Why Do All My Sundays Feel Like Dead Time?

I've spent the day reading 2007's Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. I'm about 1/3rd of the way through it. A couple of the stories have struck me well, but mostly, I am just not feeling inspired by the last several stories. I had kind of hoped to be dazzled by brilliance in reading it. Dunno why my expectations were so high. It's all good stuff, but it's not hitting me. I think I'm becoming jaded to all the quality on display maybe? Or it could be that I just don't do horror, although I like some of the ghost stories here.

I keep saying I don't do horror, but I'm starting to think that horror short fiction isn't all that bad. I am very easily startled, and jump scares can set my heart racing very badly in film and TV horror. I'm such a wimp that Signs nearly gave me a heart attack. I was thrilled at the end of that movie, despite the lame solution, because the things that had spent the movie terrifying me and causing me to feel close to collapse finally got their asses kicked. But in short fiction, the horror is more cerebral, and I can take that. I think what I mostly don't do is the jump scare. The loud-noise-and-something-moving-fast-on-the-screen combo that is utterly cheap and gets me every. damned. time. Hate that crap. Cheesy 50s/60s horror, on the other hand? That stuff is awesome for its lameness. Monster movies for the win!

Another thing around the house this weekend has been the first season of Veronica Mars, which we have watched before, but Sarah just bought the DVDs. I think for a serialized TV show, season one of that show may be the best season I've ever seen. The set-up for it was brilliant, and sadly, the series really lost its way after that season for me, I think because they exhausted what made the first season so brilliant. It's something I've put a lot of thought into, in wondering how I can adapt the technique to my own work.

What makes this series work so well for me is that we take a girl who has everything and before the story even starts, we take it all away. We take her mom, her friends, her boyfriend, her status, her dad's job--all of it. We start with a girl who is a complete outcast, but we really don't much care for the rich kids anyway, so part of the fun is watching Veronica come to terms and accept her new status. It's this back story, revealed with flashbacks, tying new events in with her past and the murder of her best friend, that makes the season work and gives the story a richness that a lot of more straightforward linear narrative shows don't have. They solve Lilly's murder in the season finale, and when they came back in season 2, it's clear that they had lost the plot. There was no more back story to draw on to flesh out the "current" events, and so everything felt a lot more flat to me. They tried to build a bit on season one's characters with new arcs and such, but they also hit the reset button on some relationships with a failed summer backstory for flashbacks. The problem with that was probably execution and not the concept.

So we'd explored Neptune and it's class divisions, and it just didn't seem like there was that much more to say. The odd retconning of Veronica's rape in season two's finale indicates to me that they realized that it was everything that happened before the start of season one that was the core of the show, and was a failed attempt at recapturing that.

It's kind of odd that a high school girl detective show is the one that demonstrates the importance of back story and world building to me. But there it is. The above runs perilously close to being a review, so I'll just shut up now.