Well, the soundtrack was pretty good.
Gina reminded me that in my desire to be pithy I left off my rating scheme, so here it is: Elizabethtown put my wife to sleep in about an hour and a half. This does not mean that she liked it; she just kept shaking her head and muttering and making unfavorable comparisons to some of her other “favorite” movies such as August Rush and Hope Floats and giving me sidelong glances and saying “How did you pick this, again?”
Before I came to realize that my style and subject matter were both completely unsuited for The New Yorker, I actually tried getting published there once or twice. No surprise: Rejected.
So my parents like to find old examples of things I wrote when I was a kid and send them to me, just to remind me that I, too, was once a child. I thought it might be interesting to post one or two of them. With that in mind, I present my classic tale of horror and suspense, “The Great Beast Invasion”. If we assume that the date in the story is about when the story was written (which it probably is, given that kids are pretty much creatures of the “now” — just like dogs!), then I would’ve been six when I scribbled down this masterpiece.
Continue reading “A Portrait of the Artist as a (Very) Young Man”
This weekend’s Netflix selection was MirrorMask. As you can see from the sidebar, Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers (love American Gods, love Stardust, love Neverwhere), so I was quite looking forward to this film. After seeing it, I would characterize it as Labyrinth (the movie) meets “Obsidian” (the video game) with a dash of Legend, filtered through an acid trip.
MirrorMask follows the adventures of Helena, who awakens in the middle of the night to find herself in a parallel world where everyone wears a mask, and a “City of Light” is threatened by shadows from the neighboring “City of Darkness”. After being mistaken for a pilfering Princess, Helena ends up volunteering to find a stolen charm (which nobody has ever seen) to restore the balance between light and darkness. Her quest is threatened by various odd-looking shadows, hungry human-faced kitties, and a sidekick named Valentine who seems to be even more useless than Hoggle of Labyrinth fame.
The film has a distinct and arresting visual style, but (unusually for Gaiman) the plot is rather slow and muddled, and at some point the weird-looking creatures and settings became a distraction. Also, the fact that most of the secondary characters are saddled with masks (and relatively inane dialog; just about everything out of Valentine’s mouth is of the “we’re doomed” or “this is hopeless” variety) made it difficult to empathize with them. (Perhaps it was more the dialog than the masks, because I didn’t have any trouble at all empathizing with Hud, the fellow behind the camera in Cloverfield, who almost never appeared on-screen.) Anyway, despite these issues, MirrorMask still held my attention for much of its running time; even Gaiman’s throwaway ideas are often better than the central conceits of other writers’ work. In particular, this film boasts the creepiest version of the old song “Close To You” that I’ve ever seen or heard.
MirrorMask put my wife to sleep in about an hour and a half, which isn’t bad; I think it was the visuals that kept her awake that long. At one point, she remarked that it looked like a video game (see “Obsidian”, above). Labyrinth is one of her favorite films, though, so MirrorMask didn’t quite measure up. (When I told her it to wake up because MirrorMask was almost over, she said, “It should’ve been over fifteen minutes ago.”)
Today, during my semi-monthly auto-Googling, I discovered that Dragon Stones has made its way out to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and the like. Interestingly enough, Long Before Dawn hasn’t reached those outlets yet, but it is available from online bookstores in the U.K. Go figure. Perhaps the British are more amenable than the Americans to proper vampire stories, where the vampires are monsters.
Anyway, for all my legions of fans out there who have just been waiting to be able to purchase my two latest books from somewhere other than Lulu.com (you know who you are), your wish has been granted! You can get Dragon Stones from Amazon.com or BN.com, and Long Before Dawn from Blackwell Online and WHSmith in the U.K. Both should be available elsewhere as well.
Once I got beyond reading five or six blogs, it became more or less impossible to keep up with checking them online and seeing if there were new posts; so I started subscribing to their RSS feeds using the Thunderbird mail client. This worked fine and made it much easier to avoid missing posts. However, today I became aware that a couple of my subscriptions had stopped functioning (sorry, Finicky Penguin and Cinema Gypsy). The folders were still there, but they looked empty, so I thought, okay, I’ll just add the subscriptions back in. Wrong! Thunderbird wouldn’t let me add them because it said I was already subscribed. I went through every single feed folder looking for the phantom feeds, but they were nowhere to be found.
Hmm. What to do next? I decided to try exporting all my feeds and then importing them again. So I created the export file (under Subscribe –> Export), deleted all my feed folders, and then imported the feed file (under Subscribe –> Import). Everything came back, except for the two missing feeds. So I thought, okay, I deleted everything, so I should be able to add the missing feeds back in now. Wrong! Thunderbird still insisted I was subscribed to them, even though it hadn’t pulled in any messages from them in over two weeks and they were nowhere to be found in any of the other folders.
Mutter mutter mutter. Okay, now what? After briefly flirting with going back to Opera and its wonderful M2 mail & RSS client, I opened the feed export that I created earlier (it’s an OPML file, which can be edited with any text editor), deleted everything out of it except for two entries, and then proceeded to modify them to be for the two missing feeds. Then I imported the hacked OPML file. Eureka! There are my missing feeds! I dragged them back to the “Blogs” folder under RSS feeds, and here come all the posts that I missed from those two blogs.
Oh no! Information overload! I’ll pick up commenting on the new posts as they arrive …
For those who are interested, here’s the OPML file after I edited it:
<opml version=”1.0″>
<head>
<title>Thunderbird OPML Export</title>
<dateCreated>Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:38:33 GMT</dateCreated>
</head>
<body>
<outline text=”Blogs”>
<outline title=”The Show Must Go On” text=”The Show Must Go On” type=”rss” version=”RSS” xmlUrl=”http://cinemagypsy.wordpress.com/feed/” htmlUrl=”http://cinemagypsy.wordpress.com/”/>
<outline title=”Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Soda” text=”Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Soda” type=”rss” version=”RSS” xmlUrl=”http://finickypenguin.wordpress.com/feed/” htmlUrl=”http://finickypenguin.wordpress.com/feed/”/>
</outline>
</body>
</opml>
After our previous “random acceptance” anomaly, we’re back in familiar territory, with a rejection letter from a literary agent I was hoping to get to represent Long Before Dawn:
Continue reading “Random Rejection: The Panettieri Agency, “Long Before Dawn””
It had to happen eventually … I reached into my nine-inch-thick folder of responses and pulled out an acceptance letter. But this one has a twist.
A while back, I sent a copy of Dragon Stones to the artist in Italy. With his sharp artist’s eye, he noticed that the cover illustration of the dragon was not anti-aliased properly. This problem has now been fixed, and the cover art looks much better — the lines are smooth rather than pixellated and the details are sharper.
I’m of the mind that anyone who bought Dragon Stones with the pixellated cover art is deserving of a pristine copy that looks the way the artist intended. If you have a copy of the book and would like to get the updated version, please let me know and I will send you one free of charge. (Obviously you shouldn’t post your address information in a public comment, so feel free to e-mail me at the listed address.)
Now, some might say that this could be an expensive thing for me to do. But don’t worry. I know how many copies of Dragon Stones have been sold, and it won’t be. (Too bad …)
Viscosity 