August 2, 2009

How I got my literary agent

Filed under: Uncategorized — Boyd Morrison @ 4:11 pm

It’s been 13 years since I finished writing my first novel. Three weeks ago, I got my first US publishing deal, and my debut thriller novel, The Ark, will be released in 12 different foreign markets and counting. So every writer who talks about persistence being a defining trait of published authors is absolutely correct. Listen to them. Keep writing. Don’t stop at that first novel. Don’t rewrite it over and over. Move on. You’ll improve your chances a hundredfold by writing that next book.

I started writing my first novel, The Adamas Blueprint, while I was finishing my PhD dissertation. Why I thought I could do both at the same time, I have no idea. It took a year to finish the book, and in 1996 I queried four literary agents. Yes, only four. Out of those four, one of them asked to read a partial manuscript and gave me some positive feedback but ultimately decided not to represent me.

One out of four was a stellar percentage, but I didn’t realize it at the time, and I stopped submitting it. My wife thought I gave up too easily, and she was absolutely right (I listen to her much better now).

At the time, she was just starting her pre-med courses in anticipation of applying to med school. It meant that I would be supporting her during her training, so I put my writing on hold to concentrate on work. Yes, I could have done both at the same time, but my job consisted of sitting at the computer for at least eight hours a day, and the thought of coming home to spend another two hours in front of the computer writing was horrific to me.

So the deal was that I would support her through nine years of pre-med, med school, and residency, and then when she was a full-fledged doctor, I would be able to quit my job and get nine years to become a published author. Not a bad deal, eh?

In January 2005, I left my job to crank up my writing again. I finished my second novel, The Palmyra Impact, in 18 months. Now it was 2006, time to do the agent search again. This time I was more savvy. I went to writers’ conferences like the Las Vegas Writers Conference, Thrillerfest, and the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference, and pitched my novel in person. I also queried the traditional way.

I would say my success at getting an agent to ask for a partial manuscript was approximately 1000% better when I pitched my book in person than by query letter. I would strongly advise anyone looking for an agent to pitch them in person at a conference. Putting a face to a book gets the partial through much faster than if it’s a query letter from someone the agent has never met.

At least four agents asked to see the entire manuscript of The Palmyra Impact, but no takers. They liked it, but not enough to represent it. I know I got over 50 rejections, but after you get above that, do you really need to know the exact number? Suffice to say, I queried every agent who I thought would be remotely interested. None were.

Back to the keyboard. I finished my third thriller novel, The Ark, in 2007. This time, I didn’t bother to query. I went straight to conferences to pitch it. The very first time I pitched the story was at Agentfest, a pitch session at Thrillerfest. It was the first year they’d done it, and it wasn’t the kind of pitch sessions where agents talk to a new aspiring author every five minutes.

At the 2007 Agentfest, agents only saw authors during the lunch session, and it was arranged that one agent would sit at each table. Who you were sitting with was totally random. I was talking with author Jon Land at the time, and we were late to the lunch, so we sat at the very last table in the room, which was about six miles from the front.

Being late to that lunch changed my life.

At that table was Irene Goodman, a very well-respected agent who has been in the business for 30 years. She had been representing primarily romance and non-fiction but was looking for thrillers to add to her portfolio.

When we were all seated, she went around the table and asked each writer to pitch their novels to her. Here’s the exact pitch I gave her for The Ark:

A relic from Noah’s Ark gives a religious fanatic and his followers a weapon that will let them recreate the effects of the biblical flood, and former combat engineer Tyler Locke has seven days to find the Ark and the secret hidden inside before it’s used to wipe out civilization again.

As soon as I said “Noah’s Ark”, she asked to see the first three chapters. I told her I still had some slight editing to do, but when it was ready and polished, I would send it to her. I would advise anyone pitching a novel to have a pithy one sentence summary of what your book is. If you can do that, it’s clear that you know what your story is about, which is more more attractive to an agent than a rambling five minute recounting of the plot.

During Thrillerfest and then the PNWA conference that year, I found ten more agents who wanted to read a partial of The Ark. Two months went by as I got feedback from some trusted friends and family on how to improve the book. I also got blurbs from James Rollins and Jon Land, both of whom generously agreed to read an early copy. If you want bestselling authors to give you blurbs, go to conferences and spend time with them. Again, writers’ conferences are where it’s at.

By this time, Irene (she tells me now) wondered if I had forgotten about her. I hadn’t. She was among the first agents I sent the sample chapters to. I mailed them on a Thursday in September. On the following Monday, she called me. CALLED ME! She was the first and only agent to ever call me, which made quite the impression.

She told me she loved the opening, and would I be willing to Fedex the entire manuscript to her? Uh, let me think…Yeah! I would have driven it there on a unicycle if she wanted me to.

Irene received it on Tuesday. I got a call from her on Thursday offering me representation, which was about the most amazing phone call I’ve ever gotten. I chewed it over for a day (I’d sent it to other agents who weren’t quite as quick to respond). On Friday, I accepted.

That was September 2007. It took another two years to get a publishing deal for The Ark and now we’re in negotiations to publish The Adamas Blueprint and The Palmyra Impact (I’ll put the story of how I got published in a separate blog post). But Irene believed in me, my book, and my writing career. That, my friends, is what you want in an agent: someone who is going to be just as persistent as you need to be.

July 1, 2009

The Jeopardy! Audition: What is the definition of nerve-racking?

Filed under: Pop Culture — Boyd Morrison @ 9:48 pm

As with most good things that have happened in my life, my wife was responsible for my Jeopardy! tryout. She knew that my mind is a repository for ridiculously useless information, to the point where I can’t get anyone to play Trivial Pursuit with me unless I supply copious amounts of beer. I can’t remember important info that would actually benefit me, such as when trash day is (well, I do remember, but it usually isn’t until the garbage truck is pulling up to the house at 7AM and I have to make a mad dash out to the driveway clad in the first thing I can grab off the coat hook, even if it’s an umbrella). But if you don’t have an iPhone handy and absolutely need to know the capital of Latvia, I’m your guy (answer: what is L? Get it? On second thought, maybe you should just get an iPhone). So when my wife saw a commercial for Seattle Jeopardy! tryouts, she saw it as the perfect opportunity for me to risk soul-crushing embarrassment in front of a national TV audience.

No, the real reason she mentioned it to me was because she knew I’d jump at the chance. Since the time we met, I had been a frequent Jeopardy! viewer. From the comfort of our sofa, under no pressure whatsoever, I could yell out the answers before the question was even finished. We’ve all had that feeling, which is why the show is so popular. Who hasn’t watched in disbelief as a contestant blew a question that you found disgustingly simple?

“He didn’t know that the Treaty of Ghent was signed in 1814? What a moron!”

Now the fact that I had to Google that last bit of info wouldn’t have bothered me at all because I wouldn’t have lost any real money when I yelled out the wrong answer. Plus, I’d be able to rationalize my error.

“So it was 1814, not 1947. Those are both numbers. Close enough.”

So I thought, heck yeah, I could kick butt on Jeopardy! To get into the audition, all I had to do was sign up online. At the time in 2002, there was no pre-test like there was for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (but there is now). So all I had to do was wait for an email telling me where and when to show up.

I showed up on a weekday afternoon at the downtown Westin hotel, which had reserved a huge ballroom for the audition. Every two hours during the two-day tryouts, they herded 100 people into the ballroom. While my group waited, I tried to size up the competition. Most paced nervously or sat staring at the floor, but some people were reading almanacs in the incredibly likely chance that a question would come up about the one page they were reading over and over. I simply concentrated on not hyperventilating.

When they called us in, I chose a seat near the front but not in the first row. No reason to seem overeager, even though I would have gladly sung the national anthem covered only in shaving cream to get on the show.

A representative from the show explained what would happen next. They would project fifty questions on the screen in front of us. We would have approximately 8 seconds to write down the answer to each question in a fill-in-the-blank form. Spelling didn’t count, but if you thought “Abraham Lincoln” was spelled “Aybram Linkin,” you probably weren’t going to ace the test anyway. Then they’d collect the tests and grade them while we watched a short video, after which they’d tell us the results. If you didn’t get at least 35 out of the 50 answers correct, you wouldn’t qualify and they would get to shoot you.

At least, I know that’s what I’d want to happen if I didn’t qualify. What would actually happen was they would call out the names of the people who passed. Everyone else would shuffle out in the walk of shame. We wouldn’t get our scores back, so the show’s rep joked that if you didn’t qualify, you could say you missed it by only one question, which to me would have been like saying that I missed meeting Tom Hanks by only one minute. Thanks! I feel much better about missing a once-in-a-lifetime experience!

Then we took the quiz. I didn’t think it was too hard, which is never a good sign. I handed it in, and they went to grade them while we watched a video that seemed to last as long as the OJ trial. When it was over, they came back and read the names. Except for a few random stomach noises, the audience was dead silent.

Out of 100 people, my name was the third called. Big sigh of relief. They only called out one more name.

After everyone else filed out, the ballroom felt cavernous, the four of us alone with the Jeopardy! crewmembers. Next on the agenda was a mock game run off a laptop, but played exactly like it was on the show, with the grid projected on the screen and us holding hand buzzers. They have you play this mock game because they want to make sure that you understand the rules, that you speak more coherently than Porky Pig, and that you don’t have the personality of gravel.

After we each got a chance to answer a few questions right, they stopped the game and asked us questions like Alex Trebek would after the first commercial break. They asked me what I would do with the money if I won. Knowing that it wouldn’t sound very sympathetic if I said “Vegas, baby!”, I said that I’d use it to repay my wife’s medical school loans. They liked that. I knew they would. But it was a lie. There was no way in hell I’d win that much money.

Then they thanked us and told us we might be called sometime in the next year. Or we might not. “Don’t hold your breath” was the gist of it.

So I went back to my job at Microsoft, completely putting it out of my mind. After two weeks of not thinking about it obsessively, my office phone rang. It was The Call. They wanted to know if I could make it down to LA in two weeks for a taping of the show. Flabbergasted isn’t a word I often use in everyday speech, but I think the following was my verbatim response:

“Glarg bnork armble smanshure.” Or something to that effect.

They got what I was saying, so we went over the details. It was official. I would be appearing on Jeopardy!

Now I just had to figure out how to cram the entire breadth of human knowledge into my brain in the next two weeks.

But not until I called my wife. I had some trivia to share.

March 31, 2009

Oh No! It’s Typo!

Filed under: Writing — Boyd Morrison @ 10:58 pm

I hate typos. Despise them. They are vermin to be wiped from the face of the planet, ranking just below tapeworms and just above spammers trying to sell me herbal V1@gr@.

The irony is that, as I have discovered this past week, typos love me. They can’t get enough of me. Apparently, they get so distraught if they do not appear in my novels that they insert themselves without my knowledge just so they don’t feel left out of the fun.

After I posted my complete, polished novels to my web site and the Kindle, several alert readers notified me that they’d come across a few typos, which I’m grateful to know about so I can go back and fix them. That doesn’t mean I don’t need a moment to gather myself after finding out about them, because my reaction is usually something like this:

ARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!

I add in some very bad words if I want to be even more articulate.

The reason for my frustration is that I proofread my books very carefully to make sure they are as error-free as possible. I spend hours reading and rereading the novels until my eyes glaze over and I can’t see straight.  I don’t see how that method can fail.

And yet, it does. My most frequent typos are of the mixed-up variety. I type “their” instead of “there” or “your” instead of “you’re.” Of course, this kind of error can lead to some amusing outcomes. A few years ago, when some striking union workers felt they were being taken advantage of by management, they didn’t help their cause by carrying placards saying, “The managers think your stupid!”

But I can see how I might miss something like that. What I can’t understand is how I used a word like “valediction” in place of “valedictorian.” I’ve never used “valediction” in a sentence in my life. In fact, I had to look up what it meant (Val*e*dic*tion: a word Boyd never uses).

The worst typo I found, all by myself, was when I used “astronomist” instead of “astronomer.” Now, “astronomist” is not, technically, a word, so how both I and spellchecker missed it is a mystery, although some other people in the same situation might make wild accusations. For example, I would never start the rumor that Microsoft Word randomly inserts nonsense words into a person’s writing just for the enjoyment of programmers who get hilarious emails every time someone sends out a document with the word “squatful” inserted into it. That would be irresponsible.

Besides, I can’t depend on spellchecker because it’s not always reliable. It hasn’t happened lately, but it used to be that when I typed “Boyd Morrison” into Word, it would underline the words in red, diligently alerting me that I had misspelled my own name. When I asked spellchecker for a better suggestion, it came up with what should have been so obvious to me: “Body Moron.” Perhaps it was suggesting a new pen name for me.

I can take comfort in the fact that even NY Times bestselling authors have books with typos. My friend, James Rollins, whose books are epic action-adventure stories that I gobble down in about a day, wrote The Last Oracle, the cautionary tale of what happens if you stand too close to a molten nuclear reactor (hint: it involves the words “brain” and “tapioca”).

Toward the end of The Last Oracle, I found the sentence, “Her entire form shook as teats spilled in shining streaks of joy.” Jim, of course, meant “tears”, but when I tried to imagine the scene as written, I laughed so hard that the person sitting next to me on the airplane thought I had a medical condition.

When I wrote an email to Jim with praise for the book, I also told him of the typo. He emailed back just one sentence: “I read your kind words with teats in my eyes.”

So I suppose, like Jim, I should keep a sense of humor about typos and their affection for me. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like I could get saddled with some kind of ridiculous nickname just because of typos.

Sincerely,
Body Moron

March 18, 2009

She/he/e-mail

Filed under: User Interface Design — Boyd Morrison @ 8:50 am

I have been a Hotmail subscriber since the dawn of the Internet, way back when searching with “The Google” or “friending” somebody would end in either a lawsuit or an arrest. Microsoft was the most powerful entity in the known universe instead of “that Xbox company,” Napster was still the best way to steal music, and download speeds were measured in lunar cycles.

It was fortunate that I registered so early for Hotmail because I was able to secure the coveted email address, wordweasel@hotmail.com, before anyone else could. You have no idea how much money I’ve been offered for that address.

So for the last thousand of your web years, I’ve been faithfully using the wordweasel Hotmail address, neglecting the seductive pitches from Yahoomail, Gmail, AIM mail, Awoogamail, Hmail, Bazootymail, ABCDEFmail, and some service by the ridiculous name of Windows Live Mail. Nope, I’ve stayed with Hotmail and they’ve stayed with me and that’s the way it’s gonna be.

But like all long-term relationships, we’ve had our ups and downs. Sometimes it’s been a minor spat, with Hotmail shutting down in a huff and me signing out without so much as a word. Oh, we’d stay away from each other for a little while until things cooled off, but I just wouldn’t able to control myself, and I’d be emailing again the next day, not even remembering what our argument was about in the first place.

But other times we’ve had knock-down drag-out fights, the kind where the police would find me face down on the front lawn in a wife-beater, yelling Hotmail’s name with a pronounced slur.

You see, Hotmail doesn’t tell me what it wants. I would say Hotmail doesn’t tell me what he or she wants, because I don’t think of Hotmail as an it, but that sounds stupid. I can’t call it he, and I can’t call it she, either. If someone can please come up with a genderless animate pronoun that can be used in place of he/she, I personally promise that Bill Gates will give you a penny every time that pronoun is used anywhere on Earth. To collect your fee, just show up at his front door and pound on it wildly until his accountants, Bruno and Mad Dog, show up to explain the payment policy.

But getting back to Hotmail, lately I’ve been doing things it doesn’t like. The problem is, Hotmail doesn’t tell me until after I’ve done it. For example, I get a lot of emails. If I tried to move every single one of them into folders, I would have absolutely no time to respond to Nigerian princes generously offering me the opportunity to give them $3000 each. So according to the little indicator at the bottom of my web browser, my Inbox contains roughly 405,987,466,372 messages.

But what Hotmail didn’t tell me was that if you go over 5000 messages, you can’t use the search function any more. Just like that. Search stops working. No warning that might be helpful, like, say, “Hey doofus, you are about to go over 5000 messages. If you do that, I’m definitely not helping you sift through all that to get it back down to 5000 messages, which is when you can search again. So there.” You’d think Hotmail might post that information in huge letters somewhere, because I can tell you, searching through 400 billion messages page by page ain’t fun. In fact, it’s what drove The Unabomber insane.

Then we came to our latest blowup, a real doozy. I recently sent out a friendly reminder to everybody in my contact list that my web site is now active. Mind you, every single one of these people is a personal friend of Wordweasel. Well, Hotmail was having none of that. In the admirable spirit of Death to Spam, it limited me to sending emails to only 100 people at a time (Wordweasel is popular).  Of course, it told me that only after I had carefully crafted the email and painstakingly added each person in my contact list.

“You can’t do that, start over, hahahahaha,” was the gist of the message.

So I did as instructed because I know who wears the pants in this relationship. I duly split the emails up into 100-person chunks and started sending them out. When I got to the last one, it didn’t work. I couldn’t send it. Hotmail informed me in that sanctimonious tone it has that I had gone over the unspoken limit for number of emails I was allowed to send in a 24-hour period. It never told me how many emails that was, but I would not be able to send any more emails. For 24 hours.

I said some very bad words that described in great detail what Hotmail could go do with itself.

One day in Internet time is approximately the age of the solar system in human time. For the next 24 hours, I tried everything. Begging, threatening, vowing to have an affair with another email service. Nothing worked. Hotmail had cut me off, and nothing would change its mind because I had to learn my lesson.

When Hotmail started working again 24 hours later, I was like a starving Rush Limbaugh hitting the midnight buffet on a Carnival cruise, gorging myself on all that sweet, sweet email.

We’re back together now, Hotmail and me. Things are still tense. But I hope we can stay a couple long into our golden years, in a world in which email searches are unlimited and Microsoft and Google live in harmonious existence.

Nah, that’ll never happen.

March 17, 2009

Chafing at Mach 1: The Physics of HEROES

Filed under: Pop Culture — Boyd Morrison @ 12:23 am

I regularly watch the show Heroes, which is by far the best show about genetic mutants on TV, and I’ve noticed that nobody has lame superpowers. They can all fly, read minds, teleport, or heal instantly. You’d think at least once, they would come across someone who hasn’t quite made the full evolutionary leap, like Rod Blagojevich. For example, maybe instead of being able to teleport anywhere on the planet instantly, the character could only teleport a short distance, like from the sofa to the refrigerator and back.

Wait a minute… That wouldn’t be lame. That would be awesome! I would never leave the house.

To add a little spice to the show, I also think it would be great if they showed characters abusing their superpowers for humorous purposes. Who wouldn’t take advantage of them for practical jokes? If you were telekinetic, think of the fun you could have at a football game:

Announcer: And in a game with a record 42 interceptions and three players’ pants falling off for no reason, it comes down to this field goal try. The center hikes, the kick is up, and it is…no good! Blocked by the face of Rod Blagojevich!

But what they really ignore on the show are the good, old-fashioned laws of physics, which is why Heroes is so much fun for me as an engineer. In an episode recently, one of the characters blew a hole in the airplane they were flying in, causing everyone to hang on for dear life so they wouldn’t get sucked out, fearing that their contracts hadn’t been renewed for the next season. An extra was lost in the scene, but he was deemed expendable, especially after snorking up all the doughnuts from the craft services table.

For several minutes, the characters, their faces contorted in agony, battled the wind raging through the plane, having no idea that all of the air should have been sucked out in a few seconds. Maybe what the director left on the cutting room floor was that there was a mutant out of camera range blowing in their direction with his super-breath after a dinner of garlic sushi.

As for the superpowers, the explanations on Heroes for how they work is sketchy at best. Senator Nathan Petrelli can fly at what looks like F-15 speeds, yet he always touches down with every hair in place. Next time you’re in a car, stick your head out of the window on the freeway. If you don’t look like one of those troll dolls by the time you get where you’re going, you’re either as bald as a raving Britney Spears or have on enough hair spray to immobilize a rhino.

Senator Petrelli must also have a built-in bug shield because I never see him plucking gnats from his teeth after a flight from New York to Chicago. The Incredibles handled this issue brilliantly, when Dash ran at top speed through a cloud of flies, but Heroes doesn’t even talk about it. You’d think after a four-hour flight, Petrelli would have so many bugs splattered on his face that he’d look like a Jackson Pollock.

Like The Incredibles, Heroes also has a superfast runner, named Daphne.  Her top speed is never discussed, but she will literally blow through a room, causing papers and skirts to fly up behind her. To run like a cheetah strapped to a Tomahawk missile, her legs would have to be churning at supersonic speeds. As with all of the other characters, Daphne doesn’t wear a super-suit, just regular clothes.  Which brings up the question of chafing (she must go through a lot of Vaseline), not to mention the condition of her clothes after a spirited 700-mile-per-hour run. Her legs churning back and forth at lightning velocity should cause her jeans to disintegrate, which might be hard for the NBC censors to explain when she arrives at her destination butt naked.

Hmmm. That gives me an idea for a new superhero show. But this one will be on HBO.

I don’t want you to think these violations of physical laws make me enjoy the show any less. I just have a supernatural nit-picking ability.

Now that’s a lame superpower.

March 15, 2009

The Perils of Acting

Filed under: Acting — Boyd Morrison @ 6:47 pm

When I was a teenager, I was the prototypical nerd, destined to be an engineer, not an actor. The evidence is painfully apparent in this grainy, Sasquatch-like photo of me at the age of 13.

cimg0096

I’ll wait until the laughter stops.

Now that you’ve had a chance to pick yourself up off the floor and wipe the streamer of drool away, I think you’ll agree that if the guy in the photo acted in anything, it would be in Revenge of the Nerds 12: The Dorkening.

But I have defied the odds and now have more than 20 plays, as well as a few films and commercials, under my belt. And by far, the most frequent comment I get from non-actor friends who come see me play a leading man is about the kissing. Yes, they almost always compliment me on my performance, but whether the kudos are heartfelt or obligatory, they’re pretty much expected when you ask friends to come see you on stage. Right after the praise, though, they regularly note that I, a happily married man, was brazenly smooching another woman right in front of them. I even get applause for such rude behavior.

Puckering up is typically required of the leading man, also called the romantic lead. He doesn’t have to be the star of the show, but he’s the one the audience roots for. He’s the hero, the guy who gets the girl, and when he does, he usually plants one on her. Oftentimes, actors have known each other only a few days when they get to that part of the rehearsal process, and locking lips with someone you’ve just met is an awkward experience, particularly in front of a roomful of people.

I’ve played ensemble roles and supporting parts, but most often I’ve been cast as the leading man. I suppose that’s partly because I am genetically predisposed to the traits directors are looking for, with 6’2” of height, a full head of hair, and a slender build(maintained by banning Doritos from the pantry). As you can see from the Sasquatch photo, however, I’ve also had to overcome faulty genetics: five years of braces to retract a Bugs Bunny-style overbite, laser surgery to correct eyesight that would have made Mr. Magoo cringe, and the removal of a neck tumor that permanently paralyzed the left side of my vocal cords but still lets me project my voice to the back of the theatre.

Of course, physical characteristics aren’t the only requirements; the leading man also has to be able to win over the audience. The supporting roles are usually more colorful and memorable, but unless the leading man convinces the audience members that he deserves to win the hand of his beloved, the overall experience will be hollow. And to convince them, the leading man generally has to kiss the leading lady.

So how does my wife feel about all this? While she isn’t thrilled about it, she isn’t threatened by it, either. She knows it’s simply part of the actor’s life, and it’s my job to convince her that, in that one moment, I’m not her husband, but someone else’s.

Besides, she’s the one I go home with when the show is over.

Backward Loading—Or Is It Loading Backward?

Filed under: User Interface Design — Boyd Morrison @ 10:12 am

Lots of people compare getting on an airplane with loading a cattle car, and I can see the similarities. We’re a line of dumb, dazed, and—after a visit to the airport’s Burger King and TCBY—fattened creatures being herded into a cramped tube in a process that is completely out of our control. And the mooing. The constant mooing. Only then do see that we are to be deposited into a space so small that, if we were real cattle, PETA would be shaming us with billboard photos of it.

If we are lucky, we’ve remembered to pack a carryon no bigger than a box of Tic Tacs, thereby leaving us enough room to put it into the overhead compartment that the other people have already stuffed with luggage the size of a standard-issue futon. Then it’s into the seat/straight-jacket, and we’re ready to stare into space, waiting for the magic words that let us turn our iPods back on—“We have now reached ten thousand feet. We are no longer in danger of having your $100 electronic gadget wreck our $100 million airplane.”

Now I know there is little room to make this sequence of events less pleasant. Yet the industrious folks at United airlines have decided that this process is just not annoying and tedious enough. On a trip my wife and I took to San Diego, I decided to save a few bucks by forgoing the nonstop service on Alaska Airlines and taking the cheaper United connection through San Franscisco. While it may seem perfectly logical to turn a two-hour jaunt into a six-hour ordeal, I came to realize ordeals are not all they’re cracked up to be. Notwithstanding the fact that almost every single store and restaurant in the San Franscisco airport was being remodeled and would reopen at about the time when the Sun was a smoldering cinder, we had to get on an airplane not twice during our trip, but four times. Thus I was exposed to United’s mind-bending loading policy in excruciating detail, made all the more apparent because my wife and I were sitting at opposite ends of the plane.

I don’t want you to think that was my idea. Using Orbitz’ easy-to-use online reservation system, I had taken the time to reserve seats for us TOGETHER. In seats that were SEQUENTIAL in both letter and number. But UNITED did not seem to honor this arrangement and SCREWED us. They have a lovely electronic check-in system that we whizzed right through, except for the fact that it wouldn’t let us change seat assignments. No matter, I thought. I had just wanted to change to the exit row so that my knees wouldn’t serve as earmuffs for me during the flight. But it’s a short trip, and as long as I’m sitting next to my wife…

Hey, wait a minute, I thought, 45 minutes later, just as we were about to get on the plane. We’re NOT sitting together. She’s in 11A and I’m way, way in the back. If it were a ticket to a baseball game, my boarding pass would have said Section 904, Row ZZ, Seat 78, Obstructed View. Of course, by this time they were loading the plane, so it was far too late to do anything about it. Except whine. It’s never too late for that.

It was at this critical moment that we noticed that our boarding passes had another number on them. Hers had a 1, and mine had a 3. Using my awesome, and at times frightening, powers of deduction, I realized that United had a simple way to tell passengers when they could board the plane. Of course, since I was in the back of the plane, they would call for passengers with 3 on their tickets first. Of course, I was an idiot.

United called for passengers with 1 on their tickets, thereby loading those at the front of the plane first. All other airlines on planet Earth load the back of the airplane first (an exception is usually made for those with small children, and in the case of eastern European airlines, those with live poultry). This process is universally used for one reason: people take for-fricking-ever to get on a plane. And if someone is trying to manhandle his futon into the overhead compartment, everyone behind him has to wait. Which, of course, brings up the question: Doesn’t “manhandle my futon” sound vaguely naughty?

But it also brings up other questions: Why does United use this perverse and, some would say, inhuman method for boarding a plane? Why does the flight attendant keep telling people to clear the aisles to let other people past when their ridiculous policy is the reason for the bottleneck in the first place?  Why did one flight attendant throw her hands up in disgust and say “It’s not up to us” when I asked her why they were doing it that way? And why do people bring along laptops on the plane just so they can play solitaire? Don’t they know laptops also come with minesweeper?

I can think of only one reason why United loads their planes this way: the person who came up with the policy is clinically insane. So I call upon United to place this person in a warm, padded environment where he can no longer hurt himself or others and hire someone with expertise at least equivalent to, say, an Irish setter. With any luck, this person will reinstitute the aforementioned universal—that is, correct—policy of loading the people in the back first. Then I can choose United confident in the knowledge that, if I’m sitting in the uncomfortable rear part of the plane, I can be sure that I didn’t block the way for those lucky heifers sitting in front of me. Moo.

March 14, 2009

What do Terminators eat?

Filed under: Pop Culture — Boyd Morrison @ 7:15 am

I’m a trained engineer and a writer, so I actually spend otherwise valuable brainpower wondering about the digestion system of Terminators. It bothers me. I mean, it doesn’t bother me that I do this. It bothers me that I don’t know what Terminators eat.

According to the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg, the Cyberdyne model 101, is living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, which is absolutely cool. The only reason it can be sent back in time is because of the living tissue. Nothing dead will go through. But what does it live on? I have to eat a protein bar before a workout or I feel like I’m going to pass out after about an hour. But in all the movies, the Terminator never eats, drinks, or consumes anything. If it were green, like the Hulk, I’d guess it was regenerating by photosynthesis, which would also be cool. A hydroponic Terminator.

But it’s flesh-colored so that it can pass as human. Maybe the director, James Cameron, didn’t want to spend time showing something as mundane as a Terminator sitting down to dinner. I’ll buy that, but when I was watching the Terminator get shot up or poke its own eye out, all I could think about was, how does the damn thing work? When it gets wounded, it’s not bleeding all over the place, which means there’s little blood in its system. The original movie does have a character ask him if a dead cat is in his room because of the smell, but I’d give the Terminator three days at best before he has to find some kind of sustenance, or it would stink like that all the time.

So what do Terminators eat? My question was answered in the TV series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, when the Terminator played by Summer Glau ate pancakes and pizza. They’re omnivores, just like we are. Question answered.

But the answer brought to mind the question of waste products. If the Terminator is eating, the waste has to go somewhere. All living creatures consume a resource, the resource goes through a chemical process, and then the byproducts are excreted. In other words, we eat, digest, and poop.

So, do Terminators poop? I would have to say that, as undignified an image that is for a Terminator, they do.

I think I’m beginning to see why this topic wasn’t broached in the movies.

There’s another problem that the Terminator movies blatantly overlook. Only living tissue can come through the time portal, right? Kyle Reese says that clearly in the first movie. But the T-1000 in the second movie, as well as the female Terminator in the third movie have no living tissue. They are liquid metal. You can’t have it both ways. Merely looking like living tissue shouldn’t count. So how does that work?

The easy answer is, it doesn’t work, you nerd! It’s a movie! It works because the shape-shifting robot is cool!

And it is cool. But as I said before, I’m an engineer, so that answer doesn’t do it for me. I like my stories to be internally consistent. It’s why I think that a key position every movie should have is a logic consultant.

In this case, the logic consultant would have stepped in and said, wait a minute! The last movie said only living tissue would go through the time machine. So the writer would add a line saying that the T-1000 came through the time portal inside a live moose, and I would never question the logic of it.

These are the kind of important engineering questions I don’t see pondered about nearly enough in our popular culture.

March 13, 2009

Making Engineers Sexy

Filed under: Pop Culture — Boyd Morrison @ 12:50 am

I don’t know many engineers who write novels, particularly thriller novels. In fact, other than me, I can’t think of any off the top of my head, and I’m not even published. There are plenty of doctors (Michael Crichton, Tess Gerritsen), lawyers (John Grisham, Scott Turow), insurance salesmen (Tom Clancy), and even a veterinarian (James Rollins). But where are all the engineers?

Dr. Paul Santi, a professor of geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, wrote a great article titled On Making Engineers Sexy, which got me thinking about the image problem engineers have in popular entertainment, if you can even find them. Books, TV shows, and movies featuring engineer characters are about as common as Mensa meetings featuring Paris Hilton. There’s Scotty, of course, from Star Trek, and his successor, Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation. All told, there are probably more engineers featured in the Star Trek canon than all other forms of entertainment combined, but I’m a big fan and even I can’t remember them.

After those two examples, the list gets mighty thin. Dirk Pitt is one of my favorites, a marine engineer with dozens of adventures in the Clive Cussler novels, but he really identifies himself more as an ocean specialist and adventurer than as an engineer, so he barely counts.

Then there’s the ultimate engineer, MacGyver (and his alter ego, MacGruber–the guy’s a friggin’ genius!). Supposedly MacGyver studied physics in college, but the way he got out of sticky situations was pure engineering, so in actuality MacGyver was not a scientist. Scientists analyze. Engineers get things done. When the timer on an atomic bomb is ticking down, you don’t want the scientist who knows the theoretical underpinnings of nuclear fission, you want the engineer who knows how to short it out with a gum wrapper.

So that’s four engineers in fictional pop culture, not counting the dubious and embarrassing example of The Professor from Gilligan’s Island.

Any others you can think of are total nerds. Which, as an engineer myself, I take as a complete insult. Sure, I’ve known my share of engineers who make Rainman look as extroverted as Ryan Seacrest. But believe me, there are engineers who partied just as hard as anyone else in college (if I had a cell phone camera back then, I’d be a rich man today). So why aren’t there any cool engineers saving the world from annihilation? Where is our engineering hero? Where is our Indiana Jones?

Short answer: No one wants to write stories about engineers because the conventional wisdom is that they’re boring. They do the brainy work that lets the hero or heroine blast the bad guys and get the girl (or guy, depending on which way the hero or heroine rolls). Meanwhile, the engineering geek is playing World of Warcraft back in the lab, where his most strenuous activity is popping open his can of Red Bull.

The irony of all this is that, without engineers, most forms of modern entertainment wouldn’t be possible. Look at any list of credits from a blockbuster action movie and you’ll see it littered with engineers: sound engineers (who do you think came up with the cool sound a lightsaber makes? Which is, technically, vwinnnge.), electrical engineers and mechanical engineers (the Titanic in Titanic didn’t sink by itself; it took engineers for that, both for the movie and the ship), and of course, computer engineers (think of the movie Iron Man without Iron Man actually in it).

So I, the owner of three engineering degrees that I don’t even use any more, did what any good engineer would do. I tried to solve the problem by writing my own engineering hero, Tyler Locke. Locke’s first adventure was in The Ark, where he battled against a vast conspiracy to destroy the earth as we know it using nothing more than his engineering abilities and his trusty Leatherman multi-tool, plus enough guns and explosives to supply the 82nd Airborne. Unfortunately, my literary agent couldn’t find any publishers for it (one editor rejected it because “the action was nonstop.” Huh?), so I’ve put it up on my web site for free download. Doesn’t mean it will never be published, but in the meantime, it’s available for you to enjoy along with the two other books I’ve written (Don’t worry; even though the protagonists in those are scientists, they’re cool scientists.).