Adam Martin's Blog

The plot: Christopher Walken looks bored.

In your best Christopher Walken voice: “I am not bored. Never tell me when I am bored. Never, ever, ever, tell me anything like that. It is up to me to make that distinction. Not you. Not ever. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a Saturday Night Live sketch to perform, and if you tell me that I am bored, I will take my sword and stick the blade into your ass, and you will have nothing more to say about the matter.”

Like many movies and the best fireworks displays, Dune 2 is a good spectacle but it’s not a good movie. It’s all about the worms. The worms justify the means.

It all starts when Luke Skywalker’s parents get killed on Tatooine. After Luke leaves to meet Yoda in a swamp, the Dune production team rushes in and uses the same location to save money because the spice market is way down, just like our version of inflation.

The set pieces, costumes, plot threads, are all repurposed and camouflaged to look Dune-ish, rather than Star-Wars-ish and wa-la! No one knows the difference, because no one knows what’s going on anyways.

After awhile, all these epic sci-fi movies begin to look like love and motocross colliding in a distant future with Tesla-driven drop ships that still require humans to pilot them.

In the year 10,000 and something, pilots sit in the cockpit of hi-tech drop ships because it gives them something to do. They’re trained to hide their Soduko puzzle books and look like they’re steering the aircraft when the camera pans towards them. Can’t Wait for Dune 3: The Dream Sequences All Mashed Together.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Madonna appeared in the next Dune. In fact, it would surprise me if she didn’t.

I know people who love the Dune novels. I haven’t read the novels or the CliffsNotes (yes, they do exist), but many people haven’t read Albert Camus’ The Stranger and wouldn’t care what it meant if I explained the plot, or intentional lack of it.

I wouldn’t want to rob anyone of an enjoyable reading experience. However, I shouldn’t have to read a novel in order to understand the movie version. That onus lies with the director who chose to adapt the origin material to tell a coherent story.

Besides, hot chicks don’t lie around swimming pools reading Dune. A lot of guys who lie around swimming pools don’t even know how to spell Dune. If Dune were renamed Dude, things may turn out to be too simple for the bros by the pool, and we don’t want that…

I saw Star Wars as a kid when it first came out in 1977. I’ve seen the bulk of recycled trope evolution over the years. I remember when you had to go to the movie theater to see Star Wars again, and again, and again, in the theater, because there was no other again-and-again technology. That was your only option.
Before Star Wars had all those Roman numerals…

I miss places like Tower Records, where you could just spend an hour or two browsing record albums, hanging out, flipping through black light posters, checking out the glass blown bongs in the head shop section, and accomplish nothing, other than spending unstructured time your way. That’s kind of how Dune movies spend their time on screen: their way, not yours…
Beware! the new Van Halen album may attract the worms!

The Dune 2 cast is decent but they look like they’re filling out a position, all designed to have a “certain quality” where the flash is the substance, like the chick who dyes her hair Sharpie Hi-liter anime blue. You can’t forget the hair but you can’t remember the chick.

I also get annoyed with klutzy direction. For instance, David Batista as Rabban literally looks like he was told by the director to just yell at everyone. It just doesn’t come across as a personal acting choice. Just my intuitive reaction.

Whereas Darth Vader instilled fear in officers by suffocating poor performers with telekinetic asphyxiation, the trope is so shopworn and stepped-on from overuse in 2024, there’s no recoiling in terror. It’s just another lazy choice.

If Rabban were wearing a Star Wars t-shirt that might have added some real “metamodern” (yet another bullshitty zero-calorie pop meme) depth to the character.

The Sci-Fi Amnesia Effect: In the distant future, people are smart enough to build devices that defy the laws of physics, but too dumb to fix them when the laws of physics break the device.

In Albert Camus’ The Stranger, Meursault lacks a first name, age, and physical features. He is the incarnation of a hollow vessel who doesn’t care about his fate until he is about to be executed for killing an Arab on the beach. In the the novel, these features are by design. Albert Camus wrote it that way on purpose.

In Dune 2, and many movies adapted from novels you will live to see, these features are not by design. They are accidental, or else, year, after year, just La-Z-Boy storytelling.

Get the chair. It’s more fun to fall asleep in.

Years ago, I saw Lawrence of Arabia in L.A. at the Cinerama dome (now closed). In psychological time, Lawrence of Arabia is a three and a half hour movie squashed into two hours. Dune 2 is a two and a half hour movie squashed into three hours.

Dune 1 is the same: lots of Discovery Channel steadicam flyover sequences of desert duneage, set to Hans Zimmer’s repetitive AI-sounding space opera score, cranked at full blast through George Lucas’ eardrum piercing THX sound system.

To some degree this strategy works: you’re so worried that your ears will start bleeding into your popcorn, you actually don’t notice how boring the movie is.

The whole sword fighting logic is just lame. I get that it was adapted in part from the novels but no one goes to sci-fi movies to watch sword fights. No one goes to a picnic to eat paper plates.

Sometimes a good cinematic idea is just a good cinematic idea in the same way a good cigar is just a good cigar. The mistake is in trying to fix a good cigar by switching out laser blasters for swords.

Light sabers back in 1977 were a different story. No one had ever seen Alec Guinness get into a light saber duel with Darth Vader. No one even knew what a light saber was. Now, it’s just a lazy trope even for the Star Wars saga.

Movies like Dune 2 would be more interesting if it were a movie about two people eating a midnight breakfast at Norms, where one tells the other all the Dune plots over ham and eggs, and the stories never close…

Read this article on Medium: https://medium.com/@adam66/dune-2-the...

Be your own imposter. It’s cheaper.

Deepstory
Deepstory is what happens when you recreate a cast member in a movie, like Peter Cushing, with CGI (computer generated imagery) as part of the plot, and to your chagrin it actually makes more sense, or deepsense, than trying to convince the audience they’re seeing a live actor onscreen.

If Darth Vader reanimated Grand Moff Tarkin at his Death Star CGI Studio, as part of the plot in Rouge One: A Star Wars Story (2016), it’s actually in keeping with the advanced technology of the Star Wars universe.

Darth Vader knows (or should know according to his mastery of the deepforce ) what we already know in real life: CGI actors, or deepactors, work cheap, or for nothing at all.

They don’t have drug problems, mental health issues, financial debt, needy dependents, gold-digging spouses, accident insurance premiums, opinions about the script, and they always show up and disappear right on time.

It’s as if… they don’t exist, while generating IP (intellectual property) revenue for those who do, in the form of copyrights, privacy rights, publicity rights, trademarks, and merchandising.

In novel form, this kind of malarky is known as ghostwriting, where the author’s name appears on the cover but the text is written by a ghostwriter, or deepauthor who deepwrites like the author so well you can’t tell the difference.

Deepdialogue
Whenever I hear words like deepfake, I’m reminded of old gangster movies where thugs fire their gun and jerk the barrel forward to make the bullets go faster. I guess, that makes the bullet holes deeper.

Once fired from a gun, the average bullet travels at around 2,736 mph, 6 times faster than the fastest car in the world. Words like deepfake provide the clarity that’s missing from our intellect… at around 2,736 mph.

Deepfake is a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake” where something deemed authentic is replaced with an imitation and cannot be easily distinguished from the original. It’s also a closed compound word: two or more words that are joined together.

Silence is a compound pause.

Once something is deemed fake, it can’t be any faker than it is. But this doesn’t stop people from trying to re-invent language from scratch every time they speak it. Call it deepeffort.

We like to turn words into the linguistic version of Kentucky Fried Chicken, so we can speak them as if they are deepfried with eleven creative herbs and spices.

Deepstyle
Most people don’t want to imitate Peter Cushing. They want to imitate the CGI imitation of Peter Cushing, playing an imitation villain, in the latest imitation Star Wars movie.

But if you don’t look, sound, or act like Peter Cushing, or the CGI imitation, what’s to be done? Become a deepimposter of yourself!

How can this be done without spending a fortune on acting classes, going to auditions, and plastic surgery?

Simple. You deepfake it, until you deepmake it!

When you use cool words like deepfake, party goers turn their attention to you, the speaker of the cool word of the day. In French that’s mot sympa du jour, and with the aid of Google translate, I’m able to write in deepfrench.

By association the speaker of cool words transforms the speaker into a deepcool person. Before you know it, people attending your new-personality party will interact with you as if they’re hanging out with a new you that’s even better than the original!

Deepconflict
This deepstyle of yours works for awhile, but what good would any story be without conflict? The inevitable deepfoil shows up to your party and uses a word like deepreal.

You wonder if this party-crasher is referring to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal, or is he just blowing smoke from his swim trunks.

The crowd flocks to this, shall we say… imposter… or deepfaker who now becomes the center of deepfawning.

If you want to know how deepstyle can backfire, see the Brady Bunch episode The Personality Kid, where Peter Brady gets a new personality and throws a party to show off his new self.

Not to be outdone by this imposter stealing your deepthunder, you choose to beat this charlatan, this mountebank, this deepfraud, at their own game.

Offering your foe pork chops and “apple shauce” (spoken like Humphrey Bogart) won’t work.

Here’s how to deepskin this cat…

Deeptechnique
Since you look just like you, you’ve got the part before you even audition, and you can bypass the expensive CGI computer process of recreating yourself. Once you start acting like you always do, people will start to notice how you “look so real” in real life.

Soon the audience will be wondering, “Did you see how he put mustard on that hot dog? Wow, he really looks like he’s sipping a beer!”

You’ll also be performing your own stunts, eliciting comments like, “Did you see how he put his foot through the screen door and cracked that priceless vase?”

The great thing about being your own imposter is that your voice is already dubbed to your mouth before you even open it! No more Spaghetti Western voice-out-of-sync issues.

Deepcaution
Remember, if we are six or fewer social connections away from each other (six degrees of separation), the same is true for being your own imposter. You may be imitating someone you know, who is imitating someone else, and the fifth person down the line is imitating you.

If you get that funny feeling that the role your playing is somehow a Xerox copy of someone else’s thoughts or behavior, that they Xeroxed from you, that’s a red flag.

The last thing you want is to become is an imitation, of an imitation, or a deepcopy, of yourself.

If this happens, you run the risk of being exposed as appearing so real that it’s really you! It’s as if Peter Cushing really did appear in Rouge One: A Star Wars Story!

All that new-you surgery down the drain, and we don’t want that…

Deepfigures
Once you perfect your deeptechnique, you can aspire to becoming a deepaction figure, bending yourself into your favorite action poses, adding your favorite costumes, accessories, vehicles, and playsets, to your life-sized toy story.

If you have a significant other, you can mash yourselves together in romantic settings, like you used to do with Ken and Barbie dolls as kids, in the privacy of your own life-sized Barbie Playhouse.

You’ve, now become a twenty-four hour solo tribute band to yourself. You don’t have to write and rehearse the songs, create the costumes, go on tour, or build an audience from scratch. It’s all done for you, as if you just added water!

Deeptheatre
Your new action adventures will unfold on sets that are already built for you, also known as domestic society, or deepdomestic society, or domestic deepsociety.

All your entrances and exits will be predicted by conspicuously absent city engineers, or deepdirectors. Your narratives will unfold inside the footprint of their architectural structures, designed landscapes, and travel networks, telling you where to go and what to do before you go there.

It’s as if all the world is a deepstage.

Deepmovies
By the year 3000 A.D., the feature film technology will be as plug and play as the Atari video game console back in the seventies, allowing everyone to recreate anyone, anywhere, anytime, with any kind of story template, in the privacy of their own homes.

Children of the future will produce movies that will look just like their favorite Star Wars movie, all for the cost of what one paid for an Atari Asteroids game cartridge back in 1981.

Behold, the deepmovie industry!

Deepcuriosity
Perhaps, all this fascination with regurgitated, repurposed, and recycled, deepculture can be summed up as follows:
If the fake is better than the original, people will pay money to see it.
If the original is better than the fake, people will pay money to see it.

Small Talk in the 31st Century
Teenager 1: Hey, did you know I’m playing all the characters in the next Star Wars movie, nationwide?

Teenager 2: Really? So, am I.
When the giant boys are around, Darth Vader has to play nice with the other action figures.

Original article appears on Medium
May the Deepfake be with You on Medium

FREE on Smashwords...

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

A personal "how to" book on writing. A quick read comprised of the author's personal notes on story structure. Inspired by reading several independent novels and plays that suffer from the same pool of structural errors that are easy to fix. Also contains diagrams designed to help authors structure scenes or stories for any writing medium: short stories, novels, stage plays, screenplays, graphic novels, boring the hell out of people in public, etc.

PORTMANTEAU
A portmanteau (from French porte-manteau) is a linguistic blend of words, in which parts of multiple words or their phonemes (sounds) are combined into a new word, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel.

SUPREME LEADER SNOKE
A portmanteau of snort and cocaine? He looks like a coke fiend who banged his forehead on a kitchen counter. If it appears like a cheap attempt at drug humor that may have been the point, conceived from stoners in the art department.

EMPEROR PALPATINE
A portmanteau of palpitation and Ovaltine? In 2011, Ovaltine was banned in Denmark under legislation forbidding the sale of food products with added vitamins. This is what happens to your appearance when you have Ovaltine withdrawals.

DARTH VADER
A portmanteau of Siddhartha and invader? Siddhartha is a novel by Hermann Hesse that deals with the spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Gautama Buddha. He now works for the Death Star.

THINK INSIDE THE BLOCK (NOT OUTSIDE THE BOX)
According to the block universe theory, the universe is a giant block of all the things that ever happen at any time and at any place. The past, present and future all exist and are equally real. Every moment of your life is out there in space-time, already developed, like a single frame on a film reel. When you stop thinking outside the box, there are several advantages:

1) You don't have to worry about knocking over other boxes and getting them all mixed up.

2) You don't have to worry about which box your in: The box that contains your box, or the box that's inside your box.

3) If you stand next to a box, you're already thinking outside of the box, and you haven't even done anything yet.

4) If there's no box in sight, but at least one box exists, your standing outside of a box by default.

5) You don't have to imagine a box and then imagine yourself thinking outside of some imaginary box. Now, you can go back to just "thinking" without all this stupid "box" stuff.

6) If there is a box in the universe that contains all the boxes and yet is not itself contained within a box, what you end up with is a block, not a box.

7) You can't think outside of a block universe. It's already been done for you. Here's one now...

SECOND HAND PERSONALITY DEFECTS
Ever notice that odorless personality defects in others are even more annoying than second hand smoke?

ACRONYMS
Everyone and their mother's corporation makes these things up on a daily basis. So do I. The uglier and dumber, the better.

ACYM
This is the acronym for acronym. Try using it in a text message and see if anyone knows what you're talking about.

TOE
Time On Earth. By wasting my TOE you're wasting your own. Think about it, but not with my TOE. Use yours.

LBP
Long Boring Passage. It's the reason I skimmed over your boring battle scene with tribe A slaughtering tribe B, and after the carnage of dead text-soldiers subsides, so what? Why was this important?

LBPC
Long Boring Passage Condensed.

ABZI
Always be zooming in. It also sounds like the name of some foreign terrorist group (it probably is). If you think this acronym is ugly, well so is UNICEF. It sounds like the name of a unicorn virus. Speaking of unicorns...

UNICORN PLOT
A unicorn plot (my terminology) is any plot where the characters serve the plot points, rather than the other way around. Unicorn's are sterile, since they're imaginary creatures that don't really exist. So, you write a story about a unicorn and becasue it's convenient to the plot, the unicorn can suddenly have unicornlings (my terminology again). The event is motivated out of the blue, rather than following a previous train of thought.

Avoid unicorn plots by suggesting somewhere in the preface, the first chapter, the interview process, the first date, the coupon, the butthugger strap, the toothbrush handle, the lid, the latch, the logo, etc., that the unicorn may be able to produce unicornilings. Now the logic makes sense within the context of the story when it happens.

However, the unicornling never serves as a central figure, object, or goal, but rather as a Mac Guffin...

MacGUFFIN
In fiction, the MacGuffin is the excuse that motivates all the excuses. It is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself. AI (as in) the maltese falcon in The Maltese Falcon, or the shark in Jaws, or the Death Star and the entire warehouse of self-referential merchandise appearing in Star Wars. IWO (in other words), if there were no Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, Red Baron Pizza, sterotypical Nazis, Muslims, or women in distress, Indiana Jones would have no excuse to go adventure-busting and have no excuse to make all the excuses that amount to the latest excuse for the next Indiana Jones movie.

The Death Star my be considered a set piece, yet when you buy the Lego-fied toy version for a child it's about the size of a MacGuffin.

If you you want to purchase a Honda MacGuffin, you now have an excuse to get into all sorts of economy car mischief that motivates you as the driver, while the car serves as mere device, until you arrive at Mc Donald's and sit down to eat your MacGuffin with cheese, wherein your next plot point unfolds.

ARE YOU A MOUNTEBANK?
I've always wanted to call someone a mountebank for being dishonest, but the word sounds more like a compliment. I picture a mountebank as someone who mounts horses and rides gallantly along river banks with their head held high.

mountebank
[ moun-tuh-bangk ]
noun
a person who sells quack medicines, as from a platform in public places, attracting and influencing an audience by tricks, storytelling, etc.
any charlatan or quack.
verb (used without object)
to act or operate as a mountebank.

IMAGINE A CUBE...
Then rotate it in your mind. Did the cube rotate or did your point of view rotate while the cube remained stationary? How do you know?

AH, THOSE GOOD OLD 70's TOYS!
The Alien Movie Viewer requires no batteries. That's how they get the kid to look into the viewfinder while his mouth hangs open. The hatchling facehugger is nesting inside the hollow movie cartridge. What will the Alien franchise think of next?

AUTHOR'S NOTE
I do most of my writing in my head. Come to think of it, I do most of my thinking in my head.

I STARTED XENOMAN WHEN I WAS 27ish...
and finished it when I was 47ish. I wrote about 300-500 pages of plot and notes regarding the black box, Intellegella, and various characters, and put it down because I couldn't get at the plot. After going through a bunch of life, I realized that if I didn't finish Xenoman, it would always bother me, especially if someone else wrote roughly the same novel as well as I could. On top of that, what I wrote previously wasn't working. I ended up using about 5% of the old stuff and gutted the rest.

XENOMAN IS A CONFUSING NOVEL
Its a mash of Groundhog Day/Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, manipulated by an alien race. The last page of the novel is the first page of the novel. What the disappearing wrist tattoos indicate is that Xeno and Trianne are stuck in a virtual time-slice loop, that may alter slightly the next time around. Hope that helps any fans floating around out there...

AND SO...
I wrote the speed notes to clarify what the hell I was talking about... and I'm working on a trilogy (wackology) that travels through virtual realities to explain what was skimmed over or left open-ended in Xenoman. I sort of did that on purpose when I realized there may be more to this story than I had anticipated. Fiddling with a design for a graphic novel, calendar, something visual... For now, I'm sort of stuck in my own Graf Zeppelin.

XENOMAN & THE SPEED NOTES ARE FREE...
on Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view....

TAKING MY OWN ADVICE
There are things I don't like about Xenoman, and things that don't work as well as I had thought they would based on others' feedback. For my next novel, I look forward to omitting those mistakes and creating brand new ones. If I had to read Xenoman for a lit class, I'd probably just read the speed notes. That's what I did with several authors in college, and still do. So in a round about way, cheating myself was its own reward.

THE BEST ADVICE...
is old, short, boring, true, discounted on Amazon, or free at the library. Don't pay six thousand dollars to walk on coals.

WRITE THE "WHAT'S" YOU KNOW
It gets you closer to the conversation and action that matters. What you know is just and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens... If two people are married for five years and then split up after five years (the what) in one paragraph, the next question out of everyone's mouth is how it happened (the series of what's) and then why (the reasons for the what's) it happened.

COLUMBO AND SHAKESPEARE ARE THE SAME THING
We know what's going to happen. The reason we watch is because we want to know HOW it's going to happen. Use long battle sequences and distant planet Olive Garden romance passages as an excuse to pay off your subplots. Inquiring minds want to know. That's why I read the National Enquirer.

OMIT "DON'T GET ME WRONG" FROM YOUR VOCABULARY...
or any written correspondence. I think it's a millennial thing. When you say "don't get me wrong," what your really saying is that you don't think people should take you seriously. If you don't want people to take you seriously, how do you want to be taken?

OMIT "I JUST DO THIS FOR FUN" FROM YOUR VOCABULARY (even if you do)
When you say you do something for fun, it's like apologizing in advance. Hence, you deflate any unknown variable that may have served to your advantage had you said nothing. By saying nothing, you lose nothing if nothing works out, or you get to say "I meant to do that all along," which, if you reverse engineer what you did, may actually be true.

KNOWING THE RULES BEFORE YOU BREAK THEM...
is just another rule. The question is what do you want to do once breaking the rules gets old, stale, and your rebellion is just another rebellion?

A REAL LIFE TROPE I'M TIRED OF
Scientists in the news are always puzzled. I need to meet a scientist who isn't.

AND I STILL LISTEN TO DISCO!
Too bad there's no more clubs like Studio 54 to go with it.

There are no more Star Wars movies, just Star Wars salads.

Everything happens in ones.

Authors will critique mistakes in other novels. But they won't correct the same mistakes in their own. It's as if the left brain doesn't talk to the right brain.

Bad authors have a lot to talk about but nothing to say.

If I imagine myself throwing away a piece of garbage, but I don't imagine the wastebasket, am I littering?

If God can clone himself, would he mistake himself for himself?

Anything based on a true story might as well be based on a false story.

Movie stars are like everybody else. So is everybody else.

DO YOU LIVE IN THE MATRIX?
your brain is already in a vat, it's called your skull.

You never see the "perceiver" of another person, nor yourself.

If everywhere you go feels like a set, that's because it is. Towns don't occur naturally in the wild.

We're all method actors to some degree.

If you were the evil alien race using human beings as cattle, why would you use your superior technology to show movies at Edward's Cinemas that exposes your dark secret to humanity?

If your life has been spent in a vat, the same thing may be happening to the evil aliens, and that scenario may just be a dream, or passing thought, in yet another alien's mind.

The matrix you see in the movies may reside within a cluster of matrixes that have nothing to do with each other.

IF YOU WANT TO TRADE PLACES WITH SOMEONE ELSE...
Ask yourself exactly what you mean by that. Do you wish to be them and retain your own interior reality? If so, doesn't that alter the context of reality for both of you? If you can't choose a result that is unknown until it happens, how is that a benefit to you?

WHY ARE ALIEN INVADERS SO DUMB?
FLAW: The first mistake they make is revealing themselves to the general public BEFORE the invasion.
SOLUTION: Wipe out humanity with a designer virus that kills everyone and leaves everything else in tact. Humans can do it to each other already, so why can't they?

FLAW: After revealing yourself, you do something even dumber. You kill millions of people and level cities to the ground, including city resources and utilities.
SOLUTION: Remain hidden and allow humans to operate resource facilities like gas and power, so that you can spend the opportunity cost doing something else. It's FREE LABOR from your end.

FLAW: You want to destroy human civilization so you can install your own. You have to kill everyone because humans would just get in the way and you want to use your own employees.
SOLUTION: Remain hidden and leak open source software into the population that allows humans to figure out how to build the advanced civilization for you, while thinking they figured it out themselves. Again, FREE LABOR.

FLAW: You want to enslave humans and have them do all sorts of heavy lifting and dangerous side work.
SOLUTION: Use robots. You don't have to wait for them to mature, nor do you have to feed, medicate, cloth, educate, hospitalize, or put up with them.

FLAW: Aliens conduct the battles in person because, for whatever reason, superior races like to show off.
SOLUTION: If you can't do the designer virus, have robots do it. Or, simply stop showing off.

HAVE YOU BEEN ABDUCTED BY ALIENS?
As advanced as they are, they always seem to screw up wiping your memory. It's like having the ability to build a Swiss watch, but you can't tell time.

If an alien can build a flying saucer that has the capability to reach Earth, why bring you on board a high-tech vessel just to open you up with a low-tech cutting tool like a scalpel?

If they can scan and observe your vital signs, organs, and the inner workings of your mind, why isn't the device advanced enough to do so while your asleep in bed, instead of dragging you onto the ship?

It's annoying how advanced alien technology can do this, and this, and this, and this, and even this, but it selectively can't do that, because it says so in the script.

TERM: MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE
I GUARANTEE THIS WILL HAPPEN TO YOU
1) you will forget what this means at the exact moment someone else uses the term and 2) you won't realize they are using the term incorrectly when they say something like 3) "There's no way that can happen at the same time. It's not mutually exclusive."
In logic and probability theory, two events (or propositions) are mutually exclusive or disjoint if they cannot both occur at the same time. A clear example is the set of outcomes of a single coin toss, which can result in either heads or tails, but not both.

ARE YOU LOST IN AN EXPERIENCE MACHINE?
You wake from an experience machine to find your inside another experience machine. But how many machines have you been in? Have you always been in a machine? When did it begin? (see Bird on a Wire, The Thirteenth Floor, and a whole host of other like movies)

DO VIRTUAL MACHINES REQUIRE VIRTUAL TOOLS?
If you could build a virtual machine, would the tools have to be virtual as well? Or would there be some sort of demarcation point at which tangible tools blur into virtual ones?

DOES BUILDING A TIME MACHINE REQUIRE TIME TRAVELING TOOLS?
If you could build a time machine, would it require tools that could travel through time as well?

CAN YOU BUILD AN ARTIFICIAL HUMAN?
That depends. Do you know how to build "consciousness".

ARE YOU LIVING IN A BLOCK UNIVERSE?
According to this theory, the universe is a giant block of the past, present and future existing simultaneously, and all moments are equally real. Sort of like a movie where the frames are stacked like a cube, rather than arranged like a strip.

Things that you think you're the only one doing, when in fact everyone else is from the reader's perspective...



Your story is littered with characters who look at each other with puppy dog eyes, forlorn expressions, and tearful gazes. What is this? A black velvet dog painting from Tijuana? Visual aid included:



What is it with people who think every movie they see is "really good"? You may have just had a brush with a philisophical zombie, someone who walks and talks like a real person, and even suffers, but exists and reacts by rote.

You see an author online who has won an award, like a Hugo, or something with lots of graphic garlands. You click the link to see the actual award, followed by another nebulous link, and another, and another, until you find yourself at some online storefront, like IKEA, or CVS. The strategy, I think, is that you'll begin to tire of clicking the clickbait, but not before crossing over links to the author's other novels that won other fake or dubious awards, that you can never really locate, or never heard of, except for the guy who invented them, which was probably the author.

You didn't write a novel, you wrote a tour of one, and the irony is unintentional. The characters don't seem to be compelled, propelled, motivated, or conflicted by the story or the sets. It feels as if their walking through a museum of the story and chatting about the artifacts from room to room, but nothing much else happens.

You know how to write a plot, but the levels are flat. Darth Vader must kill Luke Skywalker in chapter 15, but so what? It could have been John Wilkes Booth assassinating Abe Lincoln, for all we care. Try this: have John Wilkes Booth assassinate Luke Skywalker, or vice versa, and see if that makes things interesting.

You wrote a LEGO plot. The characters and scenes can be rearranged in any sequence and it doesn't matter to the story. Darth Vader can kill Luke Skywalker in chapter 1, 7, or 12, but because the plot is so thin, it doesn't matter.

Chapter 23 comes after chapter 22 because you wrote it in that order, and you stayed up 'til four in the morning to finish your story, neatly cementing your delusional train of thought in place.

"Yeah" not "yea". Stop saying "yea" when you mean "yeah". “Yea” is an old-fashioned formal way of saying “yes,” used mainly in voting and is spoken as "yay". When someone asks you if you enjoyed the movie, or a meal, and you say "yea", we're not asking for your vote. It's not a filibuster for godsake. A simple "yeah" "yes" or "no" will do. If you write a children's story and your characters keep saying "yea", are you doing this on purpose? What exactly are they voting on?

Personal Plot Rule: If you cant make it funny make it shorter, if you can't make it shorter don't do it. If you have two movies that are equally as boring, where one is 2 hours and the other is 1 1/2 hours, the shorter movie doesn't feel as boring, and the audience will hate you less for forcing them to sit through it. It's a reductive/brevity strategy and it works. Students love teachers who get to the point so they don't have to fight falling asleep in class and waking in drool.

When I took a painting class, someone once asked me "Have you sold a painting?" My silent reaction was why would that matter? My goal is to retain the rights to the original work, and the right to distribute digital copies to multiple individuals for fun, profit, good publicity, or bad publicity (a.k.a Dennis Hopper publicity). If I sold a painting, all the buyer would do is hang it in the guest bedroom, forever obscured from the general public, and only witnessed by those who want something to look at while they're brushing their teeth. What's the point?

I get tired of hearing about characters that aren't likeable. Disgusting characters? That depends. A lot of authors write disgusting characters for the same reasons people tell gross-out jokes: they're not funny or interesting otherwise.

Gimmick porn: You thought of a cool gimmick. Instead of doing Pride and Prejudice with zombies, you're version is going to be all Filipino, or take place in the Matrix, or set on Monster Island to Toho studio monsters (Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, you know... those guys). That's it. There's nothing beyond the gimmick, and then you go on to write a story that butchers the original source material so badly, all you end up doing is driving others to read the original novel.

You wrote a video game story but the plot is nothing more than defeating the next pit boss. The inner Tron game engine ennui is accidental, and everyone has the personality of the block-shaped cowboys in the 1978 Atari Gunslinger game.

It takes you 10 pages to get there, but it only takes the reader 5. Kind of like when you know what someone is going to say next and you find yourself mouthing the words coming out of their mouth because you're 3 milliseconds ahead of their thought process.

Poptart Parents: Your character has parents simply because it would look odd if they didn't. They're a little bit egg-and-sperm donor and a little less rock and roll. They 1) pop in from time to time and 2) they're a little tart, in order to offset the sweet nature of your characters. Other than that, they're boring dads lost in pipe smoke and doting mothers spraying houseplants, gingerly doling out reproductive advice that anyone could tell themselves.

You take advice from gurus that try to cajole you into thinking you're delusional, only to find after reading their own self-published works, they're more delusional than you are.

A work in progress
For amusement, improvement, or a good laugh

Xenoman

Speed Notes on Adam Martin's Xenoman

A list of things that bug me in self published and professionally published novels, print and online articles. It's not just the self-publishing industry. It's everywhere.

I care about story, pace, and flow. I don't care about your typos, or that your novel is a work in progress. True, too many typos can be distracting, but I'm not the kind of author who witchhunts for those things. That can all be fixed later. None of that will prevent me from figuring out what you're talking about, or not talking about that should be talked about. If I went back in time and corrected all the typos in the best live conversations I've ever had, I'd spend more time fixing speech errors than having the actual conversation. As for authors who bag on grammar and the like and pay for professional editing services, there are those who might consider paying someone to write the plot of their novel as well. I might get an edit lift later on, but I'm not in a rush.

You wrote 30 chapters of about something and put a cover on it. It reads like James Joyce's Ulysses, but it's accidental, not intentional.

You're cover is just, how can I say it, ugly. It has a picture of your face, but it looks like a photo you peeled off your expired passport, and you cut and pasted it on crooked.

Your cover looks like it was done on Poser. Just like my novel! I also used Photoshop as well. Personally, I don't care what software the novel was done with as long as it looks decent. I don't buy books so much for the cover, just like I learned not to buy records for the same reason at Tower Records, when there was a Tower Records.

Your cover rocks. That's it. The novel inside is worse than a colonoscopy, because you have to go through with it while you're conscious.

You write for fun and think it's the reader's job to figure out the plot. The next time you think about writing for fun, consider this: serial killers kill for fun and think it's your job to figure out why it's reprehensible. Does this bother you? Then why do it with your writing? Think it through the way you would think through, say, building a house or shelter you would want to live in. When you go to Disneyland, it's not Walt Disney's job to figure out how to find parking, or why you like to go on the rides.

Your relatives in real life are boring to readers, because they don't have any conversations that are interesting, or are integral to the plot. It's your fault for not recalling the one's that were, and your mother doesn't make the best apple pie. Mine does.

You write about what you know, but it isn't interesting. Granny makes the weirdest quilts out of old blue jeans and Uncle Joe paints duck decoys in the garage, but it has nothing to do with the plot or anyone's growth otherwise.

You're dialogue is good but it isn't clear what we should pay attention to and what is just filler. Throw out the filler. When you get together with people you like, consider that once you begin to gossip, the bulk of the time is spent cutting to the chase. Imagine others watching that discussion and consider why that may be interesting in a story, and make it part of the story, not just throw away gobbly-gook.

You don't understand that dialogue is fake. It's a movie told with words, containing a verbal haystack: setup (inciting incident), a midpoint (revelation), and a payoff (change of plans), leading to the next scene/cliffhanger. The best dialogue is like reading a great interview with your favorite artists, which is probably a whittled down version of a long conversation made to fit on a few pages. Cliffs Notes are written the same way. They're fun to read because they contain only the story information that you need to know.

Sex scenes: You think because making out with someone on a couch is fun, people sitting in a row of seats watching you would feel the same way. There's nothing wrong with people sleeping together, but if you're writing for both men and women, as a straight male, I really don't need to see in print what your boyfriend's dick starts doing once he gets aroused.

You think you wrote a ghost story because your novel has a ghost, or someone mentions one, or thinks they saw one, or likes to talk about them a lot, or thinks one of the locations is haunted, or they were "ghosted" by someone at work, and we're constantly reminded of how creepy that old mansion is.

You wrote 20 novels just so you could say you wrote 20 novels, when in fact what you wrote was a blueprint for 20 wind tunnels.

You turn everything into a covert dick joke. You're convinced that your penis is so darn funny, it can't hurt to remind everyone else. At least your doing it in print for god sake.

Exposition porn: You spend 20 pages telling us what Batman can do, instead of 20 pages with Batman showing us what he can do, while he's doing it. You write a mystery where your Holmes and Watson characters spend 20 pages talking about what all those hounds in the Baskervilles keep barking about, instead of forcing them to actually investigate the streets of London and find out.

Exposition porn II: You confuse typing with writing. You think that repetition equals character.

Gods on vacation: You write novels about gods and deities that resemble people who go on vacation: they spend tons of money to go to another part of the world, and behave exactly like they do at home, while sipping what amounts to a two-hundred dollar Margarita.

GOT porn: Game of Thrones is already it's own source of self-saturation. Why do you want to be the next George R.R. Martin? We already have like a hundred other long-winded authors doing the same thing. Ask yourself, do we need twelve Shakespeare's? Do something unique, or at least strive to.

You copy famous author's just to look cool. Your novels include multiple GOT viewpoints... just because. There's no thought experiment behind it, no big reveal, no wow, no reason to take the day off from work to read through a bunch of nonsense. Get the party started and keep it moving.

Airlock porn: You wrote a science fiction novel, and so it follows that you should have spaceships, and hence, airlocks. The problem is, your novel contains so many airlocks, the reader begins to feel like the whole novel takes place in, well, an airlock. Are there any other locations you can break this up with?

You write female characters that say "fuck" a lot, without any real motivation. After the first few instances of this, we get it: She's a chick who acts like a guy. Now go have her do or say something interesting.

Swiss Army Guards: your character gets in a fight with a bunch of guards who resemble a bunch of guards, and because they're a bunch of guards that's all they ever are. They're so generic and hard to tell apart that when one of the guards answers the phone, he greets the caller not with his name but with "Bunch of guards. What can I do for you?"

And then this happens porn: Your basic understanding of plot is... and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens... The second half of the novel doesn't conclude what the first half of the novel presumes. If it's a series and we don't know what happens to the wizard and his girlfriend, I'm OK with that. Think about it: if you can't stand reading electronics manuals, why are you turning around and writing one?

You say your a voracious reader, but you clearly borrow from television. Roughly speaking, TV evolved from film, film from literature, literature from theatre. Cave people had no choice but to act out what they were thinking or feeling. There was no Samuel French in those days. It's important to know what was done in antiquity, not because it is better or worse, but because you don't want to spend 10 years of your life writing a love story, only to find you just rewrote a lesser version of Pride and Prejudice.

Your love stories are boring. Having to choose between two people isn't interesting, nor is having a crush on someone else while your married or in another relationship. You might as well have the reader choose between shopping at Ralph's or Vons. It only becomes interesting when the situations preventing the union are interesting or thought provoking.

You don't understand that all great characters are dramatized composites or types. Marvel and DC comics has been doing in front of you for years. Even people in real life are types to the degree that they follow patterns of behavior. Everyone in Citizen Kane and Casablanca is a type, a dramatized composite of other people in real life that exist anywhere.