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.
The Early Years: “The Alien from the Planet Zorno”
Thanks to my parents’ ongoing efforts to clean junk out of their basement, I have been getting a steady stream of antediluvian scribblings (and typings). Here is a rather lengthy opus, most likely from when I was about ten, involving an alien saddled with a rather poor grasp of his own technology, not to mention a ridiculously hard to pronounce name.
Continue reading “The Early Years: “The Alien from the Planet Zorno””
Random Rejection: Design Image Group, “Night Watchman”
So one of the things you hear when you are submitting fiction, especially long-form fiction, is that lengthy response times are good. It means that the publisher is seriously considering your manuscript, that it has probably passed from the slush pile through the first readers and is perhaps, even right now as we speak, sitting on an editor’s desk awaiting the final stamp of approval before it is accepted.
Or it could just mean that your rejection letter was lost in the mail.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Design Image Group, “Night Watchman””
Oops
A while back I mentioned that Dragon Stones was now available on Amazon.com and BN.com, but Long Before Dawn hadn’t arrived there yet. I recently took another look and LBD still wasn’t out in the big stores. So I went back to Lulu and took a closer look at the project and noticed that, way down under the “price” section, it said something to the effect of “To be set when your book is approved”. So evidently I forgot to click the “Approve” button after getting my last proof of LBD way back in, oh, April was it? Just think of all the millions of dollars in sales I’ve lost because of that! 😐
Anyway, I have now clicked the “Approve” button, so Long Before Dawn should be showing up on Amazon.com and the other outlets soon.
The Early Years: “Time Warp Part Two”
Back in the day I used to watch a lot (a LOT) of “Dr. Who” on PBS. There wasn’t much in the way of SF on television when I was a kid, so the strange import from the BBC was always a treat. I would suspect that “Dr. Who” was a heavy influence on the short little excerpt that follows.
Review: “Sherrybaby”
This weekend we finished up watching Sherrybaby, a film in which Maggie Gyllenhaal expertly plays a blonde-haired, blue-eyed train wreck in a halter top. Sherry has just been released from prison after a stint for drug-related offenses, and spends the rest of the movie trying stay clean, hold down a job, and reconnect with her daughter (who is being raised by her brother and sister-in-law). Sherry seems to have only one way of relating to most men (hence the halter top); she’s spoiled, immature, narcissistic, and repeatedly displays staggeringly poor judgment. She fights, she lies, she manipulates; in particular, a scene in which she hijacks a dinner party to sing “Eternal Flame” is simply excruciating. At one point I said to my wife, “I keep waiting for her to make the right decision, and she never does.”
So now that I’ve made this movie sound unwatchable, let me add that it’s riveting. The performances are uniformly excellent, from Maggie Gyllenhaal (who’s in every scene) down to Ryan Simpkins as her daughter, Alexis. The film is gritty and believable but not sentimental and manages to let you see just how bleak Sherry’s situation is without being utterly depressing. The contrast between Sherry’s tawdry life of motel rooms and halfway houses contrasts sharply with the upper-class life of her father (his house is a palace in comparison) in a way that at first seems sad, but ultimately becomes infuriating. The pacing is just about perfect; when my wife said, “How did she get so messed up?”, we found out ten minutes later. Stop reading my wife’s mind, Laurie Collyer!
Sherrybaby put my wife to sleep in a little over an hour, at which point she made me turn it off so we could finish watching it later. It took us about two weeks to get back to it (we’ve been busy with the now-local Fred Astaire lately), but we finally did. You may find it painful to watch Sherry make one bad choice after another, but stick with her until the end of the film. It’s worth the ride.
Viscosity 