Max Barry

Video: Machine Man Book Reading

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:05:00 GMT

A long video of a Machine Man book reading at Embiggen Books in Melbourne, Australia (October 2011).

Stating the Obvious: Actors

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 06:06:37 GMT

Lately I’ve been feeling sympathy for actors. I never used to feel that. I used to think actors deserved NOTHING, because they’re already beautiful and adored. And people are swoon over how clever and cool they must be in real life, because apparently they improvised their best lines and YOU KNOW WHAT NO THEY DID NOT. They played the damn character that was written for them, that’s what they did. The alternative only gets play because people believe in their hearts that movies are real.*

Essentially, I viewed actors as mindless automatons waiting to be filled with words. Attractive automatons, to be sure. They’re a fine looking bunch. And they’re good at pretending. But that’s not a particularly impressive skill. I mean, kids do it. So I’ve never really rated actors as more deserving of respect than, say, jugglers. Especially jugglers who can balance on things while they juggle. That shit is not easy.

But this was before I actually spent time on a film set. I found that educational in a few ways. For one thing, I had to act. Only a little. I’m kind of abusing the term here. I mostly had to stand in one place and not sneeze. But there was a time when I had to move parts of my body in a coherent way while fifty people and a very expensive camera stared at me, and that turned out to be harder than I expected. There is a pressure element. So I concede that acting, or doing anything, really, is more challenging when a lot of people’s time and money is riding on you not screwing it up.

But the real eye-opener was how actors have to do what they’re told. Not always. Sometimes actors can say, “I’m not really feeling that line,” and the director will say, “Let’s try it both ways,” and the actor can perform a take differently while knowing in their soul that it will never be seen again. Actors are also free to perform minor on-the-fly sentence surgery, so long as they get the essence right. In some cases, they really can propose something different, and if the director agrees, they get to do it. But mostly they have to say the lines.

So if I write, “6 looks surprised,” then Amber Heard has to go ahead and look surprised. I want you to take a moment to think about how much you would enjoy it if you were world famous and had to look surprised just because I wanted you to. Because I would hate it. I would be all, “I tell you what, how about you go fuck yourself?” Now, okay, this probably just means I would make a crappy actor. I already knew that. And I knew actors had to say the lines. That is the most fundamental part of their job. If they weren’t prepared to do it, they would find something else to do, like juggle while balancing on things.

But still. I realize more and more how spoiled I am to own the entire process of creating a novel. I don’t need anyone’s permission to start writing. I don’t need to convince people to sign off on doing a part of the story a particular way. I just do it. You might argue that this isn’t a good thing. And I might argue, why don’t you get off my site, if you hate me so much. But for better or worse, I enjoy the ability to determine how I do my job.

Actors don’t have that. They have to give themselves to a role no matter how shitty. They’re totally dependent on being offered good scripts, and if they’re not, they have to perform bad ones. When they perform bad roles, even when they do a good job, people think they’re bad actors, because people think movies are real.* An actor might never once get the chance to perform a role at their best. Which is kind of horrifying.

Of course, they can console themselves with their immense beauty.

(* They are real. All stories are real.)

Subtextual

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 06:18:41 GMT

Now there’s this app, Subtext, that lets you read books and share your comments about them in real-time with other people reading the same book. Little speech bubbles in the margins pop up: you tap them, you get to read what other people are saying about a particular plot twist, or character death, or whatever.

In some cases, the author has gone through and made a bunch of those comments him or herself, and these read a little like a DVD commentary track.

I mention this because I’m one of those authors: Machine Man is one of their launch titles. So, if, you know, you feel I’ve been too secretive about the creative process behind Machine Man so far, now is your chance for some insight.

At first I thought you would have to turn those comments off when reading a Subtext book, at least the first time through, because otherwise that would be really distracting. But I have found that this is impossible. You know the comments are lurking there, and it’s too much to resist turning them back on when you’re wondering, “Does anyone else think this story just completely went off the rails?”

So that’s pretty cool. Not from an author’s perspective. From an author’s perspective, it’s horrible. I want you to sit there and read what I’ve damn well written for you. But as another example of users seizing control over their own entertainment experiences, it seems significant.

Movie news! I just changed the subject. That’s what happened there. Mark Heyman, the scriptwriter of Black Swan, who’s been busy working on what I have to say is a freaking fantastic Machine Man script, I know I’m not allowed to tell anyone, Mandalay, BUT IT IS AWESOME, has sold his “Facebook thriller” script XOXO, with Darren Aronofsky producing. So it’s all going pretty nicely in Heyman-land. Syrup is deep in post-production and I still haven’t seen it, not that I’m thinking about it every ten minutes or anything. And the leads are busy: Amber Heard is doing interviews for The Rum Diary, and Shiloh Fernandez is becoming an eco-terrorist.

Nuts and Bolts

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 06:04:10 GMT

I’m a little nervous about this, but here is the nerdiest thing I have ever done. You realize that bar is already pretty high. I have programmed web games. I have considered domain name availability before naming my offspring. But this is the first time I have publicly released a version control system history of a book.

I just lost you. I realize that. Unless you are some kind of freako super-geek, in which case, welcome to the tiny minority of the human race that may appreciate this. The rest of you: a revision control system is usually used for writing software, and tracking the changes you make. I used one of these for the Machine Man serial, since I was uploading a page per day, and it needed to be processed for sending out to people’s email inboxes and cell phones, and I lost you again, didn’t I? Okay.

The point is I have the entire edit history of Machine Man all the way back from notes. And you can browse to any particular page and see how it evolved from something to nothing.

Here is an example, using Version 1 of Page 18:

It’s just a note to myself about what this page might be about. By clicking the “→V2”, you move ahead to Version 2 of that page:

New words are green, deleted words are red. This page is hard to read because the software is making bad guesses about how the different versions fit together. In actuality, I simply deleted my note and wrote a first version.

Then I corrected a spelling mistake:

And continued tweaking in versions 4 through 9.

The final version is here. And if you have the book, you can follow along at home to the version that wound up in the novel:

I’m not sure what use this is to anybody, other than for exposing my writerly fumblings in an even more humiliating manner than I’ve already done. But it was POSSIBLE, so I have DONE IT.

To access the Source version of a page in the Machine Man serial, click the tiny, near-invisible nut on the top-right of any serial page. Or append “&v=1” to the URL, if you’re that nerdy. Which, if you’ve read this far, you surely are.

Schlepping the Book

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:17:52 GMT

I’d kind of forgotten what it was like to have a new book out. It’s like this:

Some people are incredibly nice and love the book and take the trouble to say so, which makes you feel like kissing their toes
Some reviewers say you are smart and you think, Hey, yeah, I am smart, I’m REALLY GODDAMN SMART
Some reviewers mistake your book for something else entirely and you have to remind yourself it’s not a good look for an author to post angry comments listing their CLEAR FACTUAL AND CONCEPTUAL ERRORS
You are invited to speak at festivals and bookstores and on radio, which causes you to gradually re-learn atrophied social skills like talking
Your time for writing shrinks and you start to panic because you’re not getting enough one-on-one time with your work-in-progress, which loves and needs you
Some people you haven’t heard from in years remember you exist
Some people take the time to email you how much you suck, which often seems to be a reaction not to the book or to you exactly but rather the fact that you are receiving attention, which infuriates them for reasons that are hard to know
Some people give oddly insulting compliments, like, “Of your four terrible books, this is at least fairly readable,” and honestly seem to expect you will be pleased to hear it
You notice things in the book you wish you had done differently
You kind of want to know how it’s selling but kind of don’t
Some people don’t seem to realize you have a new book out, and how is that possible, you’re spending all this goddamn time doing interviews and blogs and book trailers, have they seen that book trailer, HOW CAN THEY NOT KNOW

Basically, a strange time. And that’s even without a US book tour, which is usually a whole added level of surrealism for me. But I replaced it with the Skype tour, so I guess it balanced out. Actually, the Skype tour was far more successful than I expected. Or, more specifically, it contained far less crazy than I feared. I’m not saying you people are crazy. Not all of you. It was just that I was pretty sure that at some point I would find myself talking to a person who wanted me to join his underground resistance movement, and read his manuscript. But that didn’t happen. So thank you to everyone for being so nice and sane. The best part of book tours is getting to chat to readers—well, that and the hotel room service—so it was like taking just that part and condensing it down.

Tomorrow I’m off to the Brisbane Writers Festival, but next week, guess what? A clean calendar! I’m really excited about that. That means I can write.

P.S. I just realized I should probably link to some of the promotion I’ve been doing. To, you know, promote. I’ve been uploading YouTube videos, how about that? Here’s one:

I Had to Make a Book Trailer

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:29:00 GMT

Machine Man is out today. As celebration/punishment, I offer you this promotional book trailer.

Watch on YouTube.