One of the readers of Dennis’s Diary of Destruction, Anna of Anna’s Bee World, tagged both Dennis and me for a Six Facts meme. Dennis already has posted his, which means it’s time for me to post mine. But first, the rules:
Author: James Viscosi
Random Rejection: Pulp Magazine
This week’s rejection “letter” can’t really be called a letter. To me, it looks more like a sign that you might see posted on the telephone pole outside your house advertising a garage sale, except in this case, it’s advertising that your submission will not be appearing in Pulp Magazine.
The Superior Scribbler Award
This week I got a cute addition to my iconography from Alyson over at Laugh in the Sun:
Free Software for Everyone: Avidemux
So it’s been quite a while since I did a “free software” post, mainly because I had already blown through all the free software that I use that might be of general interest. (Unless someone wants to hear about the wonderful PekWM window manager for Linux. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) However, recently I’ve been spending time with Avidemux, a simple yet powerful application that allows you to do some basic video manipulation. You’re not going to be creating green-screen Stephen Colbert lightsaber duel videos with it, but you might find it useful for other things. Like what, you say? Let’s take a look:
Random Rejection: Innovation
Here’s another example of a form rejection letter that manages to convey a little more information than just “go away”. While obviously not nearly as valuable as one that contains actual feedback, I was still happy to get this sort of rejection, because at least I felt that someone had taken the time to read what I sent them.
Review: “Homefront”
This week I finished up reading Homefront, by Kristen Tsetsi. (You may have seen the occasional comment from Kristen here.) I don’t usually write book reviews here, because it’s difficult to apply my snarky rating system to them (“this book put my wife to sleep in N minutes” … nah, doesn’t really work), but I’m making an exception for Kristen because I really want to encourage people to pick up her novel.
The Early Years: The Bike With A Brain
For school assignments, I always wrote a lot of what could charitably called “speculative fiction” (or, less charitably, “nonsense”). Here’s a very short example, most likely from elementary school, although it’s hard to tell because I didn’t bother to date it, or even to put my name on it:
Review: “The Machinist”
We finally got around to watching The Machinist, a movie where Batman (Christian Bale) loses like a hundred pounds, starts messing up on his day job as an operator of heavy machinery, and starts seeing things that may or may not be there. He also finds mysterious and threatening cryptic notes stuck to his refrigerator. (At the risk of providing a spoiler, if you’ve read my short story “You“, then you already know who’s leaving those notes.)
I wasn’t sure quite what to make of The Machinist at first. I thought it might be a dystopian science fiction flick, one of those films where it’s always dark and gloomy and everyone toils in hopeless servitude for some nameless mega-corporation; so when Batman (I’m going to keep calling him that because my wife, while she was awake, just kept staring at Bale, shaking her head, and saying, “That’s Batman?”) ventures out into the bright California sunshine, the effect was actually quite jolting. The contrast between the hellish factory where he works and the sunny world beyond was effective and, I’m sure, quite deliberate.
The film does a good job portraying Batman’s spiraling isolation and paranoia, and contains some powerful scenes, particularly when Batman chaperones a boy on a ride at a theme park that neither one of them has any business riding. The final few scenes, when we get to see (in a flashback) Batman before he lost all that weight are also very well done. The big revelation didn’t come as a shock to me, as I had figured it out ages earlier (as I mentioned, I already wrote this story ten years ago), but seeing it actually play out was affecting nonetheless. The contrast between a flush and healthy Batman and his gaunt, haunted future self was simply astonishing. (I’ve no doubt that Batman had a doctor following him around the whole time they were filming.)
The Machinist put my wife to sleep almost immediately; I think she barely lasted fifteen minutes. Perhaps she would have stayed awake longer if Batman hadn’t been so frighteningly thin. This film is pushed as a thriller in its trailer and its description, but it’s really more of a character study, and is quite deliberately paced. If you go in expecting a lot of chases and action (or Batman eye candy), you’ll be disappointed; but if you want to see some moody cinematography and good acting from Batman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a nearly unrecognizable Michael Ironside, then you might like it.
NaNoWriMo
I had never heard of “National Novel Writing Month” until a very strongly-worded jab against its participants came through on one of my RSS feeds. So I went to have a look at the NaNoWriMo web site to see what it was all about. Basically, the idea is to encourage writers to bang out a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. As the web site says, “You will be writing a lot of crap”, but is that a bad thing?
Random Rejection: Ashley Grayson Agency
As I’ve mentioned before, I spent a lot of time trying to get an agent. A couple of times (three, to be exact) I succeeded in getting an agent. Unfortunately, Dan Hooker at the Ashley Grayson Literary Agency was not one of them.
Viscosity 