first time in seventeen years, back into the freelance life. I had freelance work to do, thank goodness, but I also found myself with a lot of free time on my hands. Enough, I decided, that I should devote a certain amount of it every day to working on something of my own. No deadline, no pressure. Shoot for a measly five hundred words a day on it. Just something I wanted to write, for myself, with no expectations for it beyond the doing of the thing.

At first I resisted going back to The Same Old Story. This sumbitch had already had years to mess with me and I’d be damned if I was going to give it another chance to hurt me.

But…

What harm could one more look do? My self-esteem couldn’t get much lower.

And…

When I came again to that glass wall that had been blocking me all those years, I found that all I had to do was give it the barest little shove and it toppled and shattered. I started typing and the first day’s five hundred words came as easily as anything I’d ever written. The same with the next day’s five hundred, and the next, and the next, until, within a week or two, I was pounding out a thousand or two thousand a day and, in less than two months, I had a finished manuscript.

What had changed? Damned if I knew, but what had been for years the creative bane of my existence was now a finished book…one that I was enormously proud of, not just because I had at last gotten it done but because it had turned out to be the book I had always believed it could be.

The saga of getting it published is a whole other story…as is that of Trout Fishing In Canarsie, another novel, which I started in a white hot burst of enthusiasm several months. Only to find myself racing towards another wall…only this time, I’m hoping I learned something from my experiences with The Same Old Story and won’t plunge into despair over what I now known isn’t really a barrier at all so much as it is a bump in the road. This one, I’m sure, will get written.

No matter how long it takes.

The theme for this month’s blog posts by Crazy 8 authors is a look at television science fiction. The problem is, other than Doctor Who and the occasional Outer Limits or Twilight Zone rerun, I don’t watch any science fiction shows on TV…and please don’t bother recommending any to me, thanks all the same. The genre pretty much lost me after the clusterfornications that were Lost and Heroes. Why was I investing my time and sympathies with shows that didn’t know quite what they were or where they were going and would inevitably disappoint? So I save myself the aggravation and growling at my TV by just not watching it to begin with. My recent dip into Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has confirmed the wisdom of that decision.

The problem I’ve always found is that the people producing science fiction TV shows aren’t usually very knowledgeable about science fiction. If they had ever read science fiction, it was probably back when they were kids. But seeing as they’re TV producers, it’s more likely their concept of science fiction was gleamed from the movies and television shows they watched growing up…produced by people who also weren’t very knowledgeable about science fiction. It’s like the way a friend described J.J. Abrams’ take on Star Trek, “It’s as though he heard a capsule outline of the original series as described by someone who watched it in 1967 and based his interpretation on that. Everything is more or less there, but it’s just not quite right.”

To TV and film producers, science fiction is just another medium, along with cop shows, forensic shows, medical and legal dramas, etc. Another example from Star Trek is the famous story of Gene Roddenberry’s use of the line “Wagon Train in space” in his pitch to the networks. For better than a decade, Westerns had been the most popular thing on the tube, so Roddenberry’s pitch line was an obvious descriptor for his show, and if’n you think about it, pardner, wouldn’t’a been so hard to transpose the Star Trek concept to a Western setting, the Enterprise swapped out for a railroad train with a company boldly going to lay tracks where no Europeans have gone before. Or as a period naval drama seeking out new civilizations during the age of exploration. It just shows the interchangeability of backdrops for a lot of ideas in the minds of TV producers.

Of course, what they–i.e. the producers and creators of TV “sci-fi”–consider science fiction is to us–i.e. longtime/lifelong readers of science fiction and even somewhat aware of the history of the genre–a joke. Even my print science fiction aficionado friends who watch televised science fiction and profess to enjoy much of it still spend more time tearing it apart for its lack of verisimilitude to “real” science fiction than praising it for its own merits. Fortunately for the producers, however, the True Fan is, other than as annoying creator of anti-buzz on the internet, irrelevant to the program’s bottom line. The True Fans’ numbers are too small to make a difference to the ratings (or box office) and, besides (Spoiler Alert!) they usually watch the shows anyway, if only to be able pick them apart so they’ll have something to complain about on Twitter…as if the Neilsen Ratings can distinguish between viewers who are tuned in because they like the show or out of sheer spite.

But what I want to see on the screen as a lifelong reader is what I’ve been reading all my life. A miniseries based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy? Bring it on! Except…do you know how dull that would be? Asimov’s books were largely talk and thought and, while there may be an exciting way to film it, it’s beyond my meager imagination to figure out how. I’d watch it if someone else solved the puzzle. But how many mainstream viewers would last through the first hour? TV and cinematic science fiction is designed to be a kind of shorthand version of the real thing, built with a general audience to whom “sci-fi” means ray guns, spaceships, and aliens in rubber masks in mind. Old timey non-SF conversant TV viewers remember contemporary programs like Star Trek and Lost In Space with about equal weight. Both were labeled science fiction. But then again, so were The Jetsons and It’s About Time.

So I’m not the right person to ask for my views on the latest “sci-fi” on the tube. I don’t think it’s gotten everything wrong–I call the iPhone my “Star Trek communicator,” their “replicator” has become fact with current-day 3-D printers, and, let’s face it, The Jetsons called a lot of things right about the civil and social applications of science, albeit draped in cartoonish trophs, like turning the fully-automated home into the character of Rosie the Robot-Maid–but enough so that I have, as I said, decided to opt out. Except, as I say, for Doctor Who. But that’s just the exception to my rule.

Experience has taught me that I shouldn’t expect a whole lot from adaptations across media. In fact, I’ve managed to reach a sort of Zen acceptance of adaptations. I have delved the secret which makes the good cross-genre adaptations a pleasure and the bad ones irrelevant.

Also, let’s not forget that I came of age at the dawn of the cross-platformization of brands. Mine was the mid-1960s generation at the peak of Saturday morning animated spokesbeings, when Bugs Bunny not only starred in his own animated series but was also used to pitch the cereal sponsoring the show and was featured on the cereal packaging as well. My awareness of science fiction comes from old TV shows, most notably The Adventures of Superman, to which I was introduced first through the syndication of the 1940s Fleischer Studios cartoons and the comic book, and The Outer Limits and Twilight Zone. So early on I was more or less aware that a character could exist simultaneously in a variety of iterations. My immersion into comic books solidified that awareness as I saw that not only didn’t every writer treat characters consistently from one title to another, but once they got into the hands of people outside the comic industry, all bets were off. Any resemblance to the character as portrayed in the comic book source material is purely coincidental! The 1960s Batman, for example.

That being said, and with the recognition that it’s necessary to make changes to a property or story for the transition from prose to moving pictures, there have been a few successful attempts. A favorite book that became a favorite movie is Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five, filmed by George Roy Hill in 1972. Vonnegut’s story of a man unstuck in time was adopted by the anti-war movement as an absurdist analogy to the growing resistance by Americans to the war in Viet Nam, and Hill’s deliberately paced adaptation captures the peace of Billy Pilgrim’s befuddled acceptance of his existence. Its success comes not so much from how closely it adheres to the book–I don’t watch a film with a checklist to gauge its fidelity–but how close it adheres to the intent of the book. I mean, no filmmaker could possibly film every page of Moby Dick, but director John Huston and screenwriter Ray Bradbury sure did find a way to boil the essence of Melville’s 600+ page novel down into a faithful two-hour thriller.

A more recent example of a film faithfully capturing the intent of its source novel is John Carter. Yes. John Carter. The 21^st century successor to Heaven’s Gate as biggest Hollywood mega-budget bust. I haven’t read A Princess of Mars in forty years so I’m sure some purist can tell me why I’m wrong, but Andrew Stanton’s 2012 John Carter seemed to strike all the proper chords I remembered from the books (don’t asked me why this great film tanked; I can only blame it on marketing). A lot of the current movies based on Marvel Comics properties have also found the right chord, tapping into the sense of wonder and epic excitement that made the comic books themselves work.

My two favorite science fiction novels, Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clark and The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, have never made it to the big screen. Maybe if someone did attempt to do it, I would be as unforgiving as the old, original Star Trek fan is to the J.J. Abrams remakes, but I hope I fall back on the secret that allows me to shrug off objectionable adaptations

No matter how good, no matter how bad, the original source novel or TV show or movie is still right there, on your self, waiting to be read or watched again.