On Black Panther and Symbols

M’Baku. My favorite character.

 

Warning: there are a few spoilers ahead. Marked out for your easy identification.

Black Panther, as the rest of the world already knows, was brilliant. I had the good fortune of seeing it in the theater last night, and while it wasn’t a perfect movie (does every superhero movie require a BvS-style “Martha” moment? T’challa could have just said, Nope. I don’t recognize Killmonger as having a stake to the throne. Lock him up as an outsider.), it had so much awesome going for it, I’ll put it in my top two Marvel superhero movies EVER, and within the top five superhero movies ever (Behind Dark Knight, Batman v Superman, Blade, and Hellboy).

I feel a portion of what made Black Panther so successful was the importance of symbol-use, symbol-sets, and individual identity, and I’m going to talk a little about that in this post. Also, Claw had one of the greatest laugh moments in super villain history, and it was perfect.

#amwriting Do You Even Worldbuild, Bro?

My style of book prep seems like an ever-changing thing. While everyone has their own ideas and ways to make writing a book manageable, there are a lot of differences between genres, and people writing within those genres. I’m excited to talk about what I’ve been doing to write my latest few projects, and how this differs from my earlier, young’un projects that were barely a departure from fanfic.

Mental Rambling

I usually create the title first, topic second. I have an idea in my head, but I don’t know how it’ll pan out. Thus, I write the title last. Apologies if I ramble.

This evening, I looked at myself in the mirror, and studied my facial features. It might sound strange, but I find sometimes when I look hard enough I find aspects of my characters within my face. Spend enough time on Deviantart and you’ll see your fill of eyes. As close-up as you can possibly get, natural or manufactured or mystic to the point where you’re lost in the idea of being that close to another person.

NaNoWriMo and Worldbuilding Don’t Mix

It’s like oil and water. It’s what tripped me up, smashed my face on the concrete, and left me bleeding.

I have the good fortune of nearly twenty unpublished novels under my belt, and worldbuilding for each at my disposal. Is this cheating? I sure hope not.

The Acorn King is my first finished novel. I finished it four years ago, sent it out to a couple of agents/publishers, got stock responses, and it went back to the shelf. It’s a great work, I guess, but now that I re-read it, pretty unpublishable. Why? Who cares. I don’t like it, and that’s enough for me. Passive voice, weak storytelling, all wrapped in a dual first-person narration that trips over itself and re-hashes interactions at random. I loved the theory behind it–it came from a series of violent dreams I had–coupled with a strong dose of Beksinski, violin music, and a need to create a religion.

The last part is what I’m using in my “modern” steampunk scifantasy: a character with knowledge of an entire dead religion, where no surviving followers exist, pulled from the scattered references to Hecate. I wrote Acorn King as a way to understand the deity, and in doing so, created a series of characters that defy all modern religion, but play off it.

So the “worldbuilding” is mostly managed: I have a whole series of archaic texts I wrote for AK, a series of characters/gods/demons/etc to draw from in the construction of this faux magical study, and even get to create a little alternate history while I do so.

Now all I need to do is explain the reality of working between an 1850’s locksmith and a 2000’s survivalist, and I’ll be set. I’m thinking a retelling of AK is in order; three characters being the two brothers from the novel plus Barr’cuda (renamed Lotus).

Regardless, worldbuilding while working NaNoWriMo sucks. It’s a direct counterpoint to “sit down and write,” and it was a mistake that cost me nearly fifteen days of writing: every time I sat to write I stopped because I didn’t know where to go. “A mystic, a realist, and an anarchist sit down at a bar…” Where do I go from there? How do I flesh these guys out while pushing the story forward? I DON’T EVEN HAVE A “BAD GUY!”

Worldbuilding continues. I need a bad guy (aka, antagonist). I’m thinking some slimy someone bent on collecting arcane novella that, at the realization of the MCs hunting the book, starts to dabble and eventually obsess over the thing.

Fun. I’m really excited now. Revitalization of one of my favorite novels? And all these extra files (I wrote nearly twenty back-stories, a veritable Bible of allegorical reference material) are just what the doctor ordered. AK won’t change any. The worldbuilding will just hop over to another story.