On violence in the media.

Apparently I've been inadvertently assigned to the George R.R. Martin beat. Earlier this year, I blogged about his appearance at the inaugural Santa Fe Literary Festival. This weekend, I attended Bubonicon, a science fiction and fantasy convention in Albuquerque, where Martin was given an 80-minute slot for connecting with his fans. A lot of authors will use such time slots to do a reading of their work, particularly if they have a new book out or one is coming out shortly. Eighty minutes is super generous -- usually an author gets maybe a half-hour or an hour. Only one other author got that much one-on-one time this year: Stephen R. Donaldson, who is my all-time favorite fantasy author. Donaldson did a reading from The Killing God, the final book in The Great God's War trilogy that will be out this fall, and answered questions. Of course, I very much enjoyed it.

Martin did neither of those things. He hasn't had a new book out in several years, although he assured us that he's continuing to work on The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth novel in the series on which the TV show Game of Thrones is based. And he didn't take questions (probably because a lot of the questions would have been about The Winds of Winter). Instead, he spent a few minutes bringing us up-to-date on his various TV and film projects, including House of the Dragon, a GoT prequel that has just begun airing on HBO, and he mentioned that he'd caught COVID and had to skip the premiere as well as some other promotional events because he was quarantining. Then he spent the rest of the time talking about violence.

Andrew Martin | Pixabay

He started off talking about how violence was portrayed on TV in the '50s and '60s, when he was a kid. In kiddie Westerns, the gunfight always ended with the hero shooting the gun out of the bad guy's hand, a trick shot that in real life would be unlikely at best. In prime-time Westerns, the hero shoots the bad guy once and, bloodlessly, he falls down dead -- which never happens in real life.

From there, he went on to his early career in TV writing, which included the show Beauty and the Beast. I admit that I was a fan of the show, and had in fact blocked out any memory of the final season, when Laura Hamilton quit (Martin didn't say why she left; Wikipedia says she was pregnant). Martin told us the censors gave them a hard time -- Vincent (played by Ron Perlman) was a noble lion-man who went berserk when angry, but the censors wouldn't let him tear anyone apart. So he was only allowed to throw bad guys across the room. (I'm tempted to find out if the show is streaming somewhere to rewatch it and see if that looks as goofy as it sounds.)

Anyway, it's quite a jump from Vincent growling and tossing bad guys around to the red wedding in GoT. Decades passed between them. And besides, you can get a lot more of everything on cable -- more sex, more drugs, more cursing, and more violence.

Martin acknowleged that he's gotten a lot of flak for the violence in GoT. And he knows there have been studies about how many violent scenes kids view these days. But he reasons it this way: If you want to watch what he calls comfort TV, which contains nothing that disturbs you, that's a valid choice. And it's a valid choice for content producers who only want to make comfort TV. But he says if you're going to choose to include violence, it needs to be realistic -- not the bloodless Old West shootings of the '50s and '60s.

I have Opinions.

I haven't watched GoT -- or rather, I watched the first episode and never went back. The degrading sex scenes grossed me out, but the thing that really did it for me was when Jamie Lannister nonchalantly pushed little Bran off a wall a couple of stories off the ground. I'd read all the Song of Ice and Fire books and I knew it was coming, but seeing it was too visceral for me. And because I'd read the books, I knew it would only get worse. So I bailed.

I'm not trying to be a paragon of virtue or a snob, mind you -- I'm only speaking for myself and my own taste. There are so many movies and TV shows that are supposed to be great that I haven't watched. Taxi Driver. The Sopranos. Breaking Bad. Graphic sex and violence just don't interest me. And I don't think either one is necessary to tell an intriguing, complex story.

This kind of reminds me of the time years ago when we began to discover that entertainment stars had feet of clay. Back in the heyday of the movies, the big studios had publicity departments that were in charge of the stars' images. They'd encourage the idea that a starlet and a leading man were dating, for instance, or quash any rumors about an actor's drinking or sexuality. When the publicity machines went by the wayside in the '60s, we began to learn that our favorite actors and musicians got drunk, got high, and did all sorts of scandalous stuff. The entertainers always say they're entitled to live their lives however they want. They aren't up there to be a role model for anybody. They certainly aren't responsible for teenagers who try to walk on the wild side -- that's the parents' job.

To be clear, Martin didn't explicitly say he had a right to produce anything he wants, the opinion of society be damned. But he didn't really address it, either; he mentioned the abundance of violent programming available for people to watch today and just kind of shook his head. Never mind that numerous studies have shown that viewing violent media content can increase aggressiveness in both children and adults and desensitize viewers to violence.

I'm not saying Martin should dial it back; he's free to make whatever programming he likes. But in a society where gun violence was the leading cause of death for children in 2018, maybe a little less realism on TV wouldn't be a bad thing.

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These moments of visceral blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Atwood and GRRM in my hometown.

The rebozo is finished -- well, the weaving is finished, but I need to fix a thing and then wash it. So I'll post pictures next week. 

I have a lot of to talk about this week anyway, and it's even writing related. Not mine, but that of a couple of my favorite authors. 

This weekend was the inaugural outing for the Santa Fe Literary Festival.

Lynne Cantwell 2022

It's kind of mind boggling that we haven't had a literary festival here before; we have world-class art, world-class opera, world-class food, and lots of resident authors, but no big events centered around books -- until now. So of course I couldn't miss it -- although I had to pick and choose amongst a ton of interesting author events because the ticket prices were insane, even with the discount for New Mexico residents. Here's hoping they're a little more reasonable next year.

Anyway, I settled on one Saturday session and one Sunday session. Yesterday's was Margaret Atwood. Picking her session was a no-brainer, as she's one of my favorite novelists ever. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

(She was not actually blue, you understand. My phone camera did a weird color shift when I tried to take a photo of the jumbo screen above.)

I have to wonder whether the festival organizers knew, when they scheduled Atwood's session, just how topical it would be. She's famously the author of The Handmaid's Tale, of course. When the draft Supreme Court decision on Dobbs was leaked, she had quite a bit to say about it in a piece in The Atlantic, and she reiterated many of the points in the article yesterday. But she also talked about the writing craft a bit. She's a big procrastinator, she says, but once she starts writing, she's all in. She likened it to going swimming in the cold lake waters in Toronto, where she's from. First you dip a toe in the water a few times, but eventually you realize you're just going to have to jump in and get it over with. She said at that point you say, "It's not so bad" -- but of course you're often telling that to your friends to lure them in. As both a writer and someone who grew up swimming in Lake Michigan, I can confirm both the experience and the lure.

She's also written a trilogy of dystopian novels. She says she is sometimes asked why she doesn't write any utopian novels to kind of balance it out, and she said -- and it's true -- that if everything's going along perfectly, where's the story?

"Where's the story?" makes a nice segue to the session I attended today: George R.R. Martin, famously the author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of fantasy novels upon which the Game of Thrones TV series is based, and which fans have been after him to finish since long before the TV show began airing. He wryly commented today that it appears he'll be writing the books until he dies. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

(Again, the folks on the screen are a lot less blue in real life.)

Martin is a busy guy (to ASoIaF fans' endless chagrin: "Put that other stuff aside and finish the books!"), and he talked about some of his projects today. One of them is a TV series called House of the Dragon, a prequel to Game of Thrones based on his novel Fire and Blood. It's set to premiere on HBO on August 21st. He's also been involved with Robert Redford (yes, that Robert Redford) in creating a series based on Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn and Chee novels. The show is called Dark Winds and it's set to premiere June 12th on AMC. I'm pretty excited about this one -- it was shot on the Navajo Nation, which sprawls across New Mexico and Arizona, and Martin says they made sure to involve Native Americans as both actors and behind the scenes.

Martin didn't have a lot of writing advice -- he talked more about Hollywood, which makes sense as that's where his focus is these days -- but he did mention that every writer hates the question, "Where do you get your ideas from?" (Can confirm that, by the way.) He says the late sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison had a great response. He'd tell people that his ideas came from Schnectady. But then he stopped saying it because too many people believed him.

One Hollywood tidbit: Martin claimed that the high-concept pitch for Game of Thrones was "The Sopranos meet Middle Earth."

Atwood flew in from Toronto, but Martin -- and his interviewer, Douglas Preston, who is a prolific author on his own -- had a much shorter commute: both of them live here in Santa Fe. And they're both investors in a new excursion train operation called Sky Railway. Martin talked about how he used to have a toy train that went around the Christmas tree while growing up, and how having your own actual train is so much cooler.

It made sense, given the local connection, that attendees at the Martin session this morning got a little treat. It was yummy. (Yes, that's Frida Kahlo on my sock.) 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

And with that, we segue back to a poem about food by Atwood, which she read yesterday morning. I'm posting it here without permission and hoping her publisher doesn't come down on me for it (or, at least, comes down on this blogger first, since I stole the images from their post). Atwood's in her eighties, and she says it feels to her -- with war and shortages and so on -- like she's been through it all before.

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These moments of bloggy trains, coconuts, and TV shows have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

Do authors owe their readers anything?

George R.R. Martin has apparently had it up to here with some of his fans. As "Game of Thrones," the HBO version of A Song of Ice and Fire, closes in on the end of the story published so far, certain of Martin's fans are renewing their drumbeat for him to finish writing the books, already.

ASoIaF was originally supposed to be five books, if memory serves. The first three books came out in two-year intervals, starting in 1996. Then book 4, A Feast for Crows, got to be too long, so Martin split it in two. Even so, it was five years before A Feast for Crows was published, and another six years before book 5, A Dance with Dragons, saw the light of day on bookstore shelves.

That was in 2011, the same year "Game of Thrones" began airing on HBO. Now, Martin is working on book 6, The Winds of Winter. There will definitely be a seventh book (tentatively titled A Dream of Spring), and Martin has hinted that the series may stretch to eight books before he's done. If everybody keeps to the current schedule, and if the HBO series goes to seven or eight seasons as planned -- well, you can do the math, but my calculator says everybody could know the ending of the story via HBO somewhere between twelve and eighteen years before Martin writes "The End" on the final book. That eventuality has certainly occurred to the producers of the HBO series, who have already met with Martin to find out how he plans to end it.

ISoIaF fans have never been reticent about urging the author to get on with it. During the last hiatus, a number of them criticized him for taking vacations and working on other projects instead of finishing their beloved series. That's bad enough. But this latest round of complaining has taken an ugly turn, with some people mentioning the author's age and size while wondering whether he'll survive to finish his magnum opus.

In an interview with a Swiss newspaper this week, as reported by the Guardian, Martin gave those fans the kind of wave that doesn't use all of his fingers: "I find that question pretty offensive, frankly, when people start speculating about my death and my health, so fuck you to those people."

I feel for the guy. I do. But I also understand the fans' point of view. It doesn't help Martin's case that early on, he made promises about his upcoming publishing schedule and then didn't keep them. Sure, he's run into problems with the narrative -- the story is massive in scope, and I gather he didn't fully understand how massive it was 'til he got in the middle of it -- but fans who aren't writers have no idea how much effort it takes to keep all of those balls in the air. All they see is that the guy's not keeping his word to them, and they're not happy about it.

Is there such a thing as an author-reader contract? Does Martin owe his fans anything? In general, do authors owe anything to their fans?

The answer to that question in Martin's situation is complicated by whatever contract he has with his publisher; one can only assume his agent has been kept busy renegotiating the terms of the deal. That sort of contract isn't something indies have to worry about. But for those of us who write series, it's still a viable question: Do we owe our fans "The End"?

Some authors take on the task of writing a series solely to make money. I can see someone like that feeling zero responsibility to continue, if the first book doesn't sell like hotcakes -- never mind the handful of fans who are eager to read more.

But even authors with the best of intentions can fall victim to real life. Serious illness, natural disaster, even a computer virus can upset the best-laid authorial plans. Hopefully, fans would be understanding and willing to wait -- and would still be there to read the next book whenever it comes out (a significant concern in today's nanosecond-attention-span culture).

As for me? Of course, I'm in this to sell books; if I wasn't, I would just shove my manuscripts in a virtual drawer instead of publishing and promoting them. But that's not the only reason I write.

I like to think that I'm writing the books I wish I could read. In that sense, I have a contract with my own internal reader: to keep writing to find out how the story ends. I would never intentionally bail on that contract. So you guys, gods willing, will reap the benefit.

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These moments of contractual blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service by Lynne Cantwell.