Personal Status Updates! (Page 3 of 13)

That can be a dangerous path to go down. Be careful that you don't get caught making revisions after every comment you get. I have a policy of finalizing my books at publication. Aside from formatting issues or other technical flaws, I just end the process. If someone dislikes something (which happens often enough) I just accept it and move on.

Others like to keep the door open for revisions, but that would drive me nuts.

Makes sense.

Sorry if I sounded hostile.

The first draft of "Reminiscence" was not Quinn telling his story to a psychiatrist to explain how Seasons 3 - 5 were resolved. The first draft was Quinn cornering Amanda Mallory in a coffee shop. She wouldn't remember who he was. He would sit her down and tell her the entire story of SLIDERS from his particular perspective.

Matt Hutaff read the draft and pointed out that it was an awkward piece of work indeed. He said it was ridiculous to declare that Amanda would sit with a stranger for an hour listening to a deranged recollection of lunacy. That made no sense whatsoever.

He also said he thought it was silly to try to offer in-universe explanations for why Season 1 episodes aired out of order, why Season 2's additional sliders vanished, why Season 3 had magic, why Season 4 was miserable and why Season 5 didn't have any Quinn-doubles and was constantly reusing the same sets. He thought the methodology for restoring the original sliders was nonsensical and incomprehensible and raised all sorts of questions about the process.

I rewrote the story so that Quinn was now talking to a psychiatrist so there'd be a reason for someone to sit through this story. The information Quinn conveyed, I kept largely the same, but I had the psychiatrist ask *all* the questions Matt raised and had Quinn answer them.

I think this is the way to handle feedback on fiction; if you're clear on the story you want to tell, then use feedback to consider *how* you tell it.

I'm actually open to making more revisions to "Revelation." I felt I couldn't wait for Nigel Mitchell to give me feedback.  But one thing I find "Revelation" lacked was Tracy Torme's satirical humour. I'm not very good at that; my humour is more about characters snarking and referring to crazy events in the past like the time Wade made out with a robot who happened to have the same name as the last guy she dated.

So, if Nigel wants to give me some alt-Earth jokes to put in, I will probably do that and reupload the file. For future generations. :-)

I didn't even make the 'connection' until you mentioned it, guess I was too busy enjoying the story.

Great work.

--Chaser9

Thanks, Chaser9!

Hmm. Well, there are no scenes in SLIDERS REBORN: "Revelation" that resemble DOCTOR WHO's "The Power of Three." With a direct comparison:

Both "Po3" and "Revelation" feature a small, innocuous object scattered across Earth in a quantity of billions. In both stories, the objects are of unknown origin and subjected to intense scrutiny and interest and are part of a plot to destroy the world.

In "Po3," the cubes are inscrutable and implacable. The characters can't take them apart or learn anything about them. The cubes don't actually *do* anything until the third act when they start electrocuting people to death.

In "Revelation," the sliders dismantle the clocks and learn about the internals. The clocks also have sociological impact across the Earth because the countdown to an unknown outcome is disturbing and the clocks are powered by a peculiar power source that can be repurposed for other uses.

In "Po3," the characters investigate the cubes but learn nothing about them and the story is resolved without using any information drawn from examining the cubes.

In "Revelation," the sliders examine the clocks, take them apart, and later apply the knowledge they gathered from the earlier scenes. The explanation for the clocks is tied into sliding.

I dunno. I feel like the main differences are how "Revelation" is 'better' than "Po3" at least in how its mystery-box-item is handled. And "Po3"'s main problem is that it was radically restructured at the editing stage in a way that likely obscured and confused the story, resulting in questions raised and going unanswered (what did the alien have against humans and why was it necessary for the cubes to lie around for a whole year before they started murdering people?). So "Revelation" is not flawed in the areas where "Po3" was flawed. It has its own flaws!

The main conception for the doomsday clocks in "Revelation" was the realization that if the sliders were going to explore three parallel Earths in a single story, all three Earths needed some common element to link them. And I always thought "Po3" was a really great idea that didn't work out too well as aired and decided, "I need a common element, I'll use something like the 'Power of Three' cubes but make sure that my explanation for my McGuffin is directly tied into the sliding concept."

Okay. I've decided to add a note at the end of the "Revelation" script:

The author wishes to thank Chris Chibnall for inspiring the doomsday clocks with his Doctor Who episode, “The Power of Three,” in which billions of cubes were scattered across the planet Earth by an alien antagonist seeking to exterminate the human race by using his cubes as electroshock murder machines.

So, I'm continuing to flesh out the general outline for the fifth and final installment of SLIDERS REBORN and -- I don't know if this is the right approach, but I'm trying to do all the tiring things first. Rather than try to come up with alt-history details and location descriptions when writing the script, I'm gathering all that information now for each individual scene.

Rather than struggle to work out a fight scene when trying to get to the end of the narrative, I'm working out the details now. That way, when writing the script, I can simply focus on the fun stuff (dialogue and pacing). I made the mistake of shrugging off plotholes and errors in the outline thinking I'd just fix them at the scripting stage and when I hit a problem I couldn't solve at the scripting stage, I was in too deep to have any perspective.

I don't know if this approach will be more successful than what I was doing before, but what I was doing before turned out to be rather painful in the end. Writing "Revelation" almost killed me.

Hopefully, this will be an improvement.

No point leaving copyrights you own sitting around if you can get some cash out of them! :-)

Wow. Just wanted to write a quick message to say that I kinda choked up a little when I happened to stumble across this place. Sliders means a lot to me, and it is really heart warming to see so many fans still keeping the show alive through discussions, articles and new content. I last stumbled here years ago, and it is awesome to see it still around. You guys rock.

This is a post about Writing.

So -- in SLIDERS REBORN, the date given for Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo's first slide together is March 22, 1995. That's the day the Pilot aired and "Reprise" and "Reunion" were posted on Earth Prime exactly twenty years to the day of that first airing.

"Reprise" also uses the airdate of "The Seer," February 4, 2000, as the date of that episode's events. March 22 is reiterated in "Revelation" and "Reminiscence." The date is significant to the plot. "Revelation" is all about Quinn's darkest secret, the secret of 1995.

Except I just rewatched the Pilot and the date given in the episode clearly puts the day of the first slide as September 27, 1994.

Whoops.

Um. I've been willing to change my work, as indicated in the previous page of this thread. But this one -- perhaps it's stupid, but I have decided to leave it alone and allow SLIDERS REBORN to converge with the real world in this instance. In my vision of the show, we began our journey with the sliders on the same day they began theirs.

Oddly, there's actually an explanation within the "Reminiscence" interlude novella that accounts for why the date shifted. Anyone noticing the error and awaiting an explanation would receive an answer. One that is completely unintentional and yet unmistakably present.

What an error to make for someone who wants a SLIDERS revival project so much he made his own!

I am jealous.

My brother is one of my primary readers. He will do all of that nitpicking and force me to view my work from different angles. But he has been busy lately, so he hasn't had time to read through all of the books that I'm working on, which is setting back my whole schedule. He just read book 2 of 6, so I can work on that. Hopefully he will be able to get to book 3 quickly.

I have another friend who is very blunt with feedback. He wanted my Strange Fall character to be horribly murdered for her stupidity. But that is also valuable feedback. But he is busy as well.

My whole regular team of readers/editors are busy, so I am making incredibly slow progress.

I am pretty much done with book 1 though. Now I can prep it for publication while I edit the rest. :-)

Says the guy who earnestly asked me if it mattered that his fanfic started the day the pilot aired instead of the day Quinn slid as established in the pilot.

Hey - spoilers!

Anyone watching 12 Monkeys? Only caught the first few episodes on a recent binge but really enjoying thus far.

.................................

I think I might need to expand SLIDERS REBORN to six installments.

(That agonized wail in the distance is the voice of the EP.COM webmaster who is terrified at the notion of having to talk through another installment of this series over Google Hangouts instead of doing actual work.)

(Oh relax. I just realized that there's a one-year gap between "Revelation" and "Regenesis" and about five 10-page shorts might be necessary to address the time gap.)

(Anyone want to suggest titles beginning with the letters R and E?)

Thanks, Informant. It may be "Reassemble." It may be "Remix." It may be nothing. I'm going to finish Part 5 and see if the time gap is a something that should be filled or something that should be left alone.

You couldn't be more right.

Thanks, TF! I suspect that the title may end up being "Recruitment."

"Regenesis" is set one year after "Revelation." The sliders will have gone from being a ragtag team of five to a much larger operation. I don't know how necessary the shorts will be, but if the contrast between the characters at the end of "Revelation" and the start of "Regenesis" is too jarring without a transition, the shorts can be used to facilitate the character shifts. If I do end up doing the shorts, I'll likely want to find some linking plot between them. The linking plot could probably be the sliders recruiting people to join them.

Oddly, the novella that fills in the 2000 - 2015 gap between "The Seer" and REBORN was at one point called "Reassessment" -- in that the plot featured Dr. Matthew Liebling performing a psychiatric reassessment of a patient claiming to be an interdimensional travelled named Quinn Mallory. The plot stayed the same, the title became "Reminiscence."

The titles all beginning with RE may be silly, but I've committed to it now. :-) I know you don't really read fanfic, but, as always, thank you for your encouragement.

Rembrandt!

And now for another episode of Tech Talk, with Quinn Mallory (or rather, the only person to put words in Quinn's mouth in recent years).

I managed to write about 65 per cent of SLIDERS REBORN's second script on the iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard. But there came a point when I needed the beat sheet side by side with the script, maps and photos of San Francisco next to the word processor, cross-sections of digital clocks next to Final Draft. And the desktop/HTPC setup in the living room wasn't conducive to Work. At this point, I sold some old phones and bought a new laptop. The Asus Transformer T100 CHI. It's a 10-inch Windows 10 tablet with a keyboard.

It's not a powerhouse laptop -- but there's something incredibly *cool* about it. It's very cool; this thing is made of metal and the surface always feels refrigerator chilled. And it's 2.3 pounds. The speakers are surprisingly robust once volume normalization is activated. The screen is sharp; 1920 x 1200 pixels is pretty impressive for $425. It's running on Intel Atom with 2 GB of RAM and eMMC memory, but it's incredibly responsive. Mostly. Firefox freezes every two seconds on this machine, but an offshoot, Pale Moon, runs just fine, suggesting it's less this laptop and more Firefox.

The battery life is a little weird on this thing. I've gotten nine hours of typing and web searches on the laptop. But when watching video or reading comics, it only gets about 3 - 4 hours. It's probably because typing and reading text don't require more than 10 per cent brightness, but multimedia has me raising the brightness to the 9/10 mark.

There are other quirks that are a little odd. The keyboard-mouse dock connects to the tablet section via Bluetooth. Periodically, the keyboard dock loses the connection with the tablet and I need to turn the dock off and on again. About once a month, the touchpad becomes oddly slow and unresponsive and I've had to run a repair-install on the mouse drivers and software.

There's no USB port, only a microUSB 3.0 port, so I had to spend five bucks on an adapter and a USB 3.0 hub to get me some full-sized ports. There's only 64 GB of memory in the tablet, so I had to put in a 128GB microSD card to store more files. The screen is ridiculously reflective; I had to put an anti-glare protector on it to use it outside of pitch-black rooms. The back of the tablet was hard to grip, so I had to put a plastic skin to reduce the risk of dropping it.

There's a back-facing camera on the tablet. I have no idea why it's there or how to even get a program to use it.

So, it's a weird little machine, but I have come to love it and have produced a SLIDERS screenplay and novella with it that, at this point, four whole people have read. I was kind of hoping it could replace the iPad, but the battery life just isn't there for video playback or full-brightness use. But it's kind of cool.

Hmm. Never mind. I was having a bit of a creative crisis here, but I've decided that being derivative is okay so long as the borrowed ideas are, if not SLIDERS-esque in their presentation, at least presented in a way that's tailored specifically to Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo. I think SLIDERS REBORN has, up to this point, been a fun read. It's not a transcendental experience that will expand your consciousness and redefine every preconception you've ever had, but it's a good time! And so long as it stays a good time, it's worthwhile. Thank God. I can go to bed now.

About the only thing I noticed when I read it was the Power of Three-Doomsday Clock parallel, though I just thought it was a random similarity and I got a lot of excitement out of that parallel...

I think all good writers will take aspects of things they like and work it into a story, and if done well becomes something awesome and original in nature (Kinda like what Informant said). Or an author may take something that's been done before and add his own unique twist to it. (I notice this sort of thing in my own works frequently. XD) It's not seen as plagiarism or stealing so long as it's not a carbon-copy of a story with only the character names changed.

My character Dr. Cooper and his two alter-egos were all inspired by something I like. One of these alter-egos, the Watchkeeper, is greatly inspired by the Doctor, but when I lined up their similarities and differences there were more differences than similarities... and yet they're still very similar on the surface.

I'm enjoying Reborn and think it's a pretty good story, and I look forward to the next installment.

Thank you. I found two HUGE errors in "Reunion" and "Revelation" today.

I was listening to the "Greatfellas" podcast and realized -- "Reunion" refers to the con-woman from "Greatfellas" as "Leah Greenfield." The conwoman was actually June; Leah Greenfield was the mobster's wife.

And SPOILERS

I was rewatching "The Other Slide of Darkness" for reference and I realized I made a mistake in "Revelation." There's a sequence where Smarter-Quinn attempts to win Arturo, Wade and Rembrandt over to his side. Arturo dismisses Smarter-Quinn because Smarter-Quinn insulted him in the Pilot. Wade calls Smarter-Quinn a date rapist for trying to have sex with her in the Doppler supply room while using the other Quinn's identity and declares that she intends to kill him. When Smarter-Quinn approaches Rembrandt, Rembrandt casually remarks, "Weren't you wearing a crazy wig and face paint the last time I saw you?" Smarter-Quinn growls with frustration and gives up.

... except Rembrandt actually never saw Smarter-Quinn in "The Other Slide of Darkness."  Oops.

Anyway. I changed the line to, "Weren't you wearing a crazy wig and face paint the last time WE saw you?" Which isn't entirely accurate, but could work if Quinn later told Rembrandt what happened afterwards.

Dear God. For an obsessive fan, my memory of the episodes is being revealed as extremely suspect.

I am currently in the process of switching my laptop's hard drive over to an SSD. Ithe should make the computer faster and more stable, assuming that I don't lose everything by mistake.

Wish me luck!

I think that I will watch the new X-Files and see how it goes before I get my hopes up for a spinoff.

It worked! I cloned my old drive over to the SSD, so everything is there. My old drive is still in the other slot in my computer (since I can't get the screws out), so now I have two drives... the SSD is super fast though. My computer was getting slower and slower to turn on, and even when I got it started (which took forever), I had to wait several more minutes before I could get anywhere on the internet. Now it's lightning fast to turn on and connects right away.

I got a pretty good deal on a 250GB SSD. It's half the storage of my old drive, but it should be enough for now. Especially with other storage options. Right now, I'm just happy to have the basics running a lot more smoothly.

Eventually, I'd like to get my old drive out, if only to reduce noise and power consumption. I'll keep it around for storage, but it doesn't make long-term sense to keep it internal.

Another note -- I have decided to take a break from this forum. I am experiencing a considerable amount of RAGE within two threads and I need some time to cool off. So, this isn't good bye, but I will see you all again after a sufficient interval of time. Rest assured that if you experience any technical difficulties, any odd glitches in the Bboard, any trouble at all with the software and web hosting -- TOUGH. I'm taking time off.

See you next week. Don't burn the place down while I'm away.

I said I wasn't going to deal with Colin in SLIDERS REBORN and would just write him off as the product of an altered timeline. But then I felt so terrible about failing to include Mallory in REBORN -- so awful that I wrote Robert Floyd a letter of grief-stricken apology, explaining that Mallory is really hard to introduce because his presence instantly raises questions (Why is his name Quinn and why doesn't he look like Jerry and why doesn't he have doubles and... ), questions that are a massive distraction, questions which I can't answer.

Rob was absolutely devastated to learn that his character had been excluded from a piece of fan fiction for a TV show he worked on for one season 15 years ago -- which is to say he didn't really understand what I was talking about and was also quite pre-occupied with a busy schedule of COCKTAIL THEATRE performances.

(I'm not crazy. I front-loaded the E-mail with some news articles I thought he'd find interesting; the fanfic chatter was in a post-script. The articles, he did understand and find hilarious and I'm transcribing them for Earth Prime.)

Anyway. I felt so much worse after that. So I wrote a scene where Rembrandt has a photograph of Mallory. Except then, it became necessary to also address Colin and his absence as well. So I grudgingly did so. God damn it.

Warning: there is a bit of ego in this post. Or at least faux-ego. With SLIDERS REBORN, I am (pretending to be) leading the SLIDERS property. I have a (largely imagined) responsibility to shepherd this property in a fashion that is accessible for its audience.

That's largely an audience of SLIDERS fans, a decision for which Matt Hutaff has been (correctly) critical. Doing a direct sequel to "The Seer" albeit with a time gap, treating the sliders as familiar characters to whom the readers are being re-introduced -- SLIDERS REBORN isn't a mass-audience product, it's not an entry-level story for a new generation of SLIDERS fans.

That's something I think media tie-in material can do because the target audience is the fans. Examples of such products include DOCTOR WHO comics and novels, the X-FILES SEASON 10 - 11 comics, STAR TREK novels -- writers feel comfortable assuming the audience is familiar with the mythology, continuity and signifiers.

I enjoy using continuity as a *tool*. I don't throw in references randomly; they are present because they create a feeling of intimacy between the characters and the reader. They create a sense of shared experience: we all saw Rembrandt lose his Cadillac, we all saw him admit he had no idea how to recharge the timer, we all saw Wade revealed as a mutilated human computer. When I bring these things up in scripts, I think it makes the reader feel like they are one of the sliders.

However, continuity references that don't serve a plot or emotional purpose are a distraction. They interrupt pacing. They throw off the rhythm of scenes. It's like pausing in the middle of a song to interject some unnecessary commentary before pressing play again. As I said, Mallory's presence brings in so many questions and requires that the story stop in place completely in order to answer them. It's disruptive.

I mean, SLIDERS REBORN has some crazy long scenes -- but those scenes are filled with the voices of the characters whom we all missed and longed to see again, so I felt that was simply giving the audience everything they wanted and more -- but if they stopped suddenly to explain who Mallory is and why he's there and how he can exist -- the energy would instantly deflate.

HIGHLIGHT TO SEE SPOILERS

When Smarter-Quinn from the Pilot shows up in REBORN, it was necessary to account for how he was in "The Other Slide of Darkness" as a suicidal shaman of a forest tribe who claimed to have given the Kromaggs their sliding technology. This was so convoluted that I decided to address it very distantly -- first with acknowledging that "Darkness" did happen through having Rembrandt comment that the last time the sliders saw him, Smarter-Quinn was wearing a crazy wig and facepaint. Then finally, I had Smarter-Quinn mention that when reality was rewritten, he went insane (which indicates his claim to have given Kromaggs sliding was a delusion), but he found himself eventually. Anything more would have been disruptive.

Mallory in SLIDERS REBORN would serve no purpose. The whole concept for Mallory was fundamentally flawed; the idea was that he would be more street-smart where Quinn was book-smart. Except Quinn's intelligence was completely capable of addressing physical and practical problems through improvised solutions and quick-thinking -- so Mallory wasn't actually bringing anything to the table that Quinn didn't already have; if anything, he brought less. If Quinn is in the story, Mallory is completely unnecessary.

Robert Floyd, very cleverly, focused on the identity crisis; the idea that Quinn and Mallory were two separate, conflicting personalities who would both have different perspectives. Mallory would be selfish, emotional, insincere; Quinn would be moral, analytical, heartfelt. Mallory would be empathetic and eager to engage with people; Quinn would be withdrawn and secretive. Quinn would be a risktaking crusader for justice; Mallory would want to save his own skin first. That peculiar dynamic would honour Jerry O'Connell while creating something new -- which truly speaks to how much Floyd respected Quinn Mallory and SLIDERS. But if Jerry's Quinn is present, this simply isn't needed.

Colin also serves no purpose; if you have Jerry as the young scientist, you don't need another one. Colin's naivete and innocence are also unnecessary because Quinn already had that sense of wide-eyed wonder or would if he were written correctly.

Ultimately, my (imagined?) responsibilities are to serving the original four -- Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo. The original and iconic sliders. But in my view, the best version of Sliders would have Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt, Arturo, Maggie, Colin, Mallory and Diana all sitting at the table together. If my story needs an action-girl with spy skills, that's Maggie; if my story needs to give Arturo another scientist who isn't Quinn to bounce off of, that's Diana. And I have some ideas for how to integrate the Season 3 monsters into a Season 1 - 2 style version of SLIDERS. But Colin and Mallory -- how do they serve the original four?

I have found no satisfactory answer and no one has been able to give me one -- so I'm steering clear of them outside of isolated visual and in-dialogue reference.

I like your explanation for Mallory. It remains absolutely baffling to me that Season 5 never provided any such explanation. I don't know what the hell they were thinking. They probably weren't. But I still don't see how this bypasses the need for an explanation -- none of the information you suggest was ever onscreen, meaning the script can't assume the reader already knows it and it would be necessary to spell it out. And again, for what purpose? To bring in a character to do things that Jerry's Quinn can do just fine?

And this comes back to my problem with the Mallory character; he was badly written because the route chosen to make him contrast with Quinn made Mallory totally unnecessary. Quinn was 'street-smart' in his own way.

I think that the best way to approach Mallory would have been to make him more a variant on Quinn. Jerry's Quinn was focused on mathematics as a tool for addressing physics and quantum mechanics as well as engineering and computer programming. I think Floyd's Quinn should have been focused on mathematics as well -- but seen it all only in terms of money. And this would have played up the criminal aspect of Mallory more; he's obsessed with money and scamming some out of people even if he can't take it with him. Basically like what we saw of him trying to profit off Maggie's hair in "The Return" but even moreso. Then there would be a clear contrast between the Floyd-personality and the Jerry-personality.