The Writer's Block Diaries

I’m currently taking three weeks off work to hole up in my office and write full-time on the Lost season 4 book. For everyone emailing me asking why I’m not writing more on Heroes or Fringe or anything else on television, my simple explanation is: because I haven’t watched the new episodes yet. I have about 3 weeks of Fringe and 2 of Heroes on my PVR right now, along with a million other shows. When this book is done, I’ll be doing a TV-viewing marathon unlike any other.

So now, in the vein of Homer Simpson (who left Marge once to live in the treehouse outside, only to have a 3-week beard, ragged clothes, and a rope belt after about 12 hours), I shall detail my shockingly fast descent into madness.

It is now Day 8 of my captivity. I’m not sure if the walls around me just feel like they’re closing in, or if my publisher has some switch like in the garbage compactor in Star Wars where he can actually make them move. Hm. My money’s on the former. (I think?) I have finished four episodes, two intermission chapters, and a sidebar. I look outside my window and I swear I see palm trees. Was that Desmond walking by? Just a minute... I’ll be right back...

No. It wasn’t Desmond. It was just a harried postal worker, now more harried since I ran up to him declaring my undying love and telling him I was better than Penny any day.

Now I’m on “The Shape of Things to Come” and I’ve fallen behind. There’s so much to say about this episode I’m worried I’ll either say too much or too little. My schedule is written out down to the hour (stupid One-Week-Ago-Me) and now I’m stressed because I’m not right on it still. Dammit. As of Thursday, I was still totally on schedule. Now... not.

I was allowed out of my prison yesterday to partake in a bird these islanders call a “turkey” and one of the sentries referred to “Thanksgiving.” It’s apparently some sort of celebration of the conquest of the Others or something. The bird was quite yummy. But then I fell asleep. I believe they drugged it with some Dharma chemicals.

My eyes are bugging out of my head. I barely recognize my children. I answer only to the names Kate or Juliet, depending on my mood or what episode I’m working on.

I’m afraid I shall go mad. If I haven’t already.

Does Television Belong in Academia?

I remember in the weeks leading up to the Slayage conference, seeing several articles about the impending academic conference on Buffy. But one in particular stuck out -- not for the article itself, but for the comment that followed it. It was an AOL story talking about some of the papers and what the weekend would be about. And one reader posted below (in typical online grammatically incorrect fashion): "You have got to be kidding me. This is a bad joke and i fell for it, .............right? The state of academic affairs in in big trouble if this is for real."

Suddenly the joy I felt in reading about the conference was completely deflated, I was a little angry. Why would this guy, whose screenname is "lawnsouth," assume I'm not mature and sophisticated just because I'm interested in Buffy studies?

Stupid-ass buttmunch.

He's not alone, however. A follow-up comment agreed with him, joking that it was a bird course and maybe the justification is it was better than skipping class to go golfing. The organizer of this year's conference, Kevin Durand, a philosophy professor at Henderson State, was saying on his blog that he received a stern phone call from the PR peeps at the college asking if taxpayer dollars had been going to the conference, because some paper in Tennessee wanted to know. He explained not one cent went to it.

But why not? If it had been a conference on Chaucer, no one would have blinked an eye if taxpayer dollars had gone to it. Some taxpayers might have rolled their eyes at a conference on Ibsen, but they wouldn't argue about it. If their child was heading off to give a paper at a conference on Shakespeare, they would be crowing about it with pride. But a conference on South Park? They'd probably say he was going camping that weekend.

In his time, Shakespeare was regarded as popular culture. The masses of the great unwashed would tromp over to the Globe Theatre to watch the plays and then tromp back home. An afternoon watching King Lear was regarded as no different from now going to a matinee of Die Hard (though Die Hard probably has less gore). If someone had tried organizing an academic conference on Shakespeare in 1650, the scholar would have been laughed out of the academy. "How now, you uncouth man!" they would have cried. "Dost thou not know that literature is for women? Now step aside... I'm off to a medical conference where we shall discuss the best ways of drilling holes in skulls to alleviate headaches and the proper placement of leeches to cure the common cold."

Everyone hopes their child will grow up to be a doctor: no one wants their child to grow up to be a scholar of [ack!]... television. Television is the lowest form of art, is it not? To the point where I should be thinking twice about calling it art. Anyone can watch television. It's the sort of thing you can have blaring in the background while washing your dishes and only half pay attention to it, and that's enough. It's the boob tube. The idiot box. It's the thing that any decent mother would never turn on around her kids, for fear they'll all grow up to be drooling, ADD-ridden kids with hyperactive disorder on Ritalin. How many times have we heard some pompous snob say, "Oh, pooh pooh, I don't even OWN a television."

Wow, I think every time I hear that. You must be SO out of touch.

For everyone who thinks television is not a viable art form to be studied, or that it's not a form of art at all, or that it's something you should brag about not owning, I simply say: you are watching the wrong shows.

Television, unlike film these days, is only getting better. There have always been great television shows -- All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Roseanne, WKRP in Cincinnati -- but with the advent of HBO and networks taking bigger risks, television today has reached new levels of excellence. I remember reading a piece a few years ago by Toronto Star film (and now book) review editor Geoff Pevere, in which he boasted that as a film critic, he has chosen the superior visual art form, and doesn't own a television. He bragged about having only seen a couple of Seinfelds, no Friends, and had no interest in The Sopranos.

To which I respond, Really? So did you go and watch Blade and write a review about how the idea of a vampire slayer was unique and amazing and too bad they don't have anything like this on television? How do you review a mafia film without knowing if David Chase already covered the same territory on The Sopranos? Or how do you laugh at any pop culture joke in any comedy film, not knowing if The Simpsons had mined the same laughs three years earlier?

These sorts of comments drive me mad. Take a look at The Wire (please!) This incredible show lasted five seasons, and was a neat, tight, series that explored the various angles of the drug trade, how far-reaching it was, and how many different levels of society have their fingers in the pot. In 64 hours, they were able to tell a story that had fascinating characters that we truly cared about, stunning lines that even Shakespeare couldn't have written (sorry, Will), acting that outshone anything I've seen in a movie theatre lately, and told a truly remarkable story.

When's the last time you saw a movie that did all that? Or, for that matter, read a book that did that?

Don't get me wrong: the best vacation I ever had was about 6 years ago, when the office shut down for 2 weeks and I sat in a big comfy chair and read about 10 books. When I think of my dream day, it usually involves being flopped out on a couch and reading a book in total silence.

But what I'm saying is that television has come a long way. Television boasts writers like Joss Whedon, David Chase, Alan Ball, and Aaron Sorkin. It can do the big sweeping moments (Sorkin), it can pull us into a family and make us believe they are real (Ball), and it can raise writing on television to an art form that rivals anything in book form or in any screenplay (Whedon and Chase).

Take Lost. Lost is a show with so many layers it has fans rushing to their encyclopedias, bibles, wikipedia, and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic textbooks. We've had to bone up on our literature, philosophy, physics (ugh), religion... you know what they say about how you might use 10% of what you learned in school? Lost forces you to come up with the other 90. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse pay attention to audience reaction, and occasionally (*cough* Nikki and Paulo *cough*) they listen to the viewers and adjust the storytelling accordingly. How is that any different from the way Dickens would release chapters of his books in serialized installments, and alter the plots according to the audience reactions? Dickens' stories were once in magazines, and if at the time you had told the Victorian audience reading them that someday someone would be studying his work at a university, they would STILL be laughing at you.

Epic storytelling, deep characters, rich plots . . . television is the new domain for all of it. Sitting at the Buffy academic conference and listening to people pulling out the themes of the show, dissecting specific episodes, or comparing Buffy as a text to other texts, it seemed like a perfectly normal thing.

Now... if there were an academic conference on According to Jim, I would take pause. I'm not saying ALL television should be the subject of scholarly attentions, but I wouldn't say the same about books or film, either. Should there be university courses on Virginia Woolf? Obviously. (I took one, and I loved it.) Vertigo? Of course. Buffy the Vampire Slayer? ABSOLUTELY! How about courses on Sidney Sheldon, National Lampoon's Road Trip, and the CW's Girlfriends? Uh...

It's time television be treated just like any other art form. There are those shows that deserve to be placed beside Dickens and Eliot and the Brontes as something worth studying. Why is it considered okay to read Mill on the Floss as a Shakespearean tragedy, or look at the use of symbolism in the films of Hitchcock, but the moment one does a paper on looking at the predominance of the Orpheus myth in Buffy, they're met with snickers and disdain from the rest of the academic establishment. It wasn't so long ago that film scholars were the subject of that same disdain (or, as Matthew Pateman pointed out in his keynote at the Buffy conference, that English scholars were the butt of the Greek scholars' jokes).

I wasn't one of the scholars delivering an academic paper at the Whedonverse conference, but I know the feeling. I've been writing companion guides to television shows for a decade now, and I've often been made to feel like what I do is no different than writing TV Guide synopses for the local newspaper. The amount of research that goes into one of my books is enormous -- I'm constantly looking up all sorts of references, be they Greek myths or literary or philosophical or Wiccan, depending on the series. I don't write plot summaries. I watch the episode, find a theme running throughout it, and then write an analytical guide to that episode that explores that theme and how the writers had examined it through the characters. My books require more accuracy than some textbooks, because if I get a single fact wrong, I will have many people emailing me to nitpick and complain. And yet, whenever anyone asks me what sort of books I write, there's always that millisecond in my head where I think, "Should I lie? Tell them I write novels?" Because it would seem if I said I wrote a novel that had sold 12 copies, I'd be viewed with far more esteem than if I wrote television companion guides that have collectively sold over 100,000 copies. It's a very rare moment where I tell someone what I do and they say, "WHAT?! Oh my GOD, that's AMAZING!" Very, very rare indeed. Usually it's, "What do you mean, television books? What exactly do you have to write about television?" And then we're back to that mindset that writing about television is about as scholarly as writing a news story about the results of the euchre game that happened this past Sunday at the local church gathering. Despite being proud of what I've done, I still have a few family members who ask me when I'll get around to writing a "real" book (and by "real," they mean fiction, no doubt).

So, I wasn't delivering a paper, but I've been in the classrooms, I've known the academics (many friends of mine went on to become professors, and most of them use television in the classroom quite successfully), and I know what it's like to have someone look at you strangely because you take your television FAR too seriously.

But that's okay. Some day it will change. "lawnsouth" can continue to complain that the academic community is going down the crapper while he stuffs his face with Cheetos and watches his football game. (Oh, I'm sorry, did I totally misidentify who he is? Hmm... well, now I guess he knows what it feels like.)

But for the rest of us who are watching The Wire, Buffy, Mad Men, Damages, Lost, Pushing Daisies, Heroes, Six Feet Under, Angel, Battlestar Galactica, Carnivale, The Office, Arrested Development, Firefly, 30 Rock, Chuck, Dexter, Flight of the Conchords, and, yes, Gossip Girl -- and writing about them -- we know that lawnsouth is the mental midget. Not us.

Long live television academia!

Slayage Conference: My Keynote

Don’t You Forget About Buffy:
Why Joss Whedon’s Masterpiece Captivates Us Still

I don’t know about you, but I love John Hughes films. When TBS runs one of their Hughes marathons, I’m right there. When I watch The Breakfast Club I’m suddenly 15 again, wishing my school had a Saturday detention that was that freakin’ cool. And I can’t get enough of Sixteen Candles, with its geeks and touchy-feely grandmothers and parental neglect. I’ve seen Ferris Bueller so many times I’ve lost count, and while I thought I identified with Ferris, I’ve recently realized it’s his worried friend Cameron that I sympathize with the most. I’m not a huge fan of Pretty in Pink, but despite Andie’s godawful dress and the fact that Blane was a bore, I still love Ducky.

I know I’m not alone here. Everyone I’ve talked to seems to feel the same – we turn on a John Hughes film, and we’re transported back to high school... it’s like our twenties and thirties never happened, and we’re suddenly teenagers again, experiencing that rollercoaster of emotions, embarrassed about our parents and wanting to be in with the cool crowd. And why is that? Because John Hughes captured a time in our lives that all of us went through, for better or for worse. There are things we did in high school that we’d probably chalk up to being the most embarrassing moments of our lives. And there are moments that we cherish. For every memory we have where we swear we’d give a limb just to go back and relive it one more time, there are probably ten memories that remind us we’d never go back to high school if someone paid us.

Over the years, I’ve been asked the same question countless times: What is it about Buffy that makes people love this show so much? We all have our own answers to this question.

For some, it’s that remarkable dialogue or the story arcs that took monsters and made them metaphors for real life. For others, it’s that extraordinary ensemble cast, made up of mostly unknowns, with the exception of a diva from All My Children and that British guy from the coffee commercials. Most often fans point to the veracity of the show as the reason it was so good: it might have been about werewolves, vampires, and the occasional tiny Gachnar, but it was the most realistic show on television. (Try saying that to a non-Buffy fan.)

But for me, the reason Buffy has had such a major impact on my life, and is something that I will always keep coming back to, is that it was set in the teenage years, and began in high school. At no other time in our lives do our emotions run so high. When you’re a teenager, the tiniest provocation can cause your world to come to an end. We love with so much passion we feel our hearts will split in two, and we hate with that same fervour. So many things are happening for the first time – you meet the guy or girl that you completely obsess over. Sometimes it’s requited, but sometimes it isn’t, in which case you have your first experience with writing suicidal poetry. It’s a time when you meet the people who might be your friends for the rest of your life, and when you’re fighting with them, you hate them more than any person on Earth.

When it comes to the old adage, “Write what you know,” high school is a pretty safe topic for any of us. Joss Whedon is clearly no exception. A connoisseur of teen angst, Whedon has been on the front lines, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the perfect medium through which he could recreate the hell of high school and bring it back to life. Just like watching those John Hughes movies, viewing the first three seasons of Buffy will bring back memories for all of us. You’ll realize that you can take the person out of high school, but you can’t take the high school out of the person, when you think back to how you felt watching certain Buffy moments, such as:

• Dodgeball.
• Buffy and Angel’s first kiss, and what happened after.
• The consummation of Buffy and Angel’s relationship... and what happened after.
• Cordelia teasing Willow that she’s seen the softer side of Sears.
• The prom.
• Buffy explaining to Jonathan that every student – from the mathlete to the cheerleader – is filled with pain.
• The talentless show.
• Buffy’s father not taking her to the ice show on her 18th birthday.
• Willow crying in the girl’s bathroom stall after she finds out Xander, the best friend she’s had a crush on since infancy, would rather be with someone he hates than with her.

By beginning his series firmly ensconced in a high school setting, Joss Whedon managed to pull us in and keep us there, week after week, because he had portrayed high school in such a realistic way. Because those years are so deeply imbedded in each of us, we could relate to the show, and it suddenly became about us.

High school was a huge time in our lives, filled with change and firsts: High school is when we have authority figures surrounding us – whether it’s a teacher, a coach, your boss at your first part-time job, or your parents – but we’re also struggling to gain our independence for the first time. High school is where you first stayed out late, often first lied to your parents about where you were going to be, and tested the boundaries of the rules that you had always followed before.

When we were in high school, our personal lives changed. Parents got divorced, and some of us had to deal with meeting mom or dad’s new “friends.” You may have fallen in love for the first time when you were in high school, and probably suffered through your first breakup. Your hormones were raging, so everything seemed more amazing or depressing than it later would.

In high school, we were pressured with preparing ourselves for the rest of our lives. At 17 or 18, we were making decisions that would affect everything we would do from that point on. It’s like that first section in The Game of Life... if you land your tiny car on Teacher and someone else lands on Doctor, you’re pretty much screwed from the outset.

Whedon created all of these scenarios and more. Buffy’s parents are divorced, and she’s being uprooted at the beginning of the series and moving to a new school and town with her mother. Sunnydale High is full of cool kids versus the nerds. It’s hard watching Xander, Willow, and Joyce gang up on Buffy upon her season three return in “Dead Man’s Party,” either because we identify with Buffy and hate seeing her ganged up on, or we sympathize with the others, and feel their pain of betrayal.

Emotions are running high for these high schoolers: just think of the Willow and Oz romance. Willow is the wallflower who was never supposed to get the cool guy, and when HE actually notices HER, our hearts are a-flutter. Buffy, on the other hand, personifies first true love gone terribly, terribly wrong. She discovers the guy she loves is 240 years old, and after sleeping with her he turns into a soulless vampire. But WAY worse than that... he doesn’t call her the next day.

AH!

We see characters discover changes in their bodies – Willow finds out she’s a witch, Oz is a werewolf. Buffy balances the pressures of schoolwork with a part-time job, or as she calls it, her “calling.” (I know a lot of people who also referred to their part-time jobs as their calling in high school, but after a few months folding shirts at The Gap, they felt differently.) Xander knows he won’t go to university, and the guy who’s always been part of the gang foresees a day when he will be an outcast, that dude with the technical career and not the intellectual one. Faith embodies the high school rebel, that person who puts up a harsh exterior because inside they’re in so much pain they don’t want anyone to find out. Through it all, the gang loves and tolerates Giles, that adult who is a part of the group that they tease one minute, revere the next.

But the most realistic part of all? The high school was on a hellmouth. Did ANY of us go to a high school that was not?

This theory would suggest that Buffy is only good because of the first three years. But that’s not what I’m saying. It was the first three years that managed to pull us in. By the time season 4 began, we were fully in the grip of Joss Whedon’s world, and the pain and horrors that were to follow were as realistic as the high school setting he’d already established. Just as many of us will carry around the emotional scars and happy memories of high school forever, we also remember those complicated years that followed.

After high school, there’s college or the work force. These years opened us up to new worlds. In college the geeks were in the majority, and a person was actually rewarded for working hard – imagine that! But college is often where we were uprooted for the first time, being forced to live on our own away from our parents. Our family became secondary to our friends and schoolwork, and for many of us, disorientation set in. If high school was where we had to think about adulthood, post–high school is where we had to enter it.

The same was true of Buffy. Just as seasons one through three mirrored the emotional turbulence and pleasures and traumas of high school, seasons four through seven perfectly captured the rollercoaster that was to follow. Season four wobbled and didn’t quite work, as if the writers had decided on a shift, realized they’d made a mistake, and scrambled to fix it. Similarly, when we leave high school and enter our lives, we are perplexed, and the familiarity we once knew is gone. Post–high school, we’re all in a transitional phase, following the decisions we’d made in those crucial years and entering the paths we’d laid out for ourselves. For some, they realize they’ve made a big mistake – “Law school?? Why the hell did I ever want to become a LAWYER??” – and they backtrack, desperate to try new things until they can figure out what they really want to do, and get back on the right path. This description pretty much sums up season 4.

By season five, the show had rediscovered its path, and once again, it reminded us of all those things we once went through as young adults. High school first love gives way to complicated relationships. Buffy and Spike. Anya and Xander. Perfect examples of relationships that weren’t easy to explain. Early adulthood is where we might lose a parent, as Buffy does, or where sibling rivalry turns to closeness. In Xander’s case, it was where he was able to move out and leave the abusive home he’d been living in. College is where some people come out of the closet, as Willow does, sometimes to their own surprise. With our newfound independence, we no longer need our parents in the same way, hence Giles’s departure. Perhaps by losing a family member or a friend, our previous feelings of invincibility give way to a fear of mortality. Buffy dies; the rest of the gang loses a friend. Buffy’s return is not exactly like something we’ve ever experienced, but in a way it’s like a friend of ours leaving for a different college wearing Ralph Lauren and returning in the summer wearing a safety pin through their nose and a Sex Pistols shirt.

There are some Buffy fans who say the series would have been better off ending after season 5, but perhaps that reveals an innate resistance to growing up. Just as life after high school was full of confusion for us, we resist Buffy and the gang changing. Perhaps we wanted Willow to be the consummate wallflower, and not the evil veiny Willow of season 6. Maybe we’d rather see Xander remain the class clown, and not the sad contractor who tells Dawn in season 7 that sometimes he feels like the guy who just fixes the windows every time they’re broken. Giles was no longer a librarian, and instead became the owner of a magic shop, constantly at war with Anya. But these are reflections of real life, and while Joss gave us the doses of reality, he couched them in his incomparable storytelling that kept us glued to our sets. Veiny Willow gave way to goddess Willow. Contractor Xander rejoined the good fight, and lost an eye battling alongside the Slayers. Giles went away, but he returned suddenly at the end of season 6, in my number one favourite moment of the series.

I listed off a bunch of moments from the high school years that made us cringe or laugh or cry, always in sympathy because we remember those years. But the last three years of the series boasted even more powerful moments, because we’d seen the events and changes leading up to them. Moments such as:

• Buffy finding her dead mother on the couch.
• Tara and Willow floating above the dance floor, completely in love.
• Anya’s fruit punch speech.
• Giles singing to Buffy that he’s just standing in her way, and it’s time he step aside so she can become the independent woman she was meant to be.
• Xander conquering wicked Willow by telling her how much he loves her.
• Buffy telling Spike that she’d been in heaven, and refusing to tell her friends what they had done to her.
• Spike telling Buffy how much she’s meant to him after her friends have shunned her for putting them in danger.

Often, during these more difficult and complex story arcs, fans idealized the high school years of the show. But isn’t that like life? Brian K. Vaughan, one of the authors of the new Buffy season 8 comic book series, was asked how he would write the final scene of Buffy if he were given the chance, and he replied, “I always thought it would be kind of poignant to just have Buffy and [her friend] Xander be the last two people left, and have them reminisce about high school. The point being that, while you’re going through high school, it seems like hell, but once you’re old you begin looking at high school like it used to be paradise.”

He’s not the only one who feels that way. We might think we hated high school, but if that were so, we wouldn’t take such pleasure in old John Hughes films and the first three seasons of Buffy. Joss Whedon stuck his high school on a hellmouth to indicate just how awful it was, but seven years later, at the end of the final episode, after they seemed to have grown up and moved on and changed so much... Buffy and the gang end up back in high school. As they stand in the hallway, with the camera circling around them as they discuss what they’re going to do once they’ve conquered the baddies, they momentarily revert back to the gang we’d seen seven years earlier. Buffy wants a new pair of shoes, Willow is eager and excited about a new store in the mall, Xander jokes about mini-golf... and Giles mutters to himself that the kids won’t pay any attention to him, and the earth is definitely doomed. And in this scene, Joss lets us know that no matter what happens in their lives, Buffy and the gang will always be back at that high school, for that was where they became who they are.

Just like we did.

Live, From Arkansas... It's BtVS!

Hey y'all. Nikki Stafford here, reporting live from the Deep South, where I'm attending an academic conference on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm doing a keynote in a couple of hours, and I have some extra time in between panels.

We had a fun experience crossing the border yesterday (I'll talk more on that later) and then on the plane I sat next to a burly guy with massive shoulders who was half into my seat, just because he couldn't get all the way into his own. He was clearly a former football player (he had a big championship ring on his finger) and he kept apologizing for being in my way, and I told him not to worry about it. As I said to him, they size airplane seats for toddlers, and assume the rest of us will fit in them. He pulled out some chewing tobacco at one point and stuffed it into his mouth, and I'm thinking, "Don't you have to spit that out?" He had that covered -- he pulled out a Diet Coke bottle and began spitting into it. By the end, it looked like it was half-full of Diet Coke... I prayed he wouldn't leave it behind. He was actually a really nice guy, and was totally shocked to find out what I did for a living. He's a big fan of The Sopranos and The Wire, so we had LOTS to talk about.

We landed, and were met up in the airport with the guy coordinating the shuttle, who told us it has JUST left Arkadelphia an hour away, and we'd have to wait. We met up with some other attendees, Ryan (a.k.a. Mark), Ian, and Sonya, and it was an awesome discussion all the way from the airport to Arkadelphia, as we chatted about Buffy, Firefly, Angel (they hadn't watched Angel! AH!), Dollhouse, Nip/Tuck, 90210... I was in heaven. We were informed at the airport that Arkadelphia is in a dry county. I didn't think those existed outside Utah! So they suggested we go to a liquor store on the way into town to load up. Mark was 20 so unable to drink, I don't drink, and the others decided to pick up something quick. We walked into the liquor store (which advertised in bold letters outside, "NEXT 5 COUNTIES ARE DRY! STOCK UP NOW!") and it was like a booze warehouse. I'd never seen a liquor store so big. I asked one of the coordinators how a town with two colleges in it could possibly be dry, and he explained that the residents are conservative, and the students generally are from out of town so they don't vote on it. Wow. I had no idea this existed still, but apparently it's pretty common here. I feel like I'm in Footloose!

After we'd checked into our hotel, we met up again to hit a tex-mex restaurant called Ta Molly's (we LOVED the name of it; it's like tex-mex meets Irish) where they served sloppy cheese-covered enchiladas that hit the spot (they closed at 9... NINE!) and then we were back to the hotel.

This morning we got here for registration in the morning and then listened to keynote speaker Matthew Pateman, who is from University of Hull in England. His talk was fantastic, and he referred to my book, Bite Me, as a seminal work.

Seminal!

ME!

I could have gone home happy right that moment without seeing anything else.

His talk was on the whole snobbery within academia that surrounds talking about a television show and dissecting it, and in the discussion afterwards the audience was talking about how in the last century English scholars were scorned for not studying the Classics, then in the 60s, film scholars were spurned by the English scholars for not studying literature, and now film scholars are spurning TV scholars, and the future will bring a cultural shift. He discussed a scene in "The Harsh Light of Day" where Xander spots a television in Giles's apartment and yells to the others, "Giles has a TV! Hey, everyone, Giles has a TV! He's shallow like us!" It was brilliant.

The next session we checked out (there are 3 panels happening simultaneously during each session) was under the topic of Gender, Sex, and Violence in the Buffyverse. Check out the paper titles:

"It's just... painful": Love and the Wounded Vampire
"Nothing Left but Skin and Cartilage": The Body and Toxic Masculinity
"Here endeth the Lesson": Spike's Torturous Romances and Life Laid Bare
"Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am": The Evolution of Faith

The papers were all astoundingly good, ranging from talking about the vampiric body and how it represents the sacrifices Angel has made; to the toxic masculinity portrayed on the show, and how shows like The Zeppo, Go Fish, and Reptile Boy show testosterone at its worst; to using Julie Kristeva's theory on how the infant abjects the mother to move on, and how Spike's difficult relationship with his mother reversed that, where he became her sire and she abjected him (I loved this paper); to how Faith has evolved through Buffy, Angel, and now the comic book series. It was a great discussion afterwards on gender relationships in the show, where people made observations such as Buffy feminizing Spike by constantly threatening to penetrate him with a stake, or how the men on the show, when they are bad, split themselves into William/Spike, Angel/Angelus, Giles/Ripper, whereas the women remain themselves and must make a constant progression back to the side of good (Willow and Faith choose to be good, for example). I loved this conference already.

After lunch (where we went to a Sonic, a drive-in eatery just like the old 50s diners, and if you don't have a car, you push a button on a pole and order like you're in a drive-thru), we headed to David Lavery's talk. One of the authors of the essential "Fighting the Forces" book, David gave a talk on Joss Whedon's progression as a filmmaker, from bad to worse to Serenity. He compared him to Michael Bay (to often hilarious results) and it's amazing that Hollywood can be so short-sighted on things like this. But then again, Transformers is making $700 million, and Serenity $38 million. Bwah.

Soon I'll be heading back to check out a few more papers and deliver my keynote, and the one that intrigues me is one on Willow. I'll report back later!

New Lost Book!

So while some TV viewers are watching the season finale of Grey's Anatomy, I still want to talk about Lost.

A lot of people have emailed to ask me if I'll be writing a season 4 Lost guide. Yes, I will, but not for this fall, unfortunately. Next fall (as in 2009) I intend to bring out a combined season 4/5 volume, since maternity leave gives me very little opportunity to write anything beyond this blog.

However, I'm pleased to announce there WILL be an awesome Lost book out this fall. The book is called Lost Ate My Life: The Inside Story of a Fandom Like No Other, and as the editor of the book, I've had the pleasure of reading it already, and I can't recommend it enough. The book is written by two Lost "insiders" -- one is Jon Lachonis, otherwise known as DocArzt, who runs one of the best Lost blogs around (if not THE best). The other author is Amy J. Johnston, also known as "hijinx" on The Fuselage boards, and she runs Lost Editor Bryan Burk's official website, and is one of a small handful of people who has the trust of the show producers.

Darlton are very careful about the publicity of their show. Worried about impending spoilers, they have entrusted only a very, very few people to see advance screeners of each episode: Michael Ausiello of TV Guide, Doc Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly, and Kristen at E!... DocArzt and hijinx are two others who get advance copies of each show, even if they don't actually watch them ahead of time. So when I say these are insider fans, I mean it.

The book is the inside story of both Lost, and the fandom surrounding the series. We read how the world of The Fuselage grew to what it's become today; how the producers began sticking in certain Easter eggs for the fans after finding out what they were searching for; how Lost came up with ingenious marketing ideas never before seen. There's a chapter on the original script of the pilot episode that was never filmed, and how the actual Pilot episode came to pass. There are some laugh-out-loud moments throughout the book, including one as Bryan Burk talks about how difficult dressing the set has become when fans are scouring every book on the bookshelf and using them as clues.

I'm used to seeing raw drafts of manuscripts, and was pleasantly surprised at how solid the writing was from the outset. You'll enjoy the conversational tone of it, and how they invite you in to the inside world of Lost Labs, so you watch the whole thing unfold.

The foreword of the book will be written by former executive producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, and the book contains interviews with a lot of the key people on the show. I devoured the manuscript, and then sent it back to the two authors full of suggestions for additions, and I'll be getting round two from them in a couple of weeks. As they furiously rewrite the book, I'm sure I'm not their favourite person currently, but hopefully when the editing is back in my corner, the love will fill the room once again. :)

I can't wait for y'all to read this book: Lost Ate My Life is due out in stores in November. Click on the link at the left to pre-order. And maybe I'll be able to lure the authors on here for a Q&A with all of you... stay tuned!

Bite Me Mention!

TVSquad has listed my new Buffy book as one of the things to spend your holiday money on. Thanks to everyone who sent me the link! :) (And if you want to follow their advice, go here. Yes, I'm shameless.)

In other news, a lot of people have noted that when the Lost commercials air on ABC, and it goes to that last part with the title logo and the palm trees, if you look closely you can see a city skyline reflected in the water, not the trees, which is definitely a nod to the flashforward idea that was introduced at the end of last season. The new season poster has a very clear look at that skyline in the water, which you can see here (thanks to DarkUFO's site):

Ah Desmond. You are so far away in that picture, yet my heart goes a-flutter.

And you know, I just have to say this. One of the biggest personal losses of the writer's strike was that my baby couldn't be on Lost. You may remember me posting back in August that Lost was looking for male babies to play Aaron. They were looking for babies with round faces, between 8 and 15 pounds, presumably easygoing. Mine is now 13.5 pounds, has a perfect moon face, and is the most laid-back baby you could imagine. Damn you, studios, for not letting the writers get back to work so they could write MY child into the part. Could you imagine the stories I would have had for you then?! Sigh. They would have TOTALLY taken him.

Yeah, I'm kinda living in my own world today.

Saving the World: A Guide to Heroes

'Tis Monday, the day where we all hope that this week's Heroes will be better than previous weeks this season, and then discuss it tomorrow when I finally get my act together and post something quick on it. (Gone are the days of my long posts... sigh... okay, don't scroll down and discover that's a total lie.)

So in the meantime, I wanted to mention a new book that's out in stores now called Saving the World. This is a sometimes-academic, sometimes episode guidey companion to the show, and it's great. Full disclosure: I worked on it and helped edit it, but I work on half a dozen books a year and I only mention books occasionally on my blog. Here's the cover:

I also want to mention proudly that I'm in this book as part of the "Finale Face-Off." My blog entry on that disastrous finale appears, followed by a rebuttal by author David Lavery, and then I get the final word. So if you liked the finale and hated my post on it (or if you totally agree with me that it could have been WAY better) then check out this book. There are also chapters comparing Heroes to Lost, on how Hiro follows the journey of a question hero, on the kaleidoscope of themes, on the comic book ties of the show, and lots of tables, episode guides, encyclopedic entries, etc. It's definitely the perfect companion going into the show, and I felt much better tackling season 2 after having read it. :)

Bite Me Again!

I've been waiting for the cover to finish up before mentioning this, but my Buffy book, Bite Me!, which was released in 2002, has been updated with season 7 and the season 8 comic book series, and will be out in stores before Christmas. And it has a fancy new cover!! :)