Groundwork: "The Santa Society" part 1: Conceptualization

Welcome to the beginning of my planning series for the story which I am tentatively calling "The Santa Society." At this point all I have is a basic concept about a family who runs a very secret organization based on the Santa Claus myth. I've had a few ideas about how to pursue this story, about characters and plot ideas and such. When I come up with ideas I think that subconsciously I tend to put it into the form of a movie trailer.  But with this one, no matter what I come up with, somehow the trailer seems to play out like TV Movie made for the Hallmark channel during holiday season.

So it's time to come up with a real concept.

So first of all, the business here is a non-profit organization. What exactly does that mean anyway? According to Wikipedia, a nonprofit organization is business or an organization that uses its surplus income to achieve the its larger goals, instead of paying out dividends. The funds could also be used for expansion, or self preservation.

What kind of organization would this be then? Well, the whole idea of this organization is to follow the Santa Clause myth, and perpetuate it's goals and ideals, and to do the whole thing in secret to allow Santa to remain real in the minds and hearts of children. But it's also a huge multinational conglomeration that more or less runs the Santa Claus industry, from administering the rights to the likeness and trademark of Santa Claus, to organizing the department store Santas and running the Santa college. But also organizing and administering an enormous charity that works year round, but but is at its busiest during the time between Thanksgiving and New Years, though in more recent years that's been pushing back closer and closer to Halloween. This means a huge distribution center, and warehouse full of food, medical supplies, toys, games, clothes, school supplies, musical instruments, furniture, etc. This means a massive organization of transportation, logistics, warehouse picking, wrapping,  delivery, and so on and so forth, using lots of automation, requiring lots of oversight.

Meaning lots of people involved. And most of them in the same family. Okay then. So what we're looking at is an ensemble cast of characters, like for example an Aaron Sorkin show like Sports Night or The West Wing. Or that show Parenthood.

Okay, sorted. But of course that's not enough to make a story. Every good story needs conflict. So with a big organization like this they're bound to attract the attention of big greedy corporations hoping to find a way to exploit the organization, legal means or otherwise. So one particular business interest is trying to buy a part of the company, such as the rights to the Santa trademark. They're willing to pay a ton of money for it, but they're willing to use other means of forcing the issue. But of course that's just the backdrop for the melodrama of the family conflict. There'll be some kind of brother vs brother (or sister) thing, where in the end there's some kind of emergency situation that forces them to work together, and they end up resolving their issues. Their sister the geek will be trying to cope with the issues of a family that doesn't understand her, but ends up coming up with a geeky solution to a complicated problem.

Now you know that writing is really about taking ideas and putting them together in different ways. There really are no new or original ideas any more, just new ways of putting those ideas together. I used to agonized for days if I thought that I'd come up with a good idea, then discovered that someone else had come up with it first. Then I saw this series called Everything is a Remix, and realized that many of the people I admired as some of the most creative people in the world, who had created some of the works I loved the most, had actually just remixed those ideas from others. In fact there's an entire website dedicated to these things called "tropes" and how and where they appear in modern popular culture. And it's a writers paradise when you're stuck for an idea. So I have absolutely no qualms whatsoever about borrowing heavily from other works, or at least borrowing their tropes. For example I really like the Prodigal Hero trope, I may have to find a way to incorporate that. I think I could also use Politically Incorrect Villain as an antagonist who thinks that charity work is a chumps game, and has "views" about people who don't care about Capitalism. But keep in mind that while these tropes can help to flesh out a character, they shouldn't completely define that character.

But for now, I think I have a good foundation. The next thing to do is work on history. First the history of the family, and the organization because that will inevitably inform the viewpoint of the characters. Then I'll need a "Dramatis personæ" or at least a basic list of main characters and their roles in the story, relationships to one another etc.  Then I'll create their histories, flesh out their personalities, outline the plot, the basic stuff. Then: We dive into the story.

And of course you're welcome to come along for the ride! Feel free to post any comments, suggestions, thoughts, or ideas in the comments section below, and remember, if I don't use your idea exactly don't feel bad, it might just be a fantastic jumping off point for something else, or it might spark a completely different idea that I wouldn't have had otherwise. That happens all the time. OR it's just possible that you may have your own idea, and want to start writing something for yourself.

I'll be trying to work on this idea, and the Fantasy in the Modern World story, maybe alternating back and forth, between the two just in case some people like the one idea more than the other. I'll also put up some of my other fiction, a little at a time of course. Have to build up that anticipation!

Feel free to share, I'm always eager for more feedback and would love a wide range of viewpoints. But for now, thanks for reading!

***Spoilers!***

Okay, don't worry, this post doesn't actually contain spoilers, that I know of. I'm actually going to talk about spoilers not share them.

I don't know if you've heard, or how many follow such things, but GTA 5 is coming out in a couple of weeks. It's been an exciting time for me, and a lot of other gamers who are eagerly anticipating the continuing crime drama fantasy, our very own Oceans Eleven heist game, or any movie where the main protagonists are criminals. It's great fun, and scratches a primal itch of just sometimes wanting to vent your frustrations on someone and blow their head off with a shotgun, or snipe them from half a mile away. But of course it's just a game. If I had to do something like that in real life, I would be a total basket case for months afterward.

But anyway, back to the game. In the UK, people who pre-ordered the digital edition were allowed to pre-load the game on their PS3s. Well someone who did this went and dug into the files and found a whole bunch of audio from the game, and some video as well, then posted them online.

Reaction was mixed. Some people were devouring every second of the stuff they put up there, while others ran in the other direction. And this brings me to an interesting point.

Spoilers suck.

People who create this kind of content are working very hard - not just to tell a story - but to craft an experience for you. To take you on a journey. And if you already know what's going to happen on that journey it sort of steals the thunder. I mean think about the first time you saw The Sixth Sense. If you're like me, you didn't have that spoiled for you, and you were just as surprised at the ending as the rest of us were (which I'm not giving away here, just in case you haven't seen it.)The same applies to pretty much any of M Night Shyamalan's movies, you don't want to be spoiled on them. But if you WERE spoiled on them, it made you watch the movies in a whole different way, the way that most people experience them the second time they watch. You didn't get the sense of surprise and revelation right at that critical moment.

Really I envy anyone who has been totally insulated from The Empire Strikes Back for their entire life, and has never had the experience of the huge spoiler at the climax of that movie. Wow. If I could erase my memories of Star Wars all together, then start at episode 4, and never know what was coming? Take my money, put me in the machine, and while your at it take away the 4th grade while you're at it.

There's an enormous spoiler in one of my all time favorite movies that is essentially the sequel to a canceled TV show that had an enormous cult following that started mostly after the show had ended due to the fact that when the show was on it was totally mismanaged not advertised well, and on at the worst possible air time, in a time just barely at the advent of DVR, when all you had available was TiVo, and that hadn't spread very far yet. Anyway there was a podcast which gave this particular spoiler away in a very abrupt and I would almost have to call it violent sort of way. There was no warning, people didn't have time to fast forward or turn down the volume. It was a travesty. The guy still gets hate mail to this day.

My point is this. DON'T GIVE SPOILERS. I hear Stephen King still has those people who gave away the ending to The Mist dragged before him and violently executed. With EXTREME prejudice. Seriously.

Cliffhangers

From Wikipedia:

"A cliffhanger or cliffhanger ending is a plot device in fiction which features a main character in a precarious or difficult dilemma, or confronted with a shocking revelation at the end of an episode of serialized fiction. A cliffhanger is hoped to ensure the audience will return to see how the characters resolve the dilemma."

I love cliffhangers. They're really one of the most fantastic things ever invented, especially for any sort of serialized fiction, TV, movies, books, you name it. There's nothing quite as exiting, or excruciating as the anticipation of having to wait months or even years (though years can be a little cruel, GRRM, I'm looking at you here!) to see the resolution of a climax to a story into which you've invested so much of your time and effort. When Han Solo gets taken onboard Slave I and just a few minutes later Luke, Leia, and the droids watch as Lando and Chewie set off on the metaphorical road to set him free, that's classic cliffhangerism. Which is totally a word. Now. That I've invented it. (and will show up in popular media very soon, mark my words.) And I can't tell you how many season endings have ended on cliffhangers in recent years. Tons. What sucks is when they end on a cliffhanger, but don't end up getting renewed. Like Alphas on SyFy. TOTAL buzzkill.

But there's been a growing trend recently which has turned me a little against cliffhangers. Cliffhanger commercial breaks in reality TV. And you KNOW they know they're doing it. I mean you're watching Chopped or Hell's Kitchen, and the music is building to it's carefully formulated crescendo, designed to build anticipation and drag to to the edge of your seat, and the a host says "The person going home is...." and the logo flashes up on the screen and you go to commercial. I mean I can't fault them for using a time honored technique to keep people glued to their seats so they don't miss anything, but it seems fairly pointless when you've got DVR.

See this is why I watch videos on the internet. They're only 5 minutes long or maybe up to about a half hour and they almost never end in a cliffhanger.

...Well okay, not exactly true. But with those, for the most part you don't have to wait too long for the next video, and even if you do have to wait, there are ENDLESS cat vs laser pointer videos to be distracted by.

But really it's just the "Reality Game Show" genre that I disapprove of using this particular tool. Tell us who lost this round, go to commercial, then come back and do the next round. The cliffhanger doesn't fill me with anticipation, just annoyance. It's almost as bad as spoilers.

Oh, don't get me started on spoilers...

Next Blog: "SPOILERS!' Stay tuned! Don't touch that dial! You DON'T want to miss this one!

The Mobile Revolution.

Kewl. I now have the Blogger app for my Android phone. Woo! Now I can post stuff from the toilet!

...

You probably don't want to know that. Kbai.

Huh. I'm blogging over here. So that's a thing.

So...
I don't know if anyone's noticed, but I've been posting a lot of Facebook notes lately. Lengthy affairs with a lot of prose, and speculation, and opinion. Lately, and I think due on part to the drugs, which are making me more focused, I've been more driven to create, to generate more output, to distill my thoughts and experiences through a sieve of grammar and text and spawn something that is, with any luck, communicative, evocative, and entertaining.

Or... y'know... so I hope.

I hope it's no secret that I would love to be able to call myself a writer, to be able to create worlds, and people (fictional of course) and plots, and scenarios, and... well, stories.

But for a number of years now this been quite difficult for me. I hadn't been able to figure out why, I thought maybe I was just a touch slower than most, or perhaps not as original or creative as I'd thought, or maybe just plain unmotivated.

But as it turns out it was just Narcolepsy. My body has a difficult time with sleep cycles, and sends me careening headlong into dreamland in the blink of an eye. This is no joke either. I didn't understand it before, but when I nod off, even if it's just for the space of a few moments, even seconds, I launch into a vivid full color dream, complete with backstory, full cast of characters, and surround sound. Then when I wake up, a vague impression of the dream remains, but is largely forgotten, although sometimes some of the context remains, and I have to remind myself not to say things like, "so that might have been why she wanted to steal the baby." (I've often thought that if I could just remember some of these I could make a decent living as a fantasy surrealist short story writer.) Then of course I have to struggle for a few second to remember what I was talking about. This generally only happens when I'm on the phone though, at work, and as irritating as it is, I've learned to deal with it. Mostly by asking people to repeat themselves, or looking at my screen and reminding myself where we were.

On the plus side, the drugs are pretty good.

I don't get the same kick from Adderall that most high school and college students get, mostly because they've got a head start on me in the energy department. But it does seem to bring things back into focus, give me more energy, and makes me feel more motivated. So yeah, that's a good thing.

And of course that's how I can do this, and why I'm doing it now. I've been on the drugs for a few months now, and I keep coming up with things I want to talk about, and stories I want to tell, and opinions I'd like to express. Coming up with funny comments to Facebook posts and YouTube videos can really only take you so far, though that's still really fun. Heh... yeah, I'm kinda odd... nerdy... geeky. I can't help it, it's just so much fun.

But seriously, I'm hoping that I can find a way to carry that sense of humor, thoughtfulness, insightful commentary, etc etc over to this page as well. And I'll still share all this on my FB page, but also on my Google+ account, and maybe my Twitter, which hasn't seen any real use in a while. I've also thought about doing a Vlog just reading blog posts, just to bring it to an easier to digest medium. After all those Adderall kids have such a short attention span.

But what to Blog/Vlog about? Well, isn't that a great question, thanks me for asking it. Well I'm quite welcome. Well if you read one of my latest FB Notes, you know I'm an atheist, so I think I'd quite like to talk about that, and the hows and the whys, and my opinions about religion and faith and whatnot. Don't worry, it's not all subversive, I think as far as atheists go, I'm really quite charitable. Compared to Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens I'm really quite tolerant.

And of course fiction. I have a few ideas kicking around my head for some interesting stories, and I might use this place to flesh out some ideas. I have two interesting ones right now. One is about Santa Claus; what if he's not just one person, but rather a whole family which runs a multinational super-secret non-profit organization which gives charitable donations of toys, money and other important necessities, primarily to poor and homeless, but others as well, all over the world. And they fund it all by licensing the Santa Claus image all over the world to everyone from wrapping paper makers to Coca-Cola, a decision made back in the 1930s that saved the failing organization from the brink of bankruptcy. Now they run pretty much the whole Santa Claus industry from behind the scenes, organizing all the Santa colleges from New York to San Diego, and a few overseas, and setting up pretty much every public appearance from "A Christmas Story" to "Bad Santa" (though they would never allow standards to fall that far.) I have to think of some good characters, and a good plot for that, but I think it'll be pretty entertaining. In fact, I kinda like the idea of writing the story for free, and just accepting donations for Child's Play, the Penny Arcade charity that sends toys and games to children in hospitals all over the world. Rather fitting I feel. Check them out, and if you ever want to cry like a little baby check out their testimonials page. I swear the tears will just flow by themselves.

The other one has been kicking around in my head even longer. It's set in modern day America, in a world that has always known about and used magic, and where it's even taught in college. In this world anyone has the potential to become a Mage in the same way that everyone has the potential to become an engineer, or a computer programmer, or a chef, or carpenter, or anything else. Something anyone can dabble in, but that most never do. And like most of those things magic has the potential to be used for harm, in the same way that an engineer could start building guns, or a programmer can become a hacker, or a chef can stab you with a knife, or a carpenter use his tools to hide dead bodies. Mostly Mages are similar to engineers, or mathematicians, working to unlock the secrets of the universe, or to create a better toaster. But once in a while you get a Mozart, or a DaVinci, a Newton, or a Bobby Fischer, an Archimedes, or an Einstein. People who look at the world a little differently, and have a kind of instinctive grasp of the workings of the universe, in such a profound way that even they themselves don't quite understand how it works. This is what my main character is, a savant in the field of Metaphysics.

I've had some other ideas kicking around as well, and now maybe I'll have the motivation and focus to do something with them. I'll probably go back and post some of the things I've never really finished, or a couple that I have finished but haven't yet shown to anyone. Some of them are not too bad I hope, I think.

But anyway, if you've managed to read all the way to the end of this, thanks very much, well done. I swear most of my posts won't be this long or rambling. Or maybe they will, who knows? Now that I've found a bit of focus perhaps the discourse will simply spew forth like a great monologue fountain. I'll do my best to keep it interesting, and hopefully entertaining as well.

Let me know how I do with that.