“Things to do in an action movie before I die” (An End of the World Exclusive)

- Shoot explosive-tipped arrows from a tactical compound bow. (Sylvester Stallone, Rambo: First Blood Part II, 1985)

- Jump a dirt bike onto the top of a moving freight train. (Michelle Yeoh, Police Story III, 1992)

- Karate-kick a tiger. (Jean-Claude Van Dame, Double Team, 1997)

- Stop a bullet by shooting another bullet at it. (Chow Yun-Fat, Full Contact, 1992)

- Fight in an underground martial arts tournament for my own personal reasons. (Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon, 1973. Jean Claude Van Damme, Bloodsport, 1988. Daniel Bernhardt, Bloodsport II-Bloodsport IV, 1996-1999. Don “The Dragon” Wilson, Bloodfist II, 1990. Jerry “Golden Boy” Trimble, Full Contact, 1993. Sasha Mitchell, Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor, 1994. Robin Shou, Mortal Kombat: The Movie, 1995)

- Jump out of a perfectly good airplane with no parachute. And live. (Keanu Reeves, Point Break, 1991)

- Slide under and out a semi trailer on a horse. (Chiranjeevi, Alluda Majaka, 1995)

- Nuke an entire planet from orbit. Because it’s the only way to be sure. (Colonial Marines, Aliens, 1986)

- Defeat Steven Seagal in a knife fight. (Not Tommy Lee Jones, Under Siege, 1992. Not Everett McGill, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, 1995)

- Snowboard off of a mountain and onto a helicopter. (Jackie Chan, First Strike, 1996)

- Shoot an attacking king crocodile with a .50 Desert Eagle pistol. (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eraser, 1996)

- Beat up an entire French police station floor-by-floor. (Jet Li, Kiss of the Dragon, 2001)

- Have an underwater fight to the death with a sumo wrestler. (Dolph Lundgren, Showdown in Little Tokyo, 1991)

- Kill career henchman Al Leong. (Mel Gibson, Lethal Weapon, 1987. Bruce Willis, Die Hard, 1988. Michael Douglas, Black Rain, 1989. Jean Claude Van Damme, Death Warrant, 1990. Brandon Lee, Rapid Fire, 1992)

- Face down a giant ball made of machine gun-toting killer Hindu androids. (Indian Police Force, Enthiran, 2010)

- Win a game of chicken between two city buses. (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Red Heat, 1988)

- Cave in a mountain pass with dynamite. (Burt Lancaster, The Professionals, 1966)

- Battle a giant ninja that splits into a battalion of regular-sized ninjas, including a female ninja who uses nudity as a diversionary tactic. (Yeung Chak-lam, Duel to the Death, 1983)

- Slide down the outside of a hundred-story glass skyscraper. (Jackie Chan, Who Am I?, 1998)

- Blow up a hundred-story glass skyscraper. (Alan Rickman, Die Hard, 1988)

- Free Mars. (Arnold Schwarzengger, Total Recall, 1990)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a documentary called BULLY that accurately and agonizingly depicts the acts of in-school bullying taking place every day in this country. I believe it to be an important film that should be screened in as many places and in front of as many people as possible, especially in our schools.

That prospect was threatened, however, when the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) slapped BULLY with an R-rating. This would prevent it from being shown in public schools, and from children seeing it without an adult present.

I’ve been following the story closely. I was pleased to read about twenty members of the United States Congress signing the petition to repeal the rating. I was less pleased, albeit not surprised, to learn the MPAA ignored the petition and that the rating will stand.

The Weinstein Company, who are releasing the film, have rejected the MPAA’s ruling altogether and are going to put it out unrated. I applaud their decision, even if it makes the film’s message harder to spread. Many theaters won’t show or promote unrated films.

I wrote about bullying as a problem and my own experiences with it at length. Now I’d like to write about the MPAA.

To summarize: The MPAA should not exist. Their members should be unmasked and lined up against a wall as if the revolution has finally come. Their headquarters should be razed to ash and the scorched earth left in its wake consecrated for all-time. Jack Valenti, the MPAA’s founder and chief goon for many years, should continue roasting in Hell with a demon cock pulsing brimstone in his rectal canal through the whole of eternity.

My hate-on for the MPAA goes way beyond censorship or artistic freedom. Those are what my sainted abuelita always termed “white people problems.” No, I see the MPAA as a cultural toxin that has polluted our society for nigh half-a-century in a very specific and damaging way. I charge them with no less than the shame we still teach our children for their bodies, the ignorance we gift them concerning sex and its consequences, and the violent world we’re forced to deal with every day.

The MPAA is notoriously more permissive of violence in film than they are when it comes to sex. The Human form, the most basic of sexual acts between consenting, even married adults, pleasure of any carnal stripe, these are things for which the MPAA absolutely will not stand. They will force you to excise them from your film if you want to gain a rating that allows your film to be advertised and seen by the largest portion of people possible.

Their leeway on violence, however, is astronomical by comparison.

Look, movies, video games, music; none of these things make people commit violent acts. I don’t believe any one thing is responsible for the actions of an individual, let alone an entire culture. I do believe a million little things contribute to an overall cultural climate, and movies are a major contributor. More than living in our consciousness, they help craft it. We quote them, we learn lessons from them, create role models from them.

If you see something, or don’t see something, often enough, whether you realize it or not, it begins to take root. If a billion people see it often enough, it becomes a societal standard.

The MPAA has taught generations of filmmakers that high levels of violence are always preferable to sexuality. The two are always equated as taboo, yet it has taught them to go for the kill instead of the fuck if they want to get a racy scene past the ratings board. As a result the balance between sex and violence… there is no longer a balance between sex and violence in movies.

Throughout their unchallenged and totalitarian regime they have literally created the vernacular for commercial film, and it’s a language that expresses titillation, passion, and excitement with violent action rather than perfectly healthy Human sexuality. You can beat a woman to a bloody pulp in a movie, but if you go down on her and give her an orgasm the MPAA will force you to cut it out if you want an “R” rating.

That is an insane attitude, let alone the foundation for an entire ideology that has proliferated for decades. The MPAA promotes a puritanical, shame-based culture in which violence is a far more common and acceptable outlet for baser Human instinct and emotions than sex is, regardless of how consensual or commonplace the act. Their doctrine has created an unending flood of violent saturation that desensitizes and promotes at the same time, while reinforcing the arcane notion that sexuality is dirty and not to be explored. Ever.

The MPAA’s treatment of BULLY is another example of them suppressing a realistic, everyday aspect of Human existence they find ugly. Bullying is happening in schools everywhere right now. It is hurting American children on a mass scale. The MPAA doesn’t want you to see that. They want you to repress, repress, repress.

There are filmmakers and studio executives with the power to usurp the MPAA. There always have been. They’ve failed to do so. This is a fight that should have been fought and won before I ever got to Los Angeles. The Weinsteins have fired a shot. I don’t know if it will mark the beginning of a war, but I hope so.

A society that trades sex for violence is doomed. A society that crushes the souls of its children is doubly doomed. The MPAA is a leading promoter of both practices, and they need to be condemned and cut from reality for it.

I once said it started as a way to fleece the rubes. That hasn’t changed.

You should know that before we go on.

Last year I started running an on-line writing workshop geared toward those aspiring writers who want to work. Read: work, not sit on their brains talking about writing and being writers and the angst and pathos thereof. I called it The Loose Cannon as a take-off on my “Bad Cop” gig over on author and my arch-nemesis Mur Lafferty’s award-winning I Should Be Writing podcast (where this whole insane thing began).

My plan at first was to run one every few months or whenever I needed the money and present it Robert McKee-style, meaning I’d keep repackaging the same tired lecture over and over for a different group of marks until I barely had to think about what I was saying. That plan was quickly foiled. The reason is simple. The bastards kept showing up. I have a core group of TLC (the ironic acronym which has evolved from the title of my experiment) alumni who have attended every single incarnation of the workshop I’ve put on. It’s baffling, really.

Yet no matter how much or how loudly I yelled at and abused them, they just kept coming back. This had two unforeseen consequences: 1) I had to think of new things to say and do with them, and 2) I actually saw them begin to improve.

Little by little my kids, who were all varying degrees of god-fucking-awful when I first made them put fingertips to keyboard, have gotten better. They’ve begun selling stories. I’ve begun, slowly, to enjoy teaching them things. It’s a fun gig. Everyone seems to have a good time. And above all we value brutal, uncompromising honesty about how much we all suck and need to improve. That’s the essential ingredient, and what I feel keeps them coming back.

That, and my undeniable sex appeal. Eighty percent of TLC attendees are women. I’m just saying.

Because of that support/demand, and because it keeps my edge sharp, I’m now taking TLC monthly. Each month I’ll be running a workshop on a different topic. The frequency will allow me to cover a broader range of the craft and get more of you sad directionless hacks in on the action. The next two dates are set, and the material they will be covering is as follows.

March 24th – “Action!”

Action scenes. Sword fights, shoot-outs, car chases, big battles sequences, and all of those fast-moving, hopefully ultra violent elements of entertaining storytelling. It ain’t easy presenting a highly visual concept in the form of mere words. We’ll work on writing action that is clear, concise, and draws the reader into a total sensory experience. There will be blood.

April 21st – “Worldbuilders”

Whether you’re creating your own utopian, dystopian, or tweentopian world of the distant future, or whether you’re writing a period piece set in a historical past, you have to sell your setting to your reader. We’ll go over the large and tiny details that can make a world seem real, and talk about the stupid shit a lot of writers do that bring that world crashing down in the eyes and mind of the reader.

I still have a few spots open for both sessions. I’ll post future dates and topics as I decide what they are. You can e-mail me at matt@matt-wallace.com with questions or for registration info. You can also read reviews of TLC written by attendees themselves here and here.

Chances are you suck. Most writers, aspiring and working, do. I can’t fix you.

But you will suck a little less. Or your money back (not really).

Here’s the thing. Grammar is bullshit and doesn’t matter.

I’m a writer. No, stop nodding. Stop it. Right now. I’m not a writer like you’re a writer. I’m good at it and get paid for what I write. I have immense respect for language. I love language. But language is also a schizophrenic slut who wants you to abuse it. Bad. It wants you to slam it against the chifforobe and make it do things that are cause for shunning in orthodox Amish society. Language is changing every day, everywhere, and the attempt to contain it within a system that was largely designed a fucking century ago is arrogant and elitist in the extreme.

My first blog post back some douche bag on Facebook called me out for poor grammar. Guess which one of us is the professional writer and which one of us is totally for sure absolutely going to start that novel any day now once he finishes outlining it properly? One of the key differences between us is that motherfucker knows the rules of grammar, and I know when to let them go. I only obey the flow of what I’m writing and the impact I want the presentation of those words and information to have as they are read. Impact is what it’s all about.

Sentence fragments. They’re great for that. But I’ll also begin a sentence with a conjunction to achieve a similar effect. I use semi-colons the way the first Okinawan farmer to take up arms against a samurai used his rake and hoe; HOW HE NEEDED TO AT THE TIME.

NOR AM I ABOVE CAPITALIZING AN ENTIRE SENTENCE WHEN I WANT THE ENERGY LEVEL TO RISE OR TO CONVEY OUTRAGED EMPHASIS ALTHOUGH I ADMIT IN THIS SENTENCE THAT IMPACT HAS PROBABLY WANED SOMEWHAT AS IT’S GOTTEN A BIT LENGTHY AND OFF-POINT SORRY ABOUT THAT.

Listen, I love Grammar Girl and you love Grammar Girl and Oprah loves Grammar Girl and that’s awesome and I’ve constructed this run-on sentence for maximum comedic effect. I believe in teaching kids the basic rules of grammar. Not everyone uses words for creative pursuits. There are job applications, loan applications, correspondence, college essays, and a million other functional needs for clarity and confidence in one’s writing. It’s important for reading comprehension. Everyone should learn basic grammar.

Once you’ve got a handle on those basic rules, especially if you’re a creative writer, disregard and change at will.

The same goes for narrative style and structure. It goes double for narrative style and structure. There is at least a precedent for dictating rules to people when it comes to grammar. Telling someone how to construct a story is a fallacy, and you’re a phallus for trying. If anything, we need more experimentation in this area. I’m tired of reading the same tripe in the same style and arrangement of chapters. Even Quentin Tarantino is using and reusing a chapter structure. And once Tarantino rips it off, a good general guideline is to drop it like a hot stone in a Russian bathhouse.

Don’t worry about what’s trendy, what’s popular, or what’s passé in the overstuffed, largely neglected world of fiction. Change tenses midstream for all I fucking care. Flashbacks, flash forwards, prologues, epilogues, first-person narrators, fourth-person narrators. It can all go in a blender and come out in any order you see fit as long as it is serving a purpose for you as the author. If you believe in its function and have a clear vision for its use, someone else probably will, too.

But don’t ever flash sideways. Rules aside, that shit is just retarded.

Here’s a story. I found myself sitting for a panel at a convention on some subject I don’t remember because panels and cons are both useless. This was back when anyone with their name on a couple hundred bound pages impressed me. We all go through such a phase. I’m half-listening, probably staring at some geek girl’s rack, when at the tail-end of a rant by some genre fiction novelist you’ll never hear about I caught, “… it’s like writing in first-person!”

“Whoa, whoa, what’s wrong with first-person?” I piped up, having just written an entire novel largely in monologue form that most of you probably don’t remember.

I proceeded to get verbally gangbanged by the small press mafia who were dumping on the use of first-person narrative, especially those written in the present tense, as a blogger-created trend to be dismissed. It was among the first times I realized most writers have shit for brains… and talent. Who the fuck are these people to even have an opinion? Some frumpy bitch who writes historical romance (read: porn no one wants to buy) and says you have to go to Scotland to write about Scotland yet couldn’t buy a one-way ticket there with the book she ended up not getting published. The mid-list horror superstar of the con whose ass everyone kissed because he was probably the only one scraping a living with his fiction, and then strictly because of a movie option on one of his books continuing to be renewed.

You know who they’re not? Suzanne Collins. She would very much like to hear how first-person present tense narratives don’t work except she’s too busy buying Guam. She doesn’t even like Guam, but she needs some place to store her extra hats. She’s a young lady who wrote a little YA novel in that style that is now beloved by millions and about to be the next hotshit post-Potter movie franchise, which will lead to even more millions digging her disdained, passé style.

It’s a good thing she wasn’t at that con.

Look, it’s 2012 and the world is going to end in about ten minutes. I say no more rules. I say fuck the King’s English, fuck the Fowler brothers, fuck Hart’s Way, fuck The Elements of Style in all its forms. Relegate them to emergency toilet paper where they belong. My teachers were and are the authors I love to read, and the more rules they broke, the more they hooked me with their style.

Find your own, don’t listen to what anybody (especially writers, least of all me) tell you, and write the thing you want future archaeologists to discover when they’re sifting the cultural remains of this burnt-out cinder we call Earth.

It’s hard for a lot of people to believe, as I have a reputation for being a seven-foot-tall eater of worlds (largely because I tell people that’s what I am), but the following is true.

I was bullied as a kid. Bad.

I was a fat, nervous, terrified little bastard from birth to about age fifteen. I was scared of everything. My mother got pulled over by a cop for speeding and I burst hysterically into tears. I went catatonic for about ten minutes after the Wolfman and Frankenstein cornered me at Universal Studios one vacation (and I’m still looking for those two motherfuckers. Their day will come). I had no friends, no defensive capabilities, and I weighed twice as much as any kid in school. It made me a natural target and I was, often.

Here’s a story. It will feed directly into my point assuming I arrive at such a place (I’m not a fucking fortune teller). When I was still in single digits my mom and I lived with my grandmother in North Shore, near the Salton Sea. It was the middle of fucking nowhere. Our street had four houses on it and room for about fifty. The rest was desert. There were two convenient stores, a bar, an abandoned motel, and that’s it. Yet there were a handful of kids from around the estates who needed schooling. So they bused us into Mecca, many miles away, for that.

Because it was the middle of nowhere, they had to divert buses from more populated areas to scoop us up. There were two of them, and if the first bus that usually collected our ragtag group was full by the time it got to us, it just sailed past.

And then we were screwed.

Truly, deeply, phantasmagorically arseholed.

I’ll explain. That second bus ranks high on the list of the worst places in which I’ve ever spent a meaningful amount of time. Folks, I am a man who can describe with intimate detail some of the worst whorehouses and drug dens in Mexico and South America. I have worked in the shittiest purgatorial towns of both New Jersey and Texas. A public school bus should not be on that list.

It earned its spot for one simple reason. The kids on that back-up bus were hyenas on meth and we were meat. It was largely populated by one inbred clan of fuckwits who all looked identical to each other, and the younger they were the closer their eyes seemed to be set. They were a family of genetic sociopaths. I was often held in a headlock all the way to school while my cheek was pinched hard enough to burst capillaries. My stomach was slapped and punched until it was completely numb. The verbal abuse was the stuff of nightmares and could have broken down a CIA-trained sleeper assassin.

One of my most vivid memories of that time is of sitting in the first seat of the hell bus (naively thinking it would save me) while directly across the aisle a friend of mine was being garroted. Literally. An obese cholo-in-training was behind him with a length of nylon choking the life out of the kid.

The driver, the sole adult on the bus, was sitting less than three feet away. I started yelling, “Bus driver! Bus driver!” while VIOLENTLY YANKING THE SLEEVE OF THE FAT FUCK’S SHIRT.

He didn’t speak, didn’t even turn his head. I didn’t exist.

Here’s the point. That was over twenty years ago. Fuck all has changed. Your kids are still roving packs of sadistic little animals and you ignore it. You buy them a smart phone and call it a day. You hold a pep rally and give a speech to an indistinguishable mass of humanity and then clock out. It’s bullshit. Bullying is about as valid a rite of passage as female circumcision, and no less its spiritual equivalent. You’re bullshit. You’re not an educator if you allow bullying to go on in your school, you’re a corrupt prison guard. You’re not a man if your son is a bully, you’re a fucking failure and I hope you die early of colon cancer and the pain causes your cruel offspring to turn to drugs which they eventually overdose on because you both deserve it.

I couldn’t take the hypocrisy of adults and the abuse of my peers. I quit high school in the middle of my sophomore year, went to New York, and became a professional wrestler. If I hadn’t I probably would have killed myself. People tell me the things I’ve done and the places I’ve been in the intervening years make me brave. The truth is I bailed. I fucking deserted. I took the last lifeboat and left the ship to burn. The truth is I don’t know how any of you made it through, how any of you make it through whole. I wasn’t strong enough to do it.

What sparked all of this was an article I read about Lee Hirch’s documentary BULLY being given an “R” rating by the MPAA. The Weinsteins, who bought the flick, want to show it in schools. Where it absolutely should be screened. This is an important film. Hirsch actually captured real bullying as it happens, as well as its widespread effects. Being rated “R” means it can’t be shown in those same schools. It’s madness.

It mystifies me the MPAA still exists and I truly do blame the wealthy and powerful producers and directors of the last few decades who have step-and-fetched with their every flick rather than taking a stand, but that’s another blog post. The point is this is yet another way adults have found to leave these kids out in the fucking cold when the slightest bit of action could help.

It’s thoroughly and in all ways unacceptable to me.

I can’t encourage you enough to make noise about this, and to support The Weinstein Company in its proposed “leave of absence” from the MPAA (which I hope they go through with). In a broader sense, I also can’t preach strongly enough to you that you do something about bullying in general. “It Gets Better” isn’t nearly good enough, but at least it’s proactive. I’d like to see the irreverent and downright rude bastards and bitches that tend to congregate to my works take that shit a step farther.

What that step is has to be up to you, and there is no one or right answer. I can tell you to write your congressman, join the PTA, start a fucking phone tree, whatever, but in the end you’re going to have the idea that actually ends up changing things. That’s just the way it works.

So start thinking on it.

Personally, I’m a firm believer in prison rules. I advocate the bullied everywhere band together, isolate the biggest, meanest fucker on the yard, and just beat the shit out of him. Seriously. Don’t kill him, but put the kid in the hospital for an extended stay. And write “bully” across his forehead so everyone knows why he’s there.

Now, that’s horrible. What’s worse is IT’S BETTER THAN ANYTHING YOU IMPOTENT CHUNKS OF OFFAL HAVE COME UP WITH YET.

The theme of this blog in this, the year 2012, is the end of the world. I don’t know how that end comes. I do know if we can’t bring our kids through their adolescence with their minds and bodies intact then we are fucked as a species in the most literal evolutionary sense, regardless of whether the Earth keeps spinning.

Some things are classic, dependable; even timeless.

I can site a few examples. The Great Pyramid of Giza don’t give a fuck. The oldest and the last of the seven wonders of the ancient world is still standing strong over four thousand years later, and it ain’t getting less pointy any time soon. I don’t see the lines of a ’57 Chevy ever going out of style, and their give-me-all-you-got guts will never let you down on the short track. A Buck 119 hunting knife, like the one forged right down the road in El Cajon, California that I’ve shined since I was fourteen hasn’t changed since the first one was boxed many a decade ago, and it would be plain un-American to do so now or in the foreseeable future.

And if those all seem like just things, then I can come up with no greater constant fitting all the above categories than the support of a woman who, for all the enemies you may have fought and bested and all of your scars and hard talk and phallic bullshit, is stronger than you will ever be in ways you cannot fathom. That right there will never fail to last you the rest of your life. That right there will never fail, period.

Like I said. Some things are classic. Dependable. Timeless.

According to our long-viewing, shortsighted friends the Mayans (among others), this world is not one of those things.

Well, neither is this blog. In fact, its return may actually be the harbinger of the impending apocalypse.

Like the world is supposed to shortly, it came to an end. My last blog post went live in April of 2010, almost two years ago. My last post of consequence went live a month or so before that, on the eve of my final departure from Nashville, Tennessee, headed for the coast.

That night I sat against an Algonquin fort of moving boxes and wrote these words…

In a few hours I’ll be airborne for Los Angeles, two thousand miles in four hours totally taking the technological achievements of my species for granted like every other fucking mung who fails to realize man was never meant to fly. I’m leaving almost four years on the table here. Four years in which I wrote my first novel, made my first “professional” fiction sale, realized the central fallacy of “professional” fiction markets, heard my first piece of fiction podcast, had my first story optioned for film, adapted my first story into a screenplay, got my first freelance screenwriting gig, saw my words on the screen for the first time, wrote dozens of columns, hundreds of blog posts, thousands of tweets, and even had a few moments for basic human interaction.

That’s a lot. You don’t feel it at the time. You’re numb to most of the wins while feeling the losses entirely too deep. You’re always waiting for what’s next, what’s expected, what’s desired, all the while ignorant to the waves of each crashing around you. You’re a man with his tibia protruding through the skin asking a bystander if your leg is broken. It’s not ‘til you’re ready to leave that you finally feel the pain and all the wonderful and illusory endorphins it generates. Four years ago I was living in Dallas, I quit wrestling, put in an application at a Virgin Megastore in Mockingbird Station, realized they could call at any time, promptly packed all my shit and fled the state. I came here to put my head down and write, nothing more. I wasn’t counting any of this as real life.

But of course it was. It always is. It all is.

A few months shy of two years later this is still true. Moving to LA was a big deal. Starting from scratch in life and in a new medium and market was a big deal. I stopped blogging to actually experience it for a change. Mostly. I also got tired of it, and of blogs and bloggers in general. I’ve kept up with Twitter (sort of), but largely I’ve just been Out Here. Unplugged. I’ve carved an existence from the bare, jagged rock. I’ve been writing. I’ve been working. Most of the time they’re the same thing. I’ve even been teaching here and there, or as much I can without becoming too full of shit. It hasn’t been glamorous (yet) and it hasn’t made me rich (yet), but I’m still here and I’ve sharpened my teeth in the interim. And it beats mid-list fiction.

Which brings us up to date. It’s 2012 and it seemed like the appropriate year to do some archiving, or more to the point make a little noise, while there’s time. You’re still here, which amazes me. Whether that’s because I once wrote something that moved you or made you laugh or pissed on your values, I appreciate it all the same.

A lot of you still care about writing, and we’ll talk about that. I’ve been focused primarily on the scribbling of them moving pictures, and we’ll talk about that, too. A lot of things are happening in our culture and others that piss me off, and we’ll definitely talk about that.

So here we are. We’re back. Or we’re going out. Or we’re going on. It depends on whom you ask. But I know one thing for sure. There’s some shit happening this year, man. Waves may be made. All of this may end. But shit is going down. It’s going to be a year of note.

I wouldn’t miss it for the world.