Beneath Ceaseless Skies just bought my short story "Oil Fire". It's a new market so it doesn't qualify me for SFWA just yet, but they pay pro-rates and I'll have my story up there with the likes of Charles Coleman Finlay, Marie Brennan and K.D. Wentworth. How geeked am I? (Answer: very).
"Oil Fire" is one of my favorite things I've written and I'm very pleased it's found a home.
(Of course I'm also a bit geeked because some nice young men in a yellow truck delivered my groceries this morning. After three months of going out and getting them on my own it's so nice to have them brought to my door again, and just in time for winter. Which is apparently the response they've been getting from everyone, not just time-crunched writers).
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Movies in September
October is nearly two-thirds over, so let's finish off September's posts. I spent most of September writing, so this is a short movie list this time.
I had high hopes for Crank, it looked like just my sort of Jason Statham fun ride. And I could see where this could be enjoyable; I wanted to enjoy it, but it just bugged me too much. It's the first movie I can recall seeing in a long time without at least one tough chick in it somewhere. Here all the women are strippers, hookers, or living works of naked art. Then there's the girlfriend, the very dumb girlfriend. She doesn't even have any "emotional intelligence", as her complete obliviousness to Statham's character's sense of urgency shows.
I suspect they are being ironic, but the movie comes with a "family friendly" cut, which removes all profanity (or so the box said, I didn't fire it up to see). In a movie filled with misogyny, violent mahem, and rampant drug use, profanity is the least of the things to shield young viewers from. I might even find that irony amusing if not for a similar misconnect with parenting values shown in the film, when the main character is raping his girlfriend in the middle of Chinatown, pinning her down and all that, but it's when he tears her shirt and her boob pops out that a nearby mother shields her son's eyes. Cause naked boobies, that's just wrong.
So this goes down as the first Statham movie to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
I did like The Love Guru. The character doesn't work nearly as well as Austin Powers, but he's amusing enough. I particularly liked the titles of his self-help books ("Stop Hurting Yourself, Stop Hurting Yourself, Why Are You Still Hurting Yourself?") Verne Troyer (who played Mini Me) gets a speaking part here, playing a hockey coach. He certaintly got the look spot on; his haircut is perfect. But I really loved Justin Timberlake in this as Jacque "the Cock", a French-Canadian goalie with a porn star moustache. Some of the funniest bits are in the deleted scenes, though. I particularly liked the longer take of Stink Mop, when the young Deepak Chopra wants to play but is told to sit with the young virgins practicing their kama sutra positions instead (his pout is perfect). Of course the very idea of a game like Stink Mop freaked out the boys more than a little.
Some of Quin's coworkers were appalled that he had never seen The X-Files, so they've been loaning us DVDs to rectify the situation. I was working bizarre hours when this show started and wasn't watching much TV, so I've never seen it either. We watched season 1 in September, and Quin was ready at several points to give up on it, but I and his coworkers insisted he stick it out. As it turns out (to his annoyance), we were making the same point, that back when this show started networks didn't like running storylines, they preferred a series to be a series of oners so viewers don't have to worry about following the story if they turn on episode 6 or 12 or whatever. Which is a detriment to viewers like us who like continuous story lines. I suspect the success of the "mythology" episodes of this show and shows like Buffy broke the ground for shows like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, which are really one long story. By the season finale of the first season, though, Quin was just as into it as I was and anxious to start season 2 (to be covered in my October post).
Moving on to India, I watched a Merchant Ivory film from 1970 called Bombay Talkie. It was in English, but featured a few Bollywood actors I recognized. The film centers around a writer who's just written a "Hollywood Wives" type book about Hollywood and has gone to Bollywood to look for inspiration for her second. She's the most irritating kind of writer, always looking for inspiration and never just putting words down on paper. She's also a pathological narcissist who spreads ruin and destruction everywhere she goes. So not a fun film, but definitely an interesting one. To be honest, I enjoyed the special features more than the movie; they did a short film about Helen, one of the most famous dancers of Bollywood item numbers. She talked about her work day and they compiled some of her more famous dance numbers. She must have done a hundred or more films, starting in the days of black and white films and working into Technicolor (she still works as an actress playing grandmothers these days).
So I only watched two films actually in Hindi, and they were both called Shakti. The first was older, starring Amitabh Bacchan as the Angry Young Man. His father is a cop, who loves his job more than his family, or so Amit has been given very good reason to believe when he's a young boy. He grows up to work for gangsters, which would naturally create conflicts. This was a Salim-Javed film, so the dialogue is sharp and the character motivations and the way they interact with each other is spot-on. It's not my favorite of their films, but it's still worth a see.
The other Shakti is more recent and seemed reminiscent of Not Without My Daughter. Karisma Kapoor lives and marries in Vancouver, but when her husband hears of troubles at home he takes her and his young son back to the home he had very good reason to leave. Unlike NWMD, the husband isn't the problem, it's his father who wants to keep his young grandson under his influence. When her husband is killed, grandpa wants to keep his only grandchild and raise him himself, so the rest of the story is a mother trying to get back to Canada with her son. There were definitely cultural references I wasn't getting; the family were Hindu but ate meat, which I'm guessing makes them of a warrior caste, but I'm not sure. And they had a deep Hatfield and McCoy grudge against the other family in their village which led to all the death and destruction.
It was a heavy-handed film, but I found the grandfather, played by Nana Patekar, very compelling. Karisma Kapoor was very good in it as well. The dance number with Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai was cool and fun, but totally out of place. It's meant to be SRK's dream, but still. This sort of thing comes up in a few Bollywood films; a change of tone so abrupt it loses me. I can't see a woman burned alive and then laugh at slapstick comedy immediately after (as happened in Bhagam Bhag).
I didn't see any great item numbers this month, so my YouTube this month will be from my all-time fave: Jaan-e-Mann. This is totally what I'll be singing when I finally see New York. This is a Cyrano deBergerac story, with Salman Khan telling Akshay Kumar what to sing to Preity Zinta. Watch for the bit where Salman gets hung up in a pack of joggers and Akshay has to hum...
I had high hopes for Crank, it looked like just my sort of Jason Statham fun ride. And I could see where this could be enjoyable; I wanted to enjoy it, but it just bugged me too much. It's the first movie I can recall seeing in a long time without at least one tough chick in it somewhere. Here all the women are strippers, hookers, or living works of naked art. Then there's the girlfriend, the very dumb girlfriend. She doesn't even have any "emotional intelligence", as her complete obliviousness to Statham's character's sense of urgency shows.
I suspect they are being ironic, but the movie comes with a "family friendly" cut, which removes all profanity (or so the box said, I didn't fire it up to see). In a movie filled with misogyny, violent mahem, and rampant drug use, profanity is the least of the things to shield young viewers from. I might even find that irony amusing if not for a similar misconnect with parenting values shown in the film, when the main character is raping his girlfriend in the middle of Chinatown, pinning her down and all that, but it's when he tears her shirt and her boob pops out that a nearby mother shields her son's eyes. Cause naked boobies, that's just wrong.
So this goes down as the first Statham movie to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
I did like The Love Guru. The character doesn't work nearly as well as Austin Powers, but he's amusing enough. I particularly liked the titles of his self-help books ("Stop Hurting Yourself, Stop Hurting Yourself, Why Are You Still Hurting Yourself?") Verne Troyer (who played Mini Me) gets a speaking part here, playing a hockey coach. He certaintly got the look spot on; his haircut is perfect. But I really loved Justin Timberlake in this as Jacque "the Cock", a French-Canadian goalie with a porn star moustache. Some of the funniest bits are in the deleted scenes, though. I particularly liked the longer take of Stink Mop, when the young Deepak Chopra wants to play but is told to sit with the young virgins practicing their kama sutra positions instead (his pout is perfect). Of course the very idea of a game like Stink Mop freaked out the boys more than a little.
Some of Quin's coworkers were appalled that he had never seen The X-Files, so they've been loaning us DVDs to rectify the situation. I was working bizarre hours when this show started and wasn't watching much TV, so I've never seen it either. We watched season 1 in September, and Quin was ready at several points to give up on it, but I and his coworkers insisted he stick it out. As it turns out (to his annoyance), we were making the same point, that back when this show started networks didn't like running storylines, they preferred a series to be a series of oners so viewers don't have to worry about following the story if they turn on episode 6 or 12 or whatever. Which is a detriment to viewers like us who like continuous story lines. I suspect the success of the "mythology" episodes of this show and shows like Buffy broke the ground for shows like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, which are really one long story. By the season finale of the first season, though, Quin was just as into it as I was and anxious to start season 2 (to be covered in my October post).
Moving on to India, I watched a Merchant Ivory film from 1970 called Bombay Talkie. It was in English, but featured a few Bollywood actors I recognized. The film centers around a writer who's just written a "Hollywood Wives" type book about Hollywood and has gone to Bollywood to look for inspiration for her second. She's the most irritating kind of writer, always looking for inspiration and never just putting words down on paper. She's also a pathological narcissist who spreads ruin and destruction everywhere she goes. So not a fun film, but definitely an interesting one. To be honest, I enjoyed the special features more than the movie; they did a short film about Helen, one of the most famous dancers of Bollywood item numbers. She talked about her work day and they compiled some of her more famous dance numbers. She must have done a hundred or more films, starting in the days of black and white films and working into Technicolor (she still works as an actress playing grandmothers these days).
So I only watched two films actually in Hindi, and they were both called Shakti. The first was older, starring Amitabh Bacchan as the Angry Young Man. His father is a cop, who loves his job more than his family, or so Amit has been given very good reason to believe when he's a young boy. He grows up to work for gangsters, which would naturally create conflicts. This was a Salim-Javed film, so the dialogue is sharp and the character motivations and the way they interact with each other is spot-on. It's not my favorite of their films, but it's still worth a see.
The other Shakti is more recent and seemed reminiscent of Not Without My Daughter. Karisma Kapoor lives and marries in Vancouver, but when her husband hears of troubles at home he takes her and his young son back to the home he had very good reason to leave. Unlike NWMD, the husband isn't the problem, it's his father who wants to keep his young grandson under his influence. When her husband is killed, grandpa wants to keep his only grandchild and raise him himself, so the rest of the story is a mother trying to get back to Canada with her son. There were definitely cultural references I wasn't getting; the family were Hindu but ate meat, which I'm guessing makes them of a warrior caste, but I'm not sure. And they had a deep Hatfield and McCoy grudge against the other family in their village which led to all the death and destruction.
It was a heavy-handed film, but I found the grandfather, played by Nana Patekar, very compelling. Karisma Kapoor was very good in it as well. The dance number with Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai was cool and fun, but totally out of place. It's meant to be SRK's dream, but still. This sort of thing comes up in a few Bollywood films; a change of tone so abrupt it loses me. I can't see a woman burned alive and then laugh at slapstick comedy immediately after (as happened in Bhagam Bhag).
I didn't see any great item numbers this month, so my YouTube this month will be from my all-time fave: Jaan-e-Mann. This is totally what I'll be singing when I finally see New York. This is a Cyrano deBergerac story, with Salman Khan telling Akshay Kumar what to sing to Preity Zinta. Watch for the bit where Salman gets hung up in a pack of joggers and Akshay has to hum...
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Books in September
I'm in no way finishing off this post as a way of procrastinating on cleaning my house. No way at all. Just so you know.
OK, I read six books that fall pretty nicely into three pairs.
The first pair is novel research, sort of. Having finished the first draft, I'm plowing through some books filled with information I'll never actually use. It's more about making sure I'm not getting anything subtle wrong rather than looking for more to include. At any rate, as a cluster of my characters are Hindus, and as most of what I've read on Hinduism I read nearly twenty years ago (I'm suddenly feeling very old...), I started with The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism. I like this series of books, they are good places to start to get a general knowledge of something, and the list of further reading in the back offers lots of next steps. I'm not such a fan of the layout, with the sidebars and cartoon characters talking in boxes in the margins, or of the title. I'm not a complete idiot, thank you very much, and I don't need something broken up into teeny tiny bits to grasp the concepts. But I've read a few of these on some pretty diverse topics and they've all been exactly what I needed to get a general picture of some vast area of knowledge, so I guess they do the job. I followed that up with Hindu Scriptures, translated and edited by R.C. Zaehner, which condenses down the Vedas, Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita into a reasonable size. Some of these I've read before, back in the day. I particularly liked this edition; Zaehner showed exactly where he made his edits and what was contained in the sections he removed. I liked that feature; most abridged texts don't bother to tell you what they took out. But when his notes would say "various mythological references removed" I was a bit bummed. I would have liked to have read those.
The second category of books: books by Robert Louis Stevenson. I had to read Kidnapped, as I've never read it before and Aidan is reading it for history. It's easier to correct his papers if I know the story. (This time instead of a book report summarizing the plot he wrote an essay exploring one of the book's themes, which he enjoyed. Not as much as playing Lego Game, of course; it's still school). After I read Kidnapped I decided to pick up Treasure Island. I remember starting this book many times as a kid but never getting through it. I'm not sure why, they read as fun adventure fiction to me now.
My last pair were new books read just for fun. Both are the latests installments in a series, but both work just fine as stand-alones. The first was Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi. Zoe's Tale is a retelling of The Last Colony from the point of view of Zoe, the teenaged daughter of the two main characters in The Last Colony. Sort of like Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead. It's a cool premise (I've always wanted to read the Neville Longbottom version of the same seven years at Hogwarts...), and Zoe is a terrific character, a smart and sarcastic teenager who felt absolutely real. This makes a nice companion piece to TLC and I enjoyed it.
The second was Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. I loved the settings, the floating cities of a Venus-like planet, the claustrophobic feel of being trapped on a spaceship where things are quickly going to hell; it was very cool. Pepper is the main character in this one, and Pepper is always a great bad-ass character. I also liked the new character of Timas, a teenaged boy who has being doing some pretty extreme and heartbreaking things for the sake of his family. Now on the subject of zombies, I'm pretty neutral. I don't go out of my way to see zombie movies or whatever, but I don't avoid them either. I only mention because if you are into zombies, you're going to love this book. Buckell has an interesting twist on zombies here which I found intellectually engaging, but I don't have that visceral response that hard-core zombie fans have. To be fair to zombies, I don't really get the over-the-top way vampire lovers love their vampires either. I've read Ann Rice's early books a couple of times each, and I enjoy them (particularly the language), but I don't love them the way many of her fans do. I think I digressed somewhere in there... OK, to wrap up, Sly Mongoose, well-crafted story of people hanging on by their fingernails even before the zombies show up.
OK, I really must clean up around here before I drive into work for a meeting. I could make a fourth cat out of all the hair floating around here...
OK, I read six books that fall pretty nicely into three pairs.
The first pair is novel research, sort of. Having finished the first draft, I'm plowing through some books filled with information I'll never actually use. It's more about making sure I'm not getting anything subtle wrong rather than looking for more to include. At any rate, as a cluster of my characters are Hindus, and as most of what I've read on Hinduism I read nearly twenty years ago (I'm suddenly feeling very old...), I started with The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism. I like this series of books, they are good places to start to get a general knowledge of something, and the list of further reading in the back offers lots of next steps. I'm not such a fan of the layout, with the sidebars and cartoon characters talking in boxes in the margins, or of the title. I'm not a complete idiot, thank you very much, and I don't need something broken up into teeny tiny bits to grasp the concepts. But I've read a few of these on some pretty diverse topics and they've all been exactly what I needed to get a general picture of some vast area of knowledge, so I guess they do the job. I followed that up with Hindu Scriptures, translated and edited by R.C. Zaehner, which condenses down the Vedas, Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita into a reasonable size. Some of these I've read before, back in the day. I particularly liked this edition; Zaehner showed exactly where he made his edits and what was contained in the sections he removed. I liked that feature; most abridged texts don't bother to tell you what they took out. But when his notes would say "various mythological references removed" I was a bit bummed. I would have liked to have read those.
The second category of books: books by Robert Louis Stevenson. I had to read Kidnapped, as I've never read it before and Aidan is reading it for history. It's easier to correct his papers if I know the story. (This time instead of a book report summarizing the plot he wrote an essay exploring one of the book's themes, which he enjoyed. Not as much as playing Lego Game, of course; it's still school). After I read Kidnapped I decided to pick up Treasure Island. I remember starting this book many times as a kid but never getting through it. I'm not sure why, they read as fun adventure fiction to me now.
My last pair were new books read just for fun. Both are the latests installments in a series, but both work just fine as stand-alones. The first was Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi. Zoe's Tale is a retelling of The Last Colony from the point of view of Zoe, the teenaged daughter of the two main characters in The Last Colony. Sort of like Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead. It's a cool premise (I've always wanted to read the Neville Longbottom version of the same seven years at Hogwarts...), and Zoe is a terrific character, a smart and sarcastic teenager who felt absolutely real. This makes a nice companion piece to TLC and I enjoyed it.
The second was Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. I loved the settings, the floating cities of a Venus-like planet, the claustrophobic feel of being trapped on a spaceship where things are quickly going to hell; it was very cool. Pepper is the main character in this one, and Pepper is always a great bad-ass character. I also liked the new character of Timas, a teenaged boy who has being doing some pretty extreme and heartbreaking things for the sake of his family. Now on the subject of zombies, I'm pretty neutral. I don't go out of my way to see zombie movies or whatever, but I don't avoid them either. I only mention because if you are into zombies, you're going to love this book. Buckell has an interesting twist on zombies here which I found intellectually engaging, but I don't have that visceral response that hard-core zombie fans have. To be fair to zombies, I don't really get the over-the-top way vampire lovers love their vampires either. I've read Ann Rice's early books a couple of times each, and I enjoy them (particularly the language), but I don't love them the way many of her fans do. I think I digressed somewhere in there... OK, to wrap up, Sly Mongoose, well-crafted story of people hanging on by their fingernails even before the zombies show up.
OK, I really must clean up around here before I drive into work for a meeting. I could make a fourth cat out of all the hair floating around here...
Monday, October 13, 2008
Still planning on finishing up those movie and book posts
I'll get to that before the end of October. Finished up some other projects, so that's good. In the mean time, the literal interpretation to a-ha's "Take on Me".
Pipe wrench fight!
Pipe wrench fight!
Friday, October 10, 2008
Oh how I needed that...
We wrapped up school early today - sometimes that happens on Fridays - so the boys and I watched a movie together after lunch. We've been working our way through my vast (nearly complete) collection of MST3K episodes for a while now, but lately we've taken a side step to watch things I haven't seen before, namely Cinematic Titanic. It's from five of the MST3K writers (Joel, Mary Jo, Frank, Trace and Josh). The concept is the same; little silhouettes in the front rip bad movies. There are no robots this time and no outside of the theater bits, although they do pause the movie from time to time to digress. Last week we watched The Oozing Skull, a mad scientist with a midget sidekick movie. But today we watched their second DVD, The Doomsay Machine. You know that thing where you laugh so hard you deprieve your brain of oxygen and start to get woozy? (Just me?) That's how funny the last ten minutes of this film are. Seriously. I finished watching the movie an hour ago and I'm still getting sporadic giggle fits.
Anyone else out there who needs a laugh as much as I did, go to CinematicTitanic.com and pick this thing up. You can even download it if you just can't wait.
Now if I can just stop tittering for five minutes, I can get some work down around here. You know, before I have to get to Work.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Not enough brain cells left for a pithy title
Working on the movie and book posts for last month. Working on something I hope will end with good news. Waiting on something else I also hope will end with good news. Mostly working on work though, which is not so much with the good news. You know what I need? I need to see that hypnotherapist from Office Space. Life would be so much easier if I just didn't care so much about my job...
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