UNEARTHING STAR WARS TELEVISION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

“You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” James T. Kirk, Battlestar Yamato. Episode Three: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

I think the most annoying think about the character Ahsoka Tano is that she’s called Ahsoka and not Ashoka. Whenever I go to type this name out, I have to correct something that shouldn’t have to be corrected. Rewind. Fix that name. She’s Ashoka.
   Now a rather annoying/endearing/but truthfully annoying side character can come along in a STAR WARS show and call her Ash for short. Lightsabres hum into life as she jokingly takes offence. You can’t shorten her name as it is. She should be Ash. But I see from the space wildlife documentary ALIEN that this seat is already taken. Ahsoka she must be.
   I tuned in for the first episode of – checks notes – AHSOKA. It’s the habit of streaming companies to drop two or even three episodes of a new show on you, providing a mini-binge so that you can get into the show’s stride or rapidly walk away if the whole thing isn’t for you.
   AHSOKA started off with two episodes available. I watched the first one and stopped dead. There seemed to be a lot of things going on in the show that weren’t really things going on at all. Let’s have a shot of this motorway leading to a tower. I guess that’s meaningful, somehow.
   Here’s a ceremony starring Clancy Brown. He’s portraying a guy, I guess. We’re waiting on a famous rebel from the rebel days. But she’s so rebellious that she doesn’t turn up for the ceremony. Going off to that tower is her priority.
   To quote Al Pacino, I am…over-fucking-whelmed.
   After I watched the first episode I wasn’t pointing at everything, DiCaprio style. I had the distinct impression that I’d missed something. Like, oh, I don’t know, an entire television series. Unnervingly, there were multiple guides online telling me about the sort of homework I had to do…just to follow this show.
   REBELS somehow passed me by. Apparently, aside from a few other things on the list to watch, this was the thing I should have watched first. I didn’t head straight over to episode two. Instead, I started watching REBELS. The format is short enough to make it easy to mini-binge.
   Around twenty minutes per episode.
   Pretty soon I was pointing at everything, DiCaprio style. That was in the AHSOKA opening episode. And so was that. This. Those. Her. Him. That there. Jesus Christ, it’s Jason Bourne Clancy Brown.
   What’s REBELS like? It’s full of STAR WARS cheese, and is all the better for that. Stormtroopers still can’t shoot for shit. Droids constantly save the day when they aren’t clowning around. Other film ideas sneak onto the show with varying degrees of success…3 GODFATHERS, JAWS, other STAR WARS movies...
   I shouldn’t have to do homework to catch a show. Okay, yes, I should watch a few STAR WARS movies first; I’ll grant you that one. But don’t you get the feeling that the world was a much better place before we started numbering World Wars and STAR WARS films?
   Hailing from the world of boardgaming you’ll just end up confused by ANDOR, which isn’t a series of Tolkien-lite boardgames packed to brimming with cardboard pieces. ANDOR is set around the same time as REBELS is – leading up to the rebels actually getting somewhere against the EVIL EMPIRE®.
   In STAR WARS, Episode IV: A New Marketing Strategy, the rebellion finds the somewhere it gets to is between a rock and a hard place. This means the odd cameo in ANDOR, and more of the same in REBELS. Spoiler alert: stormtroopers are in plentiful supply.
   The format for REBELS is one of a spaceship with a crew acting like an extended family of misfits. STAR TREK crewmembers, with less planet-hopping and plenty of STAR WARS. The rebels spend far too much time on the one planet. That’s where the levels of disbelief reach cheese-laden proportions.
   But we waive that point. We do not press it. We look over it.
   To wipe out the regular cast of rebels would mean destroying the whole planet they are constantly using as their base. If only the EVIL EMPIRE™ could come up with some sort of handy beach-ball sized gadget to crush that problem. Maybe a bit larger. Need to look into the physics of that.
   Away with the concept of physics in STAR WARS, and also STAR TREK. Never let science get in the way of the story. If you did, the main cast would be dead after the first firefight in a cupboard. Hangar. I meant to type hangar.
   Noisy infiltration of Imperial Base? Check. Last-minute daring rescues? Check. Bickering rebels who must band together to face the greater threat posed by the Disney Empire®? Check. Clunky references to STAR WARS movies? No, they have to be MacClunkey references.
   We’ve been down this path before. THE MANDALORIAN ran for two series. And then it became the BOBA FETT SHOW. Then it went back to being THE MANDALORIAN again. If you weren’t interested in Boba Fett and skipped all of his episodes, returning to the regular show after a self-imposed gap would leave you wondering about a few things.
   Making the later episodes of Fett’s show essential viewing for the next Mandalorian series is all about the business of getting people to watch both shows…and less about the business of telling a good story. It’s like, oh, I don’t know…
   Doing a 2006 Superman sequel to a 1980 Superman movie while ignoring the really rubbish Superman films made after 1980. So the thing is…26 years go by, but in the movie Superman has been away for five years. Everyone is recast for reasons of a quarter of a century going by. Some of the music score and dialogue is reheated from earlier movies…
   And the plot is a mix of Lex Luthor restructuring American real estate from the first film…while throwing in a dash of Lex Luthor turning up at Doc Savage’s Superman’s Fortress of Solitude from the second movie. We’re ignoring Richard Pryor and Nuclear Man from later outings. Thankfully.
   Superman Returns. I watched it once. And I’m still waiting for that movie to start.
   You can watch two watchable Superman films, skip two skippable Superman films, and still come to the conclusion that the fifth Superman film was not required.
   Luckily, there’s only one movie about a shark called JAWS. Then there’s Highlander. There can be only one. That lone movie, The Matrix, is terrific. Those two ALIEN documentaries and the two TERMINATOR films…so glad no one continued with those franchises. There isn’t a ROCKETEER animated series. I don’t know where you are getting these lies from.
   Though there is a TERMINATOR television show that allowed Dean Norris to appear in the movie and TV versions of the story. We cut that much slack to the accountants and other bean-counters.
   What is my Superman point? A franchise that continues after a gap means nothing to the viewers who missed the earlier stuff, no matter the quality of the material. That’s what we learn from Boba Fett. Here’s Ahsoka. She’s been in those pesky CLONE WARS. Fair enough.
   And she’s already had her live-action debut in someone else’s show. Miss REBELS and you are left staring at a lot of deep symbolic landscapes that have shallow symbolism for us. So much for episode one that stopped me in my tracks.
   Disney owns MARVEL, and the problem of how much homework you need to do is even more pronounced over there in the superhero setting. Away with the physics of superheroes. The question you must ask is this: do I REALLY need to watch this, that, those things, and all that other stuff just to follow the latest show?
   In the case of AHSOKA, I don’t think I had any choice. I was forced to stop. Then it was up to me to seek out the big plug for the massive gap I sensed. Luckily, watching REBELS, I viewed something that was fun. As I type this up, I am around halfway through the run of rebellious hijinks.
   Will 70+ episodes of REBELS place me in good stead to return to several episodes about Ahsoka? Doesn’t matter. I’m having fun watching a bunch of misfits sneak around Imperial bases. Even the bane of science fiction, the ventilator shaft, doesn’t spoil the show.
   Do you need to go back and watch that thing to understand this thing? Depends. That’s as good an answer as I can give you. To dodge REBELS, you might be left puzzled by many a twist and turn, and character introduction, and basic chunk of plotting. The consequence of doing a bit of homework meant that I unearthed a good show I hadn’t really taken in, when it appeared a few years back.
   So do we live in a golden age of television? Whatever that means. Now that we’re free of television’s shackles, and choose our own way of watching, consuming stories, perhaps we are. You still have to hack through a lot of fool’s gold to reach the good stuff. Remember this.
   On that point, I’ll return to REBELS. Spoiler alert: stormtroopers are easy to impersonate. That’s also a spoiler alert for STAR WARS. I won’t say which episode, in case you haven’t seen any of it. You can safely skip the Ewok spin-off movies. I think everyone did.

KINDLE FORMATTING. PARAGRAPH INDENTATION.

This next piece proved useful to people, so I’ll repeat it here with a few visuals thrown in.

To turn my story into a Kindle product, I use MS Word and convert the file to PRC using Mobipocket Creator. (PRC is nothing to do with China, as far as I know.) Go to the Kindle section of Amazon. Find a book, any book, inviting you to LOOK INSIDE!

   Do just that.
   What are you looking for? The first line of the story. Chances are, that line is indented. Amazon has a default setting within its publishing factory, which has given rise to this decidedly non-paperback phenomenon.
   When I was struggling to deal with the format of my first self-published manuscript, I soon discovered this joyful stumbling-block. That’s what the Previewer is for. Well, how do I get my book to look like a book? With the first paragraph free of indentation…
   Solution?
   I couldn’t find one. Answer – chip away at all possible permutations until I found one that worked. This solution relates to using Microsoft Word for the original text, before it goes through the caterpillar-butterfly transformation.
   Start with the chapter title. Type carefully. The chapter title ends with a tap of the return key. MS Word recognises this symbol as a paragraph mark.
   On-screen, the symbol resembles a capital P flipped to face the other way, with the hollow section filled in, and two legs to stand on instead of the usual one leg.

 

   Some of you may think of the return key as the enter key. Others might still call it the carriage return key. I feel I must refrain from making comments about age.

   Follow that single tap of the return key with manual line breaks. Hit the return key and the shift key simultaneously. That generates a manual line break. On-screen, the symbol looks like an arrow coming down and veering left.

   I use three manual line breaks like that before I start writing the first paragraph. The general recommendation is that you never use four or more.

   That should do the trick. Chapter title. Paragraph mark. A number of manual line breaks to suit your own taste – no more than three. (People like to read books on their phones, and more than three breaks will cause trouble for those readers.)
   With the title/paragraph mark/manual line break sequence in place, the first paragraph of a chapter then loses the annoying (unseen) default indent.
   You can’t just use paragraph marks one after the other, as they don’t show up when used in a straight sequence. Once converted to Kindle, they might as well not be there – leading to no space between chapter title and first line. Awkward, unless you are aiming for that style.
   (However, note that, in the above screenshot on chapter links, I place a paragraph mark at the top of the page before the title. This removes a formatting glitch from the book in relation to hyperlinked chapter titles. The title shown isn’t hyperlinked, but I use the extra paragraph mark as a matter of routine. This extra paragraph mark doesn’t show up in the finished product.)

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For breaks within chapters, I separate the sections by means of an asterisk.

   End the section of text with a paragraph mark. (The return key again.) Next, add a manual line break. (Shift and return. Not one after the other. Together or not at all.) Then type the asterisk, followed by the return key.
   To end the sequence, hit shift and return together. After that, type your new paragraph. Go back and centre the asterisk. The line break above the asterisk should also centre, though the one below should not.

 

 

   Beware. If the next section opens with direct speech, you may find inverted commas starting with closing quotes instead of opening ones. Some fine-tuning is required.

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Why place an asterisk between chapter sections? The reader will always see the asterisk. If you leave a blank space between sections, that space can be lost in the Kindle shuffle, depending on font-size. A new section, without indent, should indicate where the next scene kicks off. The best solution is to have some form of character, preferably an asterisk, right there as an obvious visual cue.

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For authors who wish to follow the advice, remember – this arrangement worked for me. You may be doing other things in the background, or foreground, bringing my advice into conflict with how you run your office. Solution. Keep trying.
   All of my books get around the Amazon default setting of the first line paragraph indent. Is this something readers are bothered by? We’re in the Twilight Zone on that one...
   How far does an e-reading experience stray from the paper one? An army of readers, used to paper publishing conventions, will want something that resembles what went before. With all the advantages e-reading brings, into the bargain. (Instant dictionary, etc.) In another generation, who knows...
   Some readers will convert completely. Others will mix and match between paper and e-reading. A few will sample then reject outright, clinging to the familiarity of the past. There is a cry for “proper” books, whatever those are.
   If you feel that you are going to alienate many of your readers by dropping traditional publishing conventions, do your best to take account of this. Though remember – there was resistance to the end of the one-page paragraph. Robinson Crusoe would be a touch easier to read if rendered in smaller chunks on the page...
   For my part, I couldn’t cut loose of an established publishing convention even though I embraced digital publishing. I wrote my fiction that way anyhow, and stuck to that format. To first para indent or not is your choice.
   If it makes production of your book easier and you don’t receive thousands of complaints, ye are harming none and saving yourself some bother if you decide to stick with the Amazon default.
   We’d all like to think it’s what we write the readers are interested in, and not how we encode our scribble...

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Paragraph indentation itself is handled in the Format box. Highlight the text you want to indent. Inside the tab marked Indents and Spacing, there’s an option for Special settings. To generate paragraph indents, set the feature to First line and select a measurement. I use 0.5 cm, as shown in the screenshot.

   Once you’ve set up the indentation, that’s it for the rest of the text unless you put in obvious breaks. Then you’ll have to highlight again.

   I can’t cover all the quirks here, as I don’t know how you write your stories. But you’ll see how things pan out as you go.
   While your attention lingers on that screenshot…
   Line spacing should be set to 1.5 for the eventual conversion to Kindle.