Another sale!

My story "On Desperate Seas" will be appearing in the next issue of the e-zine A Fly in Amber. I'm really pleased; this is one of my favorite things I've done, but being a fantasy story about one of the recovery attempts of the John Franklin Expedition, it's been tricky finding it a home. It's gotten some wonderful rejection letters from editors who loved the writing but just didn't think it fit in with their magazines (which was totally true, but it never hurts to throw things out there). Given that the writing of this story gave me actual nightmares (when you read it you'll probably guess why), I'm glad it's going to be out in the world soon.

Now I just have to finish the one I'm working on now...

Movies in April

May has been a busy month, both for work and school, and on top of that I've been trying to get a story written (not coming out to bad, either). But since May is nearly over, I think it's about time I finish off this "Movies in April" post.

First up: Slumdog Millionaire. Not remotely a Bollywood film (first clue: all the leads are Muslims. Don't think I've ever seen that in a Bollywood fillm). Not really a hard-hitting films about the slums, either (see Salaam Bombay for that). It is a good Danny Boyle film, though. I've loved his films since the first ten minutes of Shallow Grave. My "honeymoon" was an afternoon at the multiplex, and while I liked Seven Years and Tibet and The Devil's Advocate well enough, it was A Life Less Ordinary that I adored. I don't think Slumdog quite edges that out as my favorite Boyle film (although those honeymoon associations makes it tough for any film to topple it, I think). Loved the music, of course, loved the little Amitabh Bachchan scene (and how cool of Amitabh to play himself there). And I'm super-geeked that Dev Patel is going to be playing Zuko in the Avatar movie. He's so much cooler than Jesse McCartney.

I saw the George Clooney remake of Solaris as soon as it was out on DVD, and a few times since (most sci-fi movies are big on the explosions; quiet, character-driven films like this one are rare but I have a fondness for them). I finally dug up the original Russian version. It was interesting, but I think there was a lot of imagery I wasn't quite grokking, like if I were Russian I would know what the horse wandering around in the background meant. A lot of cool visuals, but I think the Clooney remake took the best of this, tightened it up, and made the female character more interesting and layered.

On the other hand, the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still blows, and that's coming from a die-hard Keanu Reeves fan. I could appreciate some of the choices they made (particularly making Klaatu a bit of a dick. It was jarring but in a good way). I don't think the director handled the material well at all, though, and how sick am I of environmental cautionary tales? (I wonder if my counterpart in the 50s was as sick of cold war cautionary tales? Probably not at this point; I'm pretty sure TDTESS was one of the first).

And now, a rare movie I saw in the theater! The Soloist, with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx. These are two actors I find awesome in just about anything, but I was worried. The trailers made this look like one of those Person Who Inspires Others To Truly Live types (and yeah, I've linked to that post before, but what can I say? Kumail Ali totally nailed it). I was extremely relieved to see it was much more complicated than that. I do wish the director hadn't used the "world is a harsh, ugly place" visual style where every skin blemish is up there 20 feet tall and all the colors are washed out. I guess it fit the story, but I've seen it used a lot lately and I'm not fond of it.

Thanks to the public library I finally saw North By Northwest. I've since discovered that all of the Hitchcock films have very long wait lists so I'm not the only one digging him lately. It would be senseless to praise this - it's already a classic, what more can I say? - but I suddenly have the hankering to see Mount Rushmore. I've never been, and it's only 8 or 9 hours away. (It also left me with the hankering to watch National Treasure 2 again. I would call that a guilty pleasure, but honestly I liked it better than the last Indy movie).

Speaking of George Clooney (a couple paragraphs back, but...), I saw Syriana for the first time too. Clooney in particular is very good in this. I think Team America ruined me for Matt Damon movies, though. I like him, I think he's a fine actor, but everytime I see him on screen I expect him to put his arms and yell "Matt Damon!"

The Man Who Knew Too Little was a Bill Murray movie I had never even heard of. He made it somewhere in the dead zone between Groundhog Day and Rushmore. It's not a great film, but Bill Murray is just so likeable that even a bad film can be fun (particularly when he's trying to dance like a Cossack).

Much funnier: The Venture Brothers, Season 3. I didn't find this to be quite as good as season 2, but that's setting the bar pretty high; this show is still consistently funnier than just about anything else on TV. But then a show that piles on reference after reference to things from my childhood (Atari, GI Joe, Voltron...), it's pretty much made exactly for me. It's a toss-up on my favorite season 3 line; it's either when the Monarch is trying to make a screen capture and says "oh shit, I made an umlaut", or it's when Doctor Venture is trying to relax in the tub but thinks the fight in the next room is his boys rough-housing and says "this is why Daddy has to drink to relax, boys".

I missed Baron Unterbeit, though. Well, there's always season 4.

Wrapping up with two Bollywood films, Gadar: Ek Prem Katha is a movie set in the Punjab before, during, and after Partition. I've been probably soaking up a bit too much on Partition, lately (as my critique group can tell you, that sort of thing leads to very dark stories). This isn't remotely an historical film; the main character is very Rambo-esque, although he kicks ass while wearing a sweater vest which I found quite endearing. The final chase back to India on the freight train was pretty cool too, and Amrish Puri was in it. He's the bomb in anything (even if his sudden reversal at the end of the film isn't remotely believable).

And lastly, Singh is Kinng, starring Akshay Kumar as a Sikh gangsta. Actually he's a farmer from Punjab named Happy who goes to Sidney, Australia to try to bring a wayward fellow villager named Lucky home and finds himself suddenly made the head of Lucky's gang, ruling the Australian underworld. At first it looks like the gangsta lifestyle will corrupt Happy, but in the end it's Happy who "corrupts" the other ganstas and at the end of the movie they are all really into helping their fellow man. No, not remotely believable, but this movie was just so likeable I went along for the ride.

I'm of course saying gansta and not ganster deliberately; at the point in the movie when Happy takes over the gang and starts livin' large, tell me you totally can't see Puff Daddy hanging with these guys:





The same song plays again over the credits, this time with Snoop Dogg in the mix. Seriously, the real Snoop Dogg did a Bollywood song and video (couldn't find a version that wasn't a little box in the corner when the credits rolled, though).

OK, back to revising my dark tale. At least I'm all caught up on last month now.

I So Identify With This

"Caring For Your Introvert". Luckily for me I have a husband who totally gets this. Most homeschooling moms need a regular Mom's Night Out (or generally Moms', as they do these things together). But around these parts it's Mom's Night In and the rest of the family leaves the house for a few hours so I can have peace and quiet, alone in my own space.

Right, back at it. I've taken a break from the WIP to write something short (more importantly something Else), but I need to finish it by tomorrow when it's my turn to post to my critique group. Shitty First Draft won't even begin to describe it but at this point just having something done will be a victory.

Books in April

Most of what I read in April were Larry Niven books. I finished off the Known Space novels with Juggler of Worlds, then proceeded on to Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne and Ringworld's Children. The idea for Ringworld is, of course, quite cool, although I don't think he's even scratched the surface of the stories that could be told. I kind of wished he had designed it, then handed it off to another writer to tell stories in. For one thing, for something of such immense size, it seems awfully homogeneous. The different races of hominids just didn't feel as culturally different to me as I think they were meant to. And there isn't much there that isn't hominids. Given that the main activity of all these hominids is to have sex with each other (since they are too genetically different from each other to produce offspring, this is Ringworld birth control), you can kind of guess why there are no sheep.

The other aspect I think he really fumbled was Teela and her "luck". I like the concept of luck, and especially how the Norse dealt with it as "hamingja", where it was a heriditary sort of luck (and related to why the sons of heroes tend to also be heroes in the sagas). But the Ringworld books spend a tremendous amount of time waffling on whether or not Teela was lucky (and it didn't feel like character waffling so much as writer waffling; I suspect Niven didn't even know and was hoping it would become clear as he wrote, only it didn't. To be honest, as a writer I've totally been there. Although I tend to take care of that sort of wishy-washiness in subsequent drafts). He also doesn't make any clear distinction between "luck" and "fate", which I think of as two entirely unrelated concepts. Partly this is just me growing up on comic books where characters like the Scarlet Witch and Longshot were lucky in the sense that they manipulated probabilities moment by moment. Which is what luck would be to me, a moment by moment, the coin keeps flipping heads sort of thing. Fate is something else entirely, bigger than a moment by moment thing.

Basically the idea that Teela's "luck" compelled her to fall in love with Louis Wu to bring her to Ringworld because that's where she was fated to be is just loathsome. Fate putting you on a ship, fine. Fate compelling you to "follow your heart" because you're a chic - ick.

There was a last minute bit of waffling that got interesting - when Louis Wu postulated quite Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene-like that Teela wasn't lucky, it was her genes that were lucky, and that luck only served to lead Teela to have more offspring/replicate more of her lucky genes. But then you realize she only ever had the one kid, and she could have had more on Earth or on one of the other Known Space planets without ever having to "follow her heart" to Ringworld at all that it all sort of falls apart again. I wished he'd thought it through first, wrote it second. It could have been a cool character.

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy the books. Protectors and puppeteers are both cool things. And there was the moment at the end of Ringworld when Teela left Louis Wu for the the Seeker, who in my head was totally the Groosalugg:

Which I totally mentioned lots of times when I was reading these novels, and Quin nodded along as if he understood. Yes, she got her Groosalugg. Yes, that would have been cool for her. Well, I've been rewatching Angel episodes when I'm doing other stuff lately and got to the first Groo episode and pointed it out at one point when Quin was in my office, "Look, it's Groo!"

"Who?"

Yeah, totally just nodding along when I talk.

Sadly, Teela didn't get to live happily ever after with her Groosalugg. But then neither did Cordelia.

The only non-Niven book I read in April was Do Your Ears Pop in Space by space shuttle astronaut R. Mike Mullane. A fun book with lots of interesting info about what it's really like up there in orbit. It didn't add much in the sense of novel research, but I was particularly engrossed with all the details about the Challenger disaster. I remember that day well (I think it's the JFK assasination for my generation; we all know where we were that day). I was home sick from school, and so was my step-dad. He came in to wake me up so I could watch the news reports on the TV. This book really gets into what went wrong, did the crew know something was wrong, could it have been prevented, etc. This came out before the Columbia disaster so there isn't a similar discussion on that mission, which would have been interesting. If you're at all interested in space, this is a highly recommended read.

Warrior Wisewoman 2 reviewed in Publishers Weekly

The Warrior Wisewoman 2 anthology will be out June 1. This is the one that contains my short story "Gardens of Wind", a sort of boy meets girl story on airships. I wrote it partly because I wanted to write about airships, partly because I wasn't done exploring the idea of uxorilocal marriages (my other two stories with uxorilocal marriages are my two Japanese ones, the two stories of mine that get the nicest rejection letters but still haven't found a home), and partly as an exercise in writing laconic characters (for those that remember, I was musing this over last February). Although the MC in this one, Akeli, goes a bit beyond laconic. She was fun to write, and the setting is one I'd love to revisit someday. Because airships are inherently cool. Just as Hayao Miyazaki.

There is no page up for the anthology yet at Amazon.com, but I do have a link to the cover (I like it, sort of classical Grecoroman and futuristic at once), and a review at Publishers Weekly (you have to scroll down about halfway, past the mystery and into the sci-fi/fantasy releases).