I’m not sure whether to be amused or annoyed by the things people say to Deena when they see her baby bump. It’s eerie how these questions are always the same, without exception. There must have been some law passed by a woman’s magazine way back when that set these in stone.

1. When are you due? The first week of August. . . . [The inevitable follow-up to Deena:] Really? But you’re so small!
2. How do you feel? I feel good!
3. Do you know if it will be a boy or a girl? Yes, a boy.
4. Have you picked out a name? Yes, but it’s top-secret until the baby is born. Damion Lucifer Warner, Mephistopheles Warner, and Jason Freddy Warner are our top candidates.
5. Really? No.

I guess I’ll be amused because the questions are all well-meant and harmless. At least there have been a minimal number of unsolicited bump-fondles. (I told Deena that if someone does that to her, she should immediately rub their¹ tummy right back.)

It will be interesting to learn what the Newborn Baby FAQs will be. I’m looking forward to it.

¹Note to Webster’s: can we please, please get a gender-neutral pronoun for English? Please?

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My local newspaper served up another nugget of mental poop this morning, this time in the form of Erika Lassen’s column, Sexy ads limit my freedoms. The cusp is a recent Calvin Klein billboard in New York City. I assume it’s this one (described in the linked article as showing “two young men and a young woman entangled half-clothed (a male and female kissing) as a third man lays at their feet, either undressing or putting his pants back on”), although Lassen doesn’t say.

So sayeth the Brigham Young University graduate: “It was cheap pornography.” Well, actually it’s not. I’m going to go out on a limb here without researching the New York City code, but I would guess that a billboard meeting the legal definition of pornography could not have been posted or would very soon be coming down. But let’s not confuse matters with facts; it certainly didn’t stop the writer.

Proceeding from the invalid assumption that it’s pornography, Lassen writes, “An interesting thing happens when pornography is viewed. Like a leech, it clings to the brain. The image pops up in our minds at rather random, unexpected times.” Oh, really? Are you generalizing about how the populace reacts to pornography based on your own, apparently limited, experience? I’ll also venture to say that this assumption is statistically faulty. But again let’s not muddle things with actual evidence. It might undermine your thesis.

“And now I will need to force the image out whenever it springs on me,” she writes. “Calvin Klein’s freedom of speech has effectively infringed upon my freedoms.”

This is patently ridiculous. Causing something to pop into your mind at random, unexpected times is not freedom-infringing mind control, Ms. Lassen. It’s called advertising, and that experience is very much the point of it. And now you go so far as to hold Calvin Klein responsible for your thoughts? And because you are unable to control your own thoughts and/or repressed urges, Calvin Klein has infringed upon your freedom? Your freedom of what? Thought, I suppose. Just exactly where in the Constitution does it say you have freedom of thought and that a commercial retailer is responsible for preserving it?

Please, for the sake of all that is sane, take responsibility for your own thoughts. Stop blaming others for causing your thoughts to go to unexpected places at random times. If an advertiser had that much power to affect you, then good for it; such is always the effect I hope to have on people with my own creations. If seeing a sexy billboard advertisement — or even reading something — that challenges your narrow world view causes you to ponder things, then consider yourself lucky. It means you have a mind. Exercising that mind is perhaps the greatest freedom you have.

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Actors read and critique my stage play script at Monday's reading. (L-R:) Bob Wright, Barb Lawson, Caleb Towns, Alejandro Rosa, Cort Skinner, and Mike Vayvada. There were seven other actors not shown here, as well as a handful of audience members, all of whom happily ripped me a new one. Well, I asked for it.

This year, I’ve been stretching myself by exploring a different format of story-telling: stage plays. I figured, why not? I’ve been getting so involved with community theater that I’d be a fool not to parlay those experiences and connections into another chance to get published.

My stage play-writing experience thus far has been limited to a one-semester course in college and one ten-minute play that I submitted to a specific market. I also have experience with radio drama and screenplays, but those are different formats that don’t entirely prepare one for writing for the stage.

In any case, I’ve spent all of 2009 so far writing and refining a two-act comedy stage play about pirates who take over a Caribbean cruise ship in a misguided attempt to gain more respect for pirates because they’re typically lampooned in movies and at Halloween.

Yes, I realized halfway through the first draft that the timing of this idea is a little off. Damned Somalis. Last night, South Park’s episode was all about how Cartman and gang dress up as buccaneers and travel to Somalia to join the pirates there. It was a brilliant episode, full of the kind of humor I’m trying to capture in my own play. I’m glad I saw it because it convinced me to take the Somali pirate issue head-on during my revisions.

Anyway, as I said, I’m a newcomer to stage play-writing and so have not been wholly steady on my sea legs, so to speak. So I took what I thought was a very sensible step of hiring an expert, Jon Dorf out in Los Angeles, to critique the script. He walks the walk and talks the talk, and I was satisfied with his service. Afterward, he convinced me that my next step in the revision process was to hold what’s called a “table reading,” where I assemble actors into a dark, smoke-filled room to read the script aloud and then critique it. The above picture is from the reading I held on Monday, sans the dark and smoke.

Over the years, I’ve been on both sides of the table — critiquer as well as critiquee. I’ve learned that giving and receiving constructive criticism is an art, and it’s taken me a very long time to learn how to do both. Just because someone is a good writer doesn’t mean they know the first thing about coaching somebody else, for instance. It’s all too tempting to tell somebody how to “fix” his story, which translates to telling him how you would have written it. This is an important concept. The story is not being written by the person giving the critique, so telling somebody, “You should have this happen,” is going to meet more resistance from the writer. Better to guide him to his own solution. Unless you have an absolutely stunning idea for how to rewrite something (and a few times while coaching I’ve felt like I have), it’s better to just tell the person things like, “I was confused why this was happening in this scene,” and, “I didn’t understand this character’s motivation.” Or, if you’re Jon Dorf and reading Matthew Warner’s laughable attempts at French phrases, you say things like, “You spell ‘yes’ as oui, not qui.”

So, my apologies to all of you whose stories I’ve critiqued and edited where I’ve done it wrong. I’ve been writing seriously for publication for nearly 20 years now, but only within the past year do I feel like I’ve learned the right way to give feedback.

On the other side of the table, as I said, it’s a learned skill to receive criticism. As you can imagine, it’s all too easy to become defensive and depressed. Opening one’s self up to criticism is an act of courage, I think. What we’ve written is us, in a way. It came out of our heads and hearts, and when somebody says anything negative about it, it’s like they’re attacking us personally. So the first step, the hardest step, is disassociating oneself from the product, to look at it as a car in your garage that may or may not need some work on the engine. The people giving feedback are nothing more than other mechanics of varying skill who are peeking under the hood. It helps to remember what your motivation is going in to this. Did I really solicit feedback on this story because I wanted to make it better, or was I secretly just hoping for validation, for someone to pat me on the head? I still struggle with this.

Beyond that first hurdle, there’s still a right and wrong way to receive constructive criticism. It hinges around a particularly difficult aspect of the process called, “Mouth shut, ears open.” When Jon Dorf was talking into my ear for an hour a couple months ago, and on Monday night when a room full of people were talking about my play, I had to keep reminding myself to keep my mouth shut. For one thing, I had incurred considerable costs of time, energy, and money to arrange these opportunities to receive their thoughts. To argue with them would have been totally pointless.

But that’s a tall order to fulfill when the comments may come from people who don’t know the proper way to give feedback. Their comments can seem completely worthless or at least off-base. “You didn’t explain why so-and-so happened,” they might say, when indeed I did, explicitly, right there on page 1 and a second time on page 15. Or the dreaded, “Why don’t you have another character who does this?” I got a lot of feedback like this at my table reading. Many times, I thought that people just weren’t paying attention.

I’ve found that the key in these situations is just to take it all down and stew on it for a while. Once I’ve had time to distance myself from things is the right time to go back and sort through the comments. Indeed I might decide that someone simply wasn’t paying attention or is flat out “wrong,” but many times there’s something in there that’s worthwhile. When I do the current round of revisions, I’m going to make a special effort to pay attention to the comments or suggestions that are “wrong” and try to diagnose why they were said to begin with. If I disagree with someone’s comment that I don’t need the foreign words in my script, I shouldn’t just throw the comment away and not think about it again. Maybe what he was really saying was that the foreign words were just confusing to him — in which case I can do things to un-confuse them.

For now, at least, I’m thankful that I think I know how do deal with well-meant criticism. But the proof of the pudding will be in the tasting. I’ll let you know when the meal is served.

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Last night, some friends who are also entreprenuers here in Staunton asked if we’re going to take a “baby moon” before our tyke is born in August. “A what?” we answered. A baby moon — sort of like a honeymoon, but it’s when expectant parents go on a trip as their last hurrah before the baby is born. Because, you know, our lives are supposed to end once the baby is here.

We said no, no baby moon, but we are making an effort to sate our appetites for things that we know will be difficult for the first few years after we cross over into the parenting universe. We’ve been eating out a lot, for instance, and are about to head down to Nashville to a convention where we’re both guests. And we’re seeing a shit load of movies. Some are great, some are okay.

A great movie was The Watchmen. Of course it was so long that I think my bladder ruptured, but it was surprising for a superhero movie, at least to me. Here we have your typical tale of men in tights in a place where cliched rain comes down constantly, especially when they’re fighting. You can’t shake a stick at a movie theater these days without pointing out some shlock where people fight in the rain — that, or where something blows up behind them while they walk casually away, or where they leap headfirst away from an exploding something or other. . . . But I digress. I loved Watchmen. It was mature. The characters were complex. There were gray moral issues instead of just black and white ones. And it wasn’t wall-to-wall action; they actually had a few slow moments to allow us to take a breath, which has the effect of making the action all that more memorable. The story was also morally ambiguous in some ways: you have to give kudos to a movie that has the balls to show a pregnant woman getting blown away in during the Vietnam War. (Well, okay, maybe there’s nothing morally ambiguous about that part. But there were some morally ambiguous moments elsewhere. Really, really there were!)

I also liked Terminator Salvation a great deal although a majority of people seem to think it was dreadful crap. It reminded me a lot of the first Mad Max movie, and I thought it had a good story. Its one, glaring flaw, that I could see, came when the terminators in the Skynet concentration camp/factory didn’t blow away Kyle Reese the instant they identified him. There was nothing in the movie that indicated Skynet didn’t know that Reese was going to be John Connor’s father, else why were they looking for him? Still, I don’t understand why the movie is so widely hated. Maybe people are reacting to the radical departure in format from the previous movies: no Arnold this time, no time travel, no futuristic robot in a modern setting — rather, lots of futuristic robots in a futuristic setting.

I didn’t see it until after it left the theater, but I also liked The Curious Case of Benjamin Button very much, although again it was a bladder-buster. (Glad I saw it at home.) It was a sentimental, unusual, and well done story, unmuddled by a sound track that got in the way. The only real objection I had to it was when Benjamin just up decides that he can’t be a father to his daughter and abandons his family. That was completely out of character for him. Up until then, he had always been depicted as a devoted family man and somebody in complete acceptance of his condition — and that everyone around him was in acceptance of his condition. It just didn’t make logical sense that he would suddenly take off. Maybe the writers needed him to do that in order to satisfy their outline — a cardinal sin of storytelling. Or maybe they finally realized the movie was getting too long and so had to compress part of his life. Whatever, it was a stupid plot development. The rest of the movie was great, though.

Other new movies I saw and enjoyed were Dragonball, Wolverine, and the new Star Trek. Sure, I can understand why purists had problems with Dragonball and Star Trek: “Go-Ku’s hair isn’t long enough, and they changed his backstory so that he’s not a Saiyan!” “But the Enterprise was constructed in orbit; not on the ground!” Again, whatever. (And for what it’s worth, all perceived continuity problems in Star Trek can be explained by the Romulan’s time travel, which altered the subsequent time line in big and small ways.) They were all still fun movies. The only problem I had, again, was shared by Star Trek, Wolverine, and the aforementioned Terminator Salvation: there was so much, nonstop action, that we never had a chance to catch a breath. As Richard Nixon once said, you can’t appreciate the heights until you’ve experienced the lows. Bad rock music has the same problem: a lack of dynamics.

And please, please, can we stop with the handheld, herky-jerky camera work? If I wanted that level of amateurishness, I’d download the stuff off of my own camcorder. A failure to keep the camera steady does not enhance the experience. It only calls attention to the cinematography, kind of like a writer who’s unable to write a dialogue tag without an adverb. Get out of the way, Mr. Director. You’re ruining the illusion of being there.

Anyway, the baby moon continues. In the meantime, I’m curious to hear what other people think of this summer’s selection.

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