Month: June 2015

What would you say is the most effective armor in fiction? Power armor? Magical barriers? Superman’s invulnerable skin?

Nah. It’s Plot Armor. The invisible, intangible protection awarded to characters and things that functions mainly by virtue of their importance to the story, rather than any particular logical reason within the story itself. Sometimes it makes sense that Indiana Jones survives a particular bit of danger. Sometimes you have to just not think about him getting dragged under a speeding truck and not showing so much as scuffmarks on his trousers as a result. You don’t think too hard about how he survives traveling from the coast of Africa to somewhere in Indonesia on the outside of a German submarine. He’s the hero. Heck, his name is in most of the movie titles (or all of them, now that Raiders of the Lost Ark is marketed as Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark). Being the hero hath it’s privileges, including the occasional bout of invulnerability because the writer says so.

Now, although this comic is not titled Susannah Zane and the Zombie Ranch, I do recall a reader once mentioning that they never felt particularly roused by any scene putting our intrepid young ranch owner in danger, because she benefited from Plot Armor. As the main protagonist, she’d obviously pull through whatever perils were occurring, so there was nothing being killed in such scenes except time.

As a writer there’s not much to say in response to that, unless perhaps you’re a Joss Whedon or George R. R. Martin who takes a perverse delight in killing off characters the audience doesn’t expect will be killed. Oh, you don’t get concerned because obviously I won’t do anything to such a beloved or important member of my cast? We’ll see about THAT, buddy! Gonna shake your preconceptions of narrative arc and hero’s journeys right up!

Mind you, the “anyone can die” school brings its own set of problems, such as, for instance, Dawn having to abandon the Song of Ice and Fire books after the third or so as the characters she kept investing her care in kept meeting dire ends. Yes, the Red Wedding is a shocking scene, but at what cost? By the time we get to the end of the fifth book, the betrayal and murder of yet another major protagonist becomes almost an exercise in nihilism that had me wondering if there might be better stories to spend my time following. It didn’t help that much of A Dance With Dragons felt to me like GRRM was casting about randomly looking for directions to take his tale, as if the sacrifice of so many of his protagonists had left him as unanchored as his audience.

As noted above, the TV Tropes version of Plot Armor is specifically about a major character being able to survive things they really shouldn’t, but it’s more useful to me to discuss it as a wider definition. The idea that the invulnerability to death or lasting harm of a main protagonist somehow makes for boring or predictable fiction seems flawed, just based on observable evidence that the “anyone can die” type of story — outside of certain genres like horror — has always seemed to be more of the exception than the norm. That’s why Whedon and Martin can shock us, after all — by subverting the expectation. What was most interesting to me about the reader comment I mentioned is that it represents a valid viewpoint, but a viewpoint you really don’t hear expressed much. Most of us (myself included) seem to be just fine with biting our nails in suspense as Indy is running for his life through a series of deadly traps. I turn around and concoct scenes of my own putting Suzie in mortal peril and the comments section more often than not has at least one reader on the edge of their seat as they wait for the next installment. It doesn’t matter that we’re 99.99% sure they’ll make it out of the situation intact — as long as we have any care for the character in the first place, that remaining 0.01% is enough to grip our attention.

Perhaps it’s in a sense like the experience of a roller coaster. I don’t know the exact accident statistics on a well-maintained roller coaster. This site claims your chances of a fatal experience are 1 in 300 million, and regardless I would guess most people don’t go on roller coasters on the off chance that an accident happens. Instead they go to get an adrenalin rush thrill high of danger while remaining in a controlled and (mostly) safe environment. The plot armor surrounding a character could serve a similar function, allowing us to gasp and worry as Flash Gordon dangles over a cliff, but having the reassurance deep down that he’ll be fine. Does it take away the thrill of a roller coaster to know that it’s astronomically unlikely you won’t walk away from it when it’s over?

The “anyone can die” model seeks to emulate the randomness and senselessness that death and suffering in our real world all too often exhibit; and while its effects can be powerful gut punches delivered to an audience seeking the safe thrill high of following their heroes, there’s no denying that it can leave behind a certain feeling of being cheated once the shock wears off. On those occasions that heroes die, they’re expected to die in meaningful ways, ways befitting their elevated place in the narrative. Otherwise, it’s the roller coaster flying off the track, the violation of an unspoken standard contract between reader and author. Best to make sure the results are worth it, and it’s not just a cheap shock tactic to be followed by an ultimately hollow aftermath where both author and audience find themselves lost. Plot Armor for your protagonist(s) might be one of the oldest storytelling tricks in the book, but because of that very weight of centuries of tradition and audience satisfaction, it’s something to strip away only with the utmost of care.

The heading I chose here is perhaps more dramatic than this article warrants, but as an addendum to my Kickstarter posts I wanted to bring up something else that aspiring project creators out there may not be aware of. It was a bit of a surprise to me, although looking back, it really shouldn’t have been. There’s money at stake in these campaigns, not to mention people’s dreams; and whenever those two things intersect, you’re going to get a certain amount of shady activity.

My first taste was getting messages sent to me through Kickstarter’s messaging system within mere moments of launching the campaign, the kind of reaction time that all but screams “bot”. An example:

Hi, let me first of all wish you all the best with your campaign!

If you are looking for marketing support (at any stage) to help you to get more visibility, social media marketing, press release writing + press coverage, online ads and more, it will be our pleasure to discuss the opportunity.

Ps if you are interested in more information, make sure to include your e-mail address so we can get in touch directly. Happy to review the campaign and get you the necessary information to get started.

Slightly slower on the draw was this one sent after midnight, from a gentleman whose account is now marked as deleted. Fancy that.

Back in 2011 I wrote about how we as human beings are obsessed with stories about the way we End, i.e. apocalypses of various flavors, and particularly how those flavors have evolved over the decades in modern pop culture media as the nature of our fears shifted. I have a thought still in my mind that the most commercially successful, or at least unforgettable tales of apocalypse are the ones that resonate with the time period they are released in. In a sense the best ones even represent a snapshot of that time period in general, even if their particular subject matter seems on the surface to be outlandish and nothing you could really be expected to take seriously. Basic physics precludes the idea of ants becoming the size of school buses, but that didn’t stop THEM! from touching a nerve, because the THEY of THEM! was a result of atomic radiation. I believe that origin is very important. The giant ants would have seemed far more ridiculous to the audience of the time, for example, were they discovered to have been the product of a vengeful voodoo curse.

That’s a weird thing to state, but that’s the nature of science fiction and horror where you bend or break certain laws of reality as we know them, but if you don’t ground the story somehow it won’t elicit the appropriate visceral reaction from the audience. Tapping into the apocalyptic zeitgeist, by accident or design, can help with that. Just as a rough hypothesis, I think the post-WWII breakdown in the United States goes something like this:

1950s/1960s: Communism / Radiation / Space Invasion

1970s: Government Conspiracy / Street Crime

1980s: Nuclear War / Robots / Toxic Waste

1990s: Hackers / Genetic Engineering

2000s: Plague / Terrorism

Now I’m sure this could be picked apart. John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) could be seen as at least as much of an anti-Communist parable as the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was, but on the other hand fears of Communism arguably made a resurgence in the early to mid-80s, just as fears of an invasion from space (whether by aliens or asteroids) had a bit of a resurgence in the ’90s. A movie like Alien got in touch with more primal fears, though the conspiracy element of being betrayed by those in power was certainly there as well.

And where, you might ask, do zombies fit in? Well, they keep being reimagined, don’t you think? In Night of the Living Dead the implied culprit was a crashed (and irradiated!) space probe. Dawn of the Dead doesn’t really concern itself with causation, but the outlaw biker gang certainly ties into ’70s zeitgeist. Return of the Living Dead puts the blame squarely on toxic waste, while the Resident Evil games are on the balance between genetic engineering and plague, with the 2002 film missing the Y2K mark but still throwing in a wacked out computer on top of everything. Finally the Dawn of the Dead remake and 28 Days Later kick off our current zombie situation of plague combined with being struck quickly and without warning in your own backyard.

What’s next? Well, much as I hate to say it, I think The Day After Tomorrow was a film on the leading edge of the zeitgeist for the 2010’s. It might have still been a little early to really register, a fate which I don’t think there’s any argument for with Waterworld in the mid-90s. The U.S. economy was humming along in 1995, gas was 99 cents a gallon, and Waterworld looked completely ridiculous. By 2004 The Day After Tomorrow is a little bit more on people’s minds what with Al Gore banging the drum on climate change, but it still seems more laughable than anything.

Now it’s 2015. Last year, Snowpiercer was on a lot of minds. This year Mad Max: Fury Road won’t let go of people’s imaginations (including mine), a movie filmed several years ago but releasing to general audiences right on the heels of things like California’s “one year left” drought scare and the Nestlé chairman’s declaration that people don’t have a right to water. Both of these news items were quickly downplayed as misinterpretations, but the fact they took hold so quickly and spread so far is telling. I believe that whether we give voice to it or not, we are starting to get really, really concerned with what we might have done to the planet’s environment, and what the consequences are going to be. Call it the Droughtpocalypse or even just more generally a Climatepocalpyse, but this is now becoming our vision of The End. Where in the 80s Interstellar‘s crisis necessitating a new world would have been all about nukes, now it’s all about our crops dying off. The term “cli fi” has even been coined to specifically denote science fiction dealing with catastrophic climate change.

It’s a thing. And I’m postulating it will be the Next Big Thing, at least in terms of apocalypse fiction. Where will the zombies fit into that? I’m not quite sure yet, but they’ve proven a rather adaptable monster through all the previous eras. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, I’m sure they’ll (uh, uh) find a way…

A certain Princess of Alderaan once told her captors, “The more you tighten your grip… the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Then her home planet got blown up. But I digress. The point I perhaps want to get at here is that no matter how much you think you are prepared for your Kickstarter attempt, no matter how many successful or failed attempts you study, no matter how many peers who have been down the road before you that you query… you’re going to get surprised by some things.

For example, Kickstarter is very up front about the bite it’s going to take out of your funding if you reach your goal. No matter what, 5% of the money you raise is going to be shaved off the top as their cut for providing the platform, and in addition to that they indicate around an additional 3% to 5% will be collected for credit card processing fees. It wasn’t until towards the end of the campaign that I realized that elsewhere on their very site was a much more comprehensive breakdown.

It’s harder to find, and I suppose that’s not so weird when you consider that there are two variables that need to solidify into fixed totals, i.e. the number of pledges received and their individual amounts. You won’t know either of those for sure until the campaign is over, and even then you may not know for a while depending on how many collection issues there are.

Collection issues? Yes. What you may not realize and what your backers may not realize is that even though they make pledges and commit their credit card information, none of that is actually processed until the campaign is over. Kickstarter doesn’t check validity until that time, either, so for instance if you accidentally entered one of your old, expired credit cards on a pledge, it will seem to be accepted, only to bounce after the closing bell tolls. Same for if you were fine on your credit limit when you pledged on the first day, but a month later you don’t have enough room. In these cases the invalid pledges are flagged on the backer report and automated emails are supposedly sent out to the backers in question, who have a week to address whatever issue caused the bounce before Kickstarter discards the pledge. Be aware of this.

Also be aware that when Kickstarter warns that it may be up to 14 days after close of the campaign before funds are transferred to you, they mean it. In our case we had some invalid pledges but all of them got corrected before the 7 day deadline was up. It still took the full 14 days before Kickstarter released the money, which in fact was right to the minute on a Sunday evening, meaning it was most likely not the result of any person being involved. That’s a two week delay, plus whatever time it takes for your bank to verify the transfer, and I don’t remember reading any Kickstarter guides that mention this fact. If you’ve got some money or credit to work with you could start your purchases before that point, but there’s where it would really help to know exactly how much you’ll have to work with, right? Well, happily I can report that as soon as all pledges were verified I used that breakdown guide I linked above and the total I came up with was indeed what we ended up getting. Still, if you don’t have any extra money to spare, you should factor in those extra two weeks to any fulfillment that requires you to make purchase orders.

I remember prior to the campaign asking some peers who’d done Kickstarters how much I should be worried about declined pledges and factoring them into calculations, and they answered they hadn’t ever really had problems. This turned out to be the case for us as well, but it also turns out I had perhaps asked the wrong question. I should have asked about cancellations.

No one I talked to or looked up prior to the Kickstarter had anything to say about cancellations. Perhaps that was just a research failure on my part, since after the fact I managed to dig up some articles. As it was, I was unprepared for it to happen. It wasn’t the last minute, it wasn’t the result of a recent update, it wasn’t anything I could really figure out, but suddenly in the third week of the campaign, over the course of a few days about four separate people pulled their pledges. When they do so, you lose track of them, so unless you were in contact with them beforehand you no longer have a way to get in touch. That’s probably intentional on Kickstarter’s part to prevent people from being harassed, but it can leave you a tad fretful as a project runner. For this is the quirkiest bit: when a backer cancels a pledge they’re asked to give their reasons why, but those reasons are only sent to Kickstarter, never to the project runner — not even in a vague sense.

That means your backer could have spent entire paragraphs apologizing and stating their life reasons on why they had to cancel and that it’s nothing personal, and all you’ll ever know is that they left. And on their end, they might not be aware you never got to read why. You’ll also perhaps wonder, as I did, how many pullouts might be considered ‘normal’ for a project since you hadn’t heard anyone talking about it at all. The answer, if you’re curious, appears to be around 5%. We ended up with four cancellations during the course of the campaign, one of whom actually ended up renewing before it was over, so that was well within the margins. If you know what those margins are. One of the others later got in touch with me through the Zombie Ranch site to let me know he ended up with some unexpected financial issues. The other two, I’ll probably never know.

It’s just something that happens, so be prepared. Pledges can be freely made, canceled, altered up or down, or remade for most of the campaign, with one exception: if canceling your pledge would take the project below it’s minimum goal, it cannot be done in the last 24 hours of the campaign without contacting Kickstarter customer service to explain the special circumstances. Obviously that’s to prevent someone ruining the entire project’s funding by a last-minute pullout, which otherwise would potentially be a very effective dick move. Still, as far as I know there’s no such limits on if the pledge won’t kill the minimum goal, which means to keep in mind that any of your stretch goals are vulnerable.

It’s customary to mark off stretch goals as they’re reached in the course of the campaign, with much congratulations and thanks. It’s possible, however, that cancellations or invalid pledges after the fact could leave you without the money you actually needed to enact them. We had no last-minute cancellations, but at the end of the campaign we only met our stretch goal with $15 to spare, and then we ended up with those three invalid pledges I talked about earlier. Had all of those pledges been dropped, we would have lost enough money that we would have had to backtrack and announce that the stretch wasn’t met after all, which would have been both disappointing and embarrassing.

How can you account for that? Well, the scary thing is you really can’t. You won’t know how many cancellations you get until the campaign is over, and you won’t know how many pledges get dropped for payment issues until up to a week after. So I suppose you just have to have a certain measure of faith, or better yet a significant buffer in your calculations. When facing the unknown, it helps.