Geek Monthly magazine

I don't subscribe to many magazines, mostly because I don't have time to read them. I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly and The Writer. (I let my subscription to Bon Appetit lapse because their recipes were getting too esoteric even for me - I mean, really, green tea cheesecake? - and because I've already got a huge backlog of recipes I've clipped and haven't tried yet.)

But I've just added Geek Monthly to my list of subscriptions. I only just heard of it, and probably wouldn't have picked it up if it hadn't had Nathan Fillion, my imaginary boyfriend du jour, on the cover. Fine interview (and pictures!) with Mr. Fillion aside, it's a fun little magazine that covers many areas of geekiness. Some sections aren't of interest to me (such as anime and game console reviews) but there's also Blu-Ray reviews that are honest about whether you need to trade up on your DVDs, interviews with and articles about such diverse people as Wallace Shawn and Takashi Miike, and more. 

They had me at an article that singles out Ray Harryhausen's ten greatest moments ... and did not have to explain who Harryhausen is. This magazine speaks my language. Check it out at geekmonthly.com.

Books into Celluloid: Catch-22

My latest Books into Celluloid column, comparing book and movie of Catch-22, is up at BookBalloon. Here it is.

Watch this now

Need a laugh this morning?

Watch this now.

Now that's what I call writing: Anthony O'Neill

From Anthony O'Neill's fascinating thriller The Lamplighter, this little bit of heaven for book lovers.

It was beyond the limits of his wildest dreams. A cavernous library greater than anything in London, the Vatican, or historical Alexandria. Glassed cabinets, polished mahogany bookcases, and sturdy oaken shelves swept ten stories high and half a mile deep, complete with spiral staircases, ladders on greased rails, and carpeted balconies that trailed into infinity. There were reading carrels, escritoires, cozy armchairs, blazing hearths, silent clocks, drinking fountains, innumerable writing utensils, reams of blank notepaper, a row of magnifying glasses...even a pipe rack. And all of it illuminated with more lamp cabinets and gas mantels than there were stars in the firmament. He might never leave. 

He exhaled heartily, surveying both the gold-embossed spines already arranged on the shelves and the crates spilling over with folios, quartos, octavos, and priceless manuscripts waiting to be catalogued. He barely knew where to begin. But as the appointed curator he had a lifetime, and he doubted his excitement would ever wane.

Now that's what I call a library!

The Lamplighter isn't a well-known book - I found it in my search for another addition to my "Naughty, Nutty, and Slutty Victorians" shelf - but it's a suspense novel that goes beyond what you'd expect. Highly recommended.

The fine art of smiting

This is one of my favorite Far Side cartoons.

It's a bit hard to read, but the caption says "God at His computer" and he's about to press the "Smite" button and make the piano fall down on that unlucky bastard.

Why do I like this cartoon? Because writers are a lot like God at His computer. Characters, many of them perfectly nice people, are diddy-bopping along with their lives when the writer decides to hit the "Smite" button and BAM! Said character is toast.

What a lot of my friends readers don't seem to understand is that I writers don't want to smite characters.* The story makes us do it, I swear! Do you think I want to kill off the  nicest characters? It's not my fault! I blame the Muse!

This topic provoked a debate this last Saturday when I took my Constant Readers Erik and Gerry to the Blue Bayou at Disneyland (I had the mahi mahi - yum!). I held the position that a smiting only counts if the character dies during the course of the narrative. People who die before the story begins (i.e., the character whose murder drives the story in my mystery Undertow) do not count.

Erik and Gerry respectfully disagreed, saying that any character death that was relevant to the story counted, including characters who died before the narrative began or whose deaths happened in flashback. (It took them a while to arrive at this admittedly reasonable position - at one point in the debate they were trying to blame me for the death of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. I suspect they still haven't forgiven me for a couple of the smitings that have been in my books.)

I concede they have a point but now I have to readjust all my smite tallies for my books. Yes I keep smite tallies. In the work-in-progress I'm up to two...SO FAR! MUWAHAHAHA! MINE IS AN EVIL LAUGH!

* Not unless they really deserve it. **

** Or unless it will really vex my friends. Erik and Alyca, I'm looking at you.

I take requests

Had a bathtime conversation with my 6-year-old son this evening, in which he requested that I write a book that met the following criteria:

• 620,000 words
  
• includes giant dragonflies that turn into macaroni
  
• has a giant salami monster
  
• has oviraptors that fight military bomber jets (I asked if the jets went back in time to fight the oviraptors or the oviraptors went forward in time to fight the jets - he said they both time traveled and met halfway, so I guess this story takes place in the dark ages)
  
• something about robots
  
• has a scene when 100 people burp so loud it makes the bombs fall off the fighter jets and the oviraptors eat the bombs
  
• will be illustrated
  
• must include the word "patootie" at some point
  

It's a tall order but I may be able to come up with something.

Review: 42nd Street Forever Vol. 4: Cooled by Refrigeration

My review of the latest 42nd Street Forever trailer compilations is up. Read it here.

Best book of the year so far

So as of March 1, the best book I've read this year is Joseph Heller's Catch-22. 

I took my time with this one, savoring it (translation: not reading it while cooking pasta). I'd read it once before, back in college, and it didn't click with me then. 

Now I get it. I'm flat amazed at the sheer amount of detail Heller was able to pack into his story, the deft characterizations, and most of all the tone. The slide from farce into outright horror is inexorable yet so subtly done that when we're finally given the full truth we're nearly as shaken as Heller's protagonist Yossarian is.  

Amazing.

Review: The Sentinel

My review of the 1970s big-budget shocker The Sentinel is up at Horrorview.com. Think "Love Boat" in a haunted house, only not as good.

Save the date: L. A. Times Festival of Books

The last weekend of April will be the Los Angeles Times annual Festival of Books. If you haven't been, it's held at UCLA campus and is nothing but books, books, books! Panels, performances, signings, and did I mention lots of lovely books to buy?

More information here. You better believe I'll be there with my jingle bells on.

Draft 2 - complete!

Finished the revised draft of my mystery novel Undertow, and it's now ready for distribution to the Constant Reader Brigade for feedback and comments.

I feel good about this one. I really enjoyed working with a first-person narration, which was new to me. The intimacy of that POV is nice, though I miss the chance to jump into other characters' heads. But first-person suited that particular story best. Third-person would not have worked nearly as well. 

First-person is ideal for mysteries because the reader finds things out as the narrator does, and it can prevent the reader from seeing things the narrator doesn't and then wondering why the narrator doesn't know that Character X is a red herring and Character Y is the murderer and how can the narrator be such a doofus, anyway?

In other writing news, I'm up to 51,000 words in the work in progress (don't worry, I'll think of a title). 

Books into Celluloid: The Painted Veil

My latest book vs. movie comparison column takes on The Painted Veil. 

Review: Stanley

My review of the snake horror film Stanley is now up at Horrorview.com. Enjoy.

Focus on the manuscript

The other weekend I did a do-it-myself writer's retreat, taking the manuscript of my mystery novel Undertow and holing up in a hotel room in Solvang. Armed with red pens (for corrections) and black pens (for major revisions) and lots of coffee and Milano cookies, I went through the entire manuscript and gave it a thorough edit. Once those edits have been implemented, I'll be able to distribute the MS to my Constant Reader Brigade and get their feedback.

I highly recommend this to all writers. Especially if, like me, you have to juggle writing with day jobs, family, and other responsibilities. The benefits are numerous.

To sum up: Focus. Total focus. I cannot emphasize this enough. You don't have to worry about getting dinner on the table, about helping the kid find his Crocs or the hubby find his glasses, or about anything but your manuscript.

My advice is to go somewhere a reasonable distance from your house. However, make your destination someplace familiar, that way you won't be tempted to go exploring, and you won't have to wonder where you're getting dinner that night.

Try to avoid distractions. Leave the iPod at home. Bring your laptop, but leave the internet cable at home. If you bring books, make sure they're old favorites you've read before so you aren't getting caught up in them. 

I find that even in my downtime, I'm not worrying about any of the myriad of things I normally have to think about. I can focus on one thing: my book.

In addition to the edits on Undertow, I brought Boswell The Laptop with me and was able to get work done on the work in progress. Up to 48,000 words now (technically I passed 50,000 but I realized that a chapter needs to be narrated by a different character and so I have to redo it).

I also did a bit of book shopping. Yes, I know I'd said I wasn't going to buy anything new until the Festival of Books in April (you in the back, stop laughing). But times are tough, Solvang is one of my favorite towns, and I supported local businesses like The Book Loft  and the newly opened use book store, Valley Books. Came home with books by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, P. G. Wodehouse, and Cormac McCarthy. Good times.

Oh, and I ate a lot of pancakes while I was at the retreat, too. Editing makes you hungry.

Now that's what I call writing: Tom Stoppard

Before I depart for a few days to do intensive editing on my manuscript Undertow, I'll leave you with a quote from Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which, to me, sums up nicely why so much of fiction consists of bad things happening to people.

The Player: We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

Guildenstern: Is that what people want?

The Player: It's what we do.

Writing craft: How Not to Write a Novel

In preparation for my writing retreat to edit and revise my manuscript Undertow, I'm reading How Not to Write a Novel by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman. 

Mittelmark and Newman know that writers can learn more from bad examples than good ones, and describe 200 classic mistakes in fiction. They use hilariously exaggerated examples to demonstrate such blunders as "I Complete Me: Wherein the novel is a work of auto-hagiography" and special sections on sex scenes ("The Purple Blue Prose: In which the sex is cloaked in lyricism"), jokes, and postmodernism.

Every writer should get this book; along with the good advice, it's very funny. An excerpt to get you interested: 

"It is as if the author had said, 'Oh, I just realized my plot doesn't work, so I'm going to add something from outside of my plot, okay?' This particular blunder is known as deus ex machina, which is French for 'Are you f---ing kidding me?'"

Review: Freaks

My review of Tod Browning's movie Freaks is up at Horrorview.com. Take a view if you're so inclined.

Birthday wishes, creativity, and more

I forgot to mention this on Tuesday what with the Inauguration and all, but 1/20/09 was the birthday of one of my favorite creative people, David Lynch. Happy birthday to him! And here's a very creepy short film (slightly NSFW) by Lynch!

Lynch is not just a film-maker and artist, but an author as well. His book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is an insightful, humorous, and surprisingly practical guide to fostering creativity. While focusing mainly on transcendental meditation and how it's aided his creative process, the book also gives insight into the making of many of his movies, his inspiration for art, and ways in which everyday people can make better use of their creativity. For example, Lynch dismisses the cliche of the starving artist, correctly noting that it is difficult if not impossible to be creative when you're worrying about keeping a roof over your head or where your next meal is coming from.

I'm not sure I'm on the TM bandwagon, but for a person whose art can be so dark and disturbing, Lynch comes across as a serene person.  Learn more about the book and about the David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace here.

Writing craft: Tips from Joss Whedon

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, has these tips for writers. (They're geared to screenwriters but much of the advice is applicable to novelists as well.)

I especially like the "Finish it" tip. I spent years on my very first novel and few things have made me feel better than actually finishing the damn thing. Of course, it's a first novel and as such has a bad case of being a first novel, but I finished it, and learned a lot in the process. It's all about going from "I'm writing  a book" to "I wrote a book." Many people say the former, not nearly as many say the latter.

Now that's what I call writing: C. S. Lewis

Posts tagged with "Now that's what I call writing" will feature quotes from others' works that I've found particularly interesting or inspiring, or that make me throw up my hands and wonder why I bother writing at all.

The excerpt below is the opening of C. S. Lewis' novel Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew.

Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will dare to write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write. I will accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain. That is, I will tell all he has done to me from the very beginning, as if I were making my complaint of him before a judge. But there is no judge between gods and men, and the god of the mountain will not answer me. Terrors and plagues are not an answer.

The book isn't one of Lewis' better-known works, but it is definitely worth seeking out. By all means, do so.