Laure Eve

Top Ten Things I really, really want to learn how to do

2012-01-29T16:34:00.005Z

Archery. Yes. I want to kick ass with a bow. Currently no practical use in my life, but you never know. This is not a Hunger Games thing but a Veralidaine Sarrasri thing.

Film editing. Because it's pure artistry.

Kickboxing. This is what watching Van Damme from an early age does. It's not because I want to be able to hurt people. It's because I want to be able to hurt people AND look cool doing it.

Scuba diving. My love of exploring strange new worlds tempered by my crippling fear of coming across a giant jellyfish. Sometimes I wake up screaming.

Computering. Overarching term for being able to build, create, understand and design computers and computer software. Slight problem in that I don't think I have the brain for this.

Foraging. I think this and the archery might have something to do with my inherent fear of apocalypsi.

Rock climbing. Scuttling like a crab with ease up the side of a building may only have practical application in action films, but what if? For example, what if a serial killer was chasing me and my only route of escape was down the side of a cliff? Not so silly now, IS IT.

Sword fighting. See kickboxing. Slightly less hurt, bit more cool.

Horseriding. Slight cheat since I already technically can horse ride. But I haven't been on a horse since my teens and I want to be able to really ride a horse. Ride like a cowboy.

Photoshop. And not just deleting eye bags. I mean, PHOTOSHOP. I mean the crazy, incredible shiz that people create with it. I mean art.

Special mention of things that are probably not achievable:-

sorcery
invisibility
altering reality
going back in time
shapeshifting
flying
becoming the lead singer of an incredible rock 'n roll band

Some conclusions I have come to whilst researching literary agents

2012-01-24T13:43:00.001Z

FYI - this what the best agents look like. Obvs.

Right or wrong, these are the things, in the course of my research, that I have decided so far. Feel free to tut disapprovingly at any one of them, then give me a good old fashioned disagreement spanking in the comments.

• If an agent doesn’t have a website, I avoid.
Seriously? In this day and age? With the whole, you know, minor internet thing? No way. I don’t care if they have an established reputation, nor if their name is spoken with reverent hallowed tones in the echoing hallways of publishing. It’s much more important to me that they are clued in to the here and now. This is what they are telling me by not having a website:- they don’t want to be findable because they are not looking for new clients – in which case, pointless for me; they are an elite agency that approaches authors, not the other way around – again, pointless for a newbie; they think the whole ‘online thing’ is a flash in the pan - in which case, I don’t think we’re going to get along.

• If an agent doesn’t have submission guidelines, my heart sinks a bit.
I’ve researched query letters until my eyes have bled. Not, you know… literally. I’ve crafted the pitch paragraph. I know what I’m going to say about myself. I’ve trawled the huge number of websites out there stuffed with example queries and pitches. I’ve done my time, man!

What this exhaustive browsing has also taught me is that agents are as individual as… well, humans, in fact. Some of them won’t like you addressing your query letter/email to Dear Sir, or Dear Bastard (just a thought). Some freaking hate it when you compare your books to other books. Others think if you don’t do that, you can’t even pitch your own book and you don’t know the market you’re trying to sell into, so reject you. Some prefer it if you smear your query letter in marmalade so they have something to suck while they’re reading your ms*. I’ve read so many absolutely conflicting opinions, and mostly from agents themselves, that actually trying to craft a query letter that satisfies them all would be much akin to attempting to eat my own head: pointless; time-consuming; painful.

So when an agent’s website has a handy section entitled – submission guidelines - I shed a tear of gladness and follow those guidelines. To the letter.

If an agent’s website does not have a handy section so entitled – I think twice about going through the effort of submitting to them. It’s not the be all and end all, of course; there are a few other reasons that influence my decision, which brings me neatly on to…

• If I can find out about the personality of an agent, I’m more interested in them.
This doesn’t mean stalking them. It means, if they’re on social media and I’m interested in submitting to them, I’m going to start reading what they’re saying. If they say things that gel with what I’m trying to sell, well – hell yes. You have to be in sync with your agent – they are selling you and your books, and will very hopefully continue selling you and your books for your entire career. They are not there just to get you to a publisher. They are your, you know, agent.

If they’re not on social media, it’s not going to put me off – but the more accessible they are, the more confident I feel that they actually want me to submit to them. Which brings me neatly on to…

• Querying an agent very briefly on whether they are actually open to submissions is a good idea, and I shouldn’t be nervous of doing it.
No point getting all the way to this stage only to find out that they will ignore your sub because they already have a full roster. Send them a very quick email to ask if they are accepting new clients. Some agents may even say it on their website, which is really quite handy. Don’t ignore the ‘no, I’m not looking for new clients at this time’ message – they’ll ignore you, and it’ll be this whole ignoring game, which isn’t as fun as it sounds. And it doesn’t sound very fun, so imagine.

• Sending a short, polite chase email after an agent’s response time has elapsed is a good idea, and I shouldn’t be nervous of doing it.
So I’ve heard. Yeeeeah haven’t actually gotten to that bit yet :) I’ll let you know when I do.

* possibly untrue.

About Me

2012-01-20T13:05:00.019Z

I am ...

of the female persuasion.
a writer.
not yet 30.
repped by Sam Copeland at RCW.
odd. Some might say.

ORIGINS

The question I dread most when meeting new people is “Where are you from?” For some reason, possibly to do with being an idiot, I can’t just give one answer. Because it’s a bit complicated. Where are you from – you mean where do I live? Where did I used to live? Out of all the places I’ve lived, which one do I most identify with and thus would feel comfortable about choosing to answer your question? Where am I from ‘genetically’? Where was I born?

‘Idiot’, you’re thinking right now. It’s cool.

I’m both French and British (none of this ‘half’ stuff – I don’t have a half citizenship or half a passport); and I live and work in London. I was born in Paris, but grew up in Cornwall. Sometimes I feel very French. Other times exceedingly British with biscuits on top. Often the proud Cornish part of me rears its affable head. I strongly suspect the British part of me has more than a hint of Scottish. Ah, the Old Alliance, as the Boy is fond of saying.

This is all both complicated and pretty damn enjoyable.

CAREER ONE and CAREER TWO

I work in publishing [career 1], in an area that crosses over substantially with the kind of fiction I write [career 2]. I try hard to keep them separate. I don’t talk about my writing when I have my publishing hat on, and vice versa. It’s basically like I have a secret identity. Yes of course that makes me cool, why do you ask?

10 THINGS I REALLY LIKE – A RANDOM SELECTION

n.b. updated every so often with a new random selection.

Tetris.
Lexx.
Never Land by The Sisters of Mercy.
Anything almond flavoured.
This Metallica/Britney Spears mash up. Musically, it just doesn’t get better.
Matthew Bourne.
Clueless.
Small silver charms embedded with little crystal gems.
Peep toe heels.
Trees – any kind of.

Drop me an email. Follow me on Twitter. I do like to chat shit. I also swear. A bit.

Fearsome Dreamer: Book 1 synopsis

2012-01-16T17:15:00.002Z

The unthinkable happens.
Napoleon, a self-made emperor with limitless ambition, wins. England falls under the yoke of the French Empire and becomes an island outpost of isolation and little consequence, redubbed Angle Tar by its citizens as a mutation of the French imposed name of Angleterre.

War after war takes its toll and a conglomerate of European nations finally emerges from the dust, the technology mad, hubristic World. World relies on Life, a vast super internet that acts as the blood of World's body. No-one can survive without Life, they know - no-one. But Angle Tar does.
Backward, introverted, stubborn Angle Tar.

Angle Tar proclaims to hate technology. It prefers to rely on people. People who can do things others can't. People like the Dreamers, an emerging and mysterious talent that allows them to 'see' places and people thousands of miles away in their dreams. Any government's idea of the perfect spy.

Rare, one-in-a-million Dreamers can do more than that, though. Dreamers like White, who moves, unchecked, between places as easily as stepping through a doorway.
That kind of talent is far too dangerous a thing to allow.

-----------------------------------------------

For some people, dreaming can feel as real as being awake.
For a fraction of those, dreaming is as real as being awake.

Rue is a fraction, and knows that she is destined for more. She knows being whisked off from hedgewitching in the country to a city life full of mystery and intrigue is meant to be. She knows she has something her government wants, a talent so rare and precious and new that they will do anything to train her in it.

But what she doesn’t know would fill a forest. She doesn’t know, for example, that she is being lied to. She doesn’t know that the man teaching her about her talent is desperately in love with her, and considered by some to be the most dangerous man alive.

So she will learn. She will learn how to betray everyone around her for empty promises, how to choose the wrong man to trust, and just how real her dreams can be.

Dog and Monster synopsis

2011-11-12T16:34:00.003Z

A girl wanders rain-lashed streets of grime, looking for an out. She's not a real vampire, or is she the realest of them all? After all, everyone knows vampires are just junkies, timid wasted things looking for their next hit. This girl might not like the taste of blood but she does enjoy the killing.

A priest has lost his way and drowns his past with a different kind of drug. Trying to save people gets him nowhere, because he could not save the one that mattered.

Dogs prowl the streets, dogs with strange intelligence in their eyes and a love of storytelling. Their mistress, a Castle girl, has a whole plan of her own, and her girls will do anything to survive. They find joy in the kill and the chase and cannot be tamed. Don't you dare fall in love with them.

First two chapters of Fearsome Dreamer: Book 1

2011-08-19T18:32:00.006+01:00

Synopsis here.

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CHAPTER 1

ANGLE TAR

Rue

Surely that was too much blood for anyone to lose.

She never would have thought that people had so much of the stuff inside them. Was it all in the blood, then, and was she seeing this woman’s life draining away before her eyes? Would it stay with her forever, this moment? Would she tell herself to remember it, to see if she could, years upon years later?

Rue clutched her arms together. The woman before her moaned. It sounded like a cat’s warning.

“I need you to put your hands here for me, dear,” said a voice. But Rue stood stiff as a fence board, unwilling to accept what the voice was telling her.

“Rue, pay attention,” said the voice. It was calm and steady, as if it were asking for little, but Rue could hear the thin, vibrating note of stress and urgency underneath it.

“Hands, if you please. Now.”

Rue blinked, crumbling to her knees and moving forward. There’d be hell to pay, her body had evidently reasoned without her, if she ignored the note of threat in that last ‘Now.’ She placed her hands where indicated, but the rags under her palms were already dripping onto the floor. Rue reached over to a pile beside her and snatched up clean strips of cloth, laying them on top of the soaked mess. In seconds the material bloomed wet flowers of blood. She pushed her hands against them and felt her throat convulse.

“Push hard, dear,” said the voice. “Don’t worry about hurting her.”

The groaning was the worst. It was thin and continuous, and she could feel the vibrations of it through the flesh she pushed against. The owner of the voice was out of sight, far away behind the hills of her knees. Rue felt alone. What if too much blood was lost? It would be her fault. How could anyone leave her alone when she didn’t know what she was doing? She felt panic flit around the edge of her and tried hard to ignore it.

It seemed to go on for hours, but there was no asking if she could stop or have a rest. Her arms shook occasionally with the effort. The woman’s blood had soaked into the skin cracks in the palms of her hands. She could hear the soothing up and down cadence of her mistress’s voice at the head of the bed.

“Fernie?” she called.

The soothing voice stopped. Fernie’s head appeared over the hillock of rumpled blankets and sweating flesh that made up Rue’s current viewpoint.

“What is it, dear?”

“Um. My arms are tired.”

“Not for much longer. Dam Woolmaker’s doing just fine.”

“When’s the baby coming?”

“Not too long, Rue. Think you can keep your end up?”

Rue swallowed. “Course.”

It was probably a lie, she thought fitfully as Fernie’s head disappeared. Fern was an honest soul – she had once said to Rue that being honest made life a lot more interesting than lying – but when she was trying to calm a woman in labour bleeding out like a stuck pig she’d be sneakier than a snake. The widow Woolmaker could die. Would die, maybe, and her baby with her. And maybe it would even take a few more hours. Rue didn’t want to think about that, but thinking was about all she could do right now. She’d never seen anyone die before. She thought about praying to Tro to keep the woman alive. Then she thought about praying to Buc to keep him from taking her. In either case it probably wouldn’t do much good, and if Fernie heard her she’d laugh in her face for believing that gods were worth anything more than a good story.

Odd what came into your head at a time like this. Here a woman lay dying, as Rue would eventually do herself. Was it better to be practical about it, as Fernie was, or did it help to believe there were powerful beings who could intervene and extend or take away life? Did that make everything easier?

“Let’s wrap her up properly, then.”

Rue looked up. Fernie’s hands were on her own, lifting them gently away.

“Move out of it so’s I can get to her. But mind you keep a watch for I’ve not taught you this yet.”

“She’s…?”

“Sleeping, dear. I gave her something to sleep her for the time being.”

“What about the baby?”

“We’ll see. Stubborn little thing, causing such trouble for his mam.”

Rue watched the woman work, watched her hands flit quickly back and forth the way they did when she was cooking or making up tonics. She was envious of the hands and the skill, but not of the woman. Fernie was both gnarled and fat.

“Is she alright?” she asked.

“Bless you, yes. You thought she was going to die?”

“There was so much blood.”

“And she’ll need to be making more soon enough, else she’ll be in a bit of trouble. I’ll admit it was touch and go there for a while, and there’ll be more of that before the end. But she’s strong, she’ll pull through.”

“Fern.”

“Yes dear.”

“You did something.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

Rue caught it in Fernie’s voice. Faint, but there.

“She should be dead,” said Rue. “She should, or her kit. You did something. You should tell me. I’m your prentice. I’ve to learn, haven’t I?”

“Rue,” said Fernie, pulling the bandage tight and knotting it off. “You’ve filled your head with too much fluff, so you have. There’s no magic in what we do. Just hard work. You’d best to go on home to bed, we’ll be needing you later again.”

“But what are you going to do?”

Fern sat back on her haunches, her work complete. “Stay, course. I’ll keep watch on her, don’t you worry. If I need you I’ll send for you.”

“But”

“Go on now. Off home.”

Rue thought about refusing. She would have with anyone else. Fernie was hard to test, though; somewhere under all that kindness and fat was a will of iron. So she bit her tongue and scrambled up from the floor. A wave of dizziness swamped her and she thought NO furiously, as if her will alone could keep her upright. Miraculously, it seemed to work.

“Your pardon,” she managed.

Fernie was looking at her speculatively. “No matter. It’s the smell of the blood, I expect. You did fine. You need some fresh air, is all. The walk home’ll set you right.”

Rue took a last lingering look at the woman crouched on the floor, her face creased with exhaustion, and left.

Two miles to home, she thought, as she got outside and sucked in the night breeze. At least it’s warm.

She woke in her room. She had fistfuls of bed sheet gripped in her hands, and her fingers ached from being clenched so tight.

That one had been fairly bad.

She had dreamed of people. So many people it hurt to try and count them all. They were in a grey, listless kind of open space, with nothing much to see. At first she had thought them an ordinary crowd of walking people, though bizarrely dressed. But they didn’t move like normal people, instead following irregular paths. The more she watched them, the more she realised that they were wandering; that was it. Wandering around in slow, looping circles, directionless. When she looked into their faces she saw nothing there. Their eyes were misty, filmed over.

She didn’t like them. They seemed hollow.

Something was going on over her shoulder. She could feel a tingling as the skin on her back crawled in warning. She turned.

It took a moment to work out what was happening, but then someone near her dropped to the ground, as if their legs had been cut. She stared at the crumpled body. Then someone else fell, and lay without moving. She heard a series of thumps. Several more people fell.

Bodies flumped downward. Their eyes were still open as they lay, curled awkwardly, their limbs at angles. The noise become louder and louder as more people crashed to the ground. Rue stood rooted, unable to move. Why wasn’t it happening to her? What was saving her? What was different?

She recoiled at the cloying memory of it. Feeling clammy, she levered herself up from the bed and pulled strings of hair from her eyes. She had sweated the bedclothes through again.

Fernie would scold her. Fernie couldn’t understand Rue’s nightmares. She believed in the practical everyday of life. Dreams were for the academics and city folk, the studiers of mind, and had no place in a hedgewitch’s repertoire. No-one cared about dreams out here.

Rue peeled the blanket and damp sheet back, noticing with disgust how her nightdress clung to her in moist folds. She wondered if she had time for a quick bathe in the river before Fernie got back. Doubtless the witch would have spent the night with the mother to be, making sure she made it through the long hours in one piece. She hadn’t been called, so Dam Woolmaker couldn’t have given birth yet. Fern would expect the place to be clean though, and some tea ready.

Well. She couldn’t work sweat-soaked. Fernie would smell her and know. Rue dragged the blanket from the bed, dropping it carelessly on the flagstone floor, and stripped off the sheet. She pushed her feet into raggy slippers and took her bathing cloth from behind the door. When she opened the shutters she saw that the sun was up, though it hadn’t been awake for long. She took the dry slither of honey and lemon rind soap Fernie had made her from the windowsill and pushed open the back door, shivering pleasantly as the cool air wound around her legs. As she walked, she worked at the nightdress with one hand, peeling it from her, and continued to the river naked. She would wash the thing at the same time as herself.

She looked about as she walked, wondering if she’d see any sign of life. A shivery rustle in the heather patch to her right sounded like a rabbit. She loved rabbits, but Fernie wouldn’t let her keep one, saying they weren’t practical because they didn’t provide anything of use. Fernie had bees, for honey and wax, and chickens for eggs, and a goat for milk, and the biggest herb and plant garden in the area. Not that she needed them. Her profession never wanted for anything in the country.

Occasionally people offered to pay her, but as she always said, what use was money out here? Most of her payment was in food, clothes and services. Fernie never had to pay for anything at the farms or the village shops – even if the shopkeeper she visited that day had never been treated by her, he knew someday he would be, or a member of his family. So Fernie had what she wanted, and people did things for her as and when. A bit of gardening, or fixing her roof, or giving her a nice plump hen, or cheese and butter freshly churned, or cakes, mead, pickles. Rue, by extension as Fernie’s apprentice, enjoyed most of the same deal, though some thought they could get away with charging her since she was still learning. Fernie set them to rights if Rue told her about it. After all, one day their children would be in Rue’s care, and if they’d slighted her she’d remember, and perhaps those children wouldn’t be so well looked after as others.

Well.

It was politeness, anyway, at the end of the day. A hedgewitch would never refuse to treat children, no matter what their parents had done.

Rue reached the river, picking her way down the bank. Her bathing cloth she deposited on a rock, and moved to the water edge, clutching her nightdress and soap. The icy water tickled at her toes, catching her breath. She knew of old that it wouldn’t do to wait as courage would fail, so she forced herself forward, pebbles sliding under her feet. Launching herself in, she let out a mangled squeal as her body was enclosed in a freezing liquid case, and trod water furiously. Her skin protested in a bout of vicious tingling, but soon grew numb. She started to relax, ducking her nightdress under the surface with bloodless hands. She let it float before her and scrubbed at herself with the soap.

She liked being here. Here she could pretend she was a river nymph, perhaps, or a goddess of the wild, surveying her kingdom. Out of the river and she was just apprentice witch Vela Rue, not worthy of her third adult name until she’d mastered a craft. She was a fairly good student, she supposed. Fernie would never have taken her on if she wasn’t capable. Rue didn’t want to be fairly good, though. If she wasn’t going to be extraordinary, then what was the point of it? She could not wait her life out here, none but the villagers knowing the importance of her. She knew, knew in the very depths of her that she was destined for something more. Something she could do better than anyone else. Something that would make her shine and people flock to her.

She rinsed her arms, feeling a sudden hunger gripe. She should get back before Fernie did. Turning to wade out of the river, she spied something darting behind a tree and froze. It was a person, that much she was sure of. Her mind worked. Who would hide? It had to be a boy.

“Come out,” she called. “I can see you, silly!”

She was aware of her nakedness of a sudden. The water came up to her waist, but she was bare from then on up. Her skin was pimpled and white. She waded out hurriedly, one eye on the tree. Grabbing with one hand, she unravelled her bathing cloth and wrapped herself into its thick depths. The morning air was mild, as it was midsummer, but she’d have to start moving if she wanted to get warmed up. The sodden nightdress in one hand left a spattered trail of water on the stones beside her. As she approached the tree, she realised she could see no shape behind it.

“Where’ve you gone?” she muttered, peering around the trunk. Nothing there. Maybe she imagined it. Maybe it had just been an animal.

Or maybe it had been a man, secretly watching her, some sprite man who had the trick of disappearing like that. Maybe he came to visit her at night, watching her while she slept, too. Perhaps she would think about that more later, alone in bed. She started to make her way back to the cottage.

Rue had a vague idea she was regarded as silly and dreamful by some, but she didn’t care. She thought wishing for more a special quality, a quality that those who made something extraordinary of their lives always possessed. No-one in the village seemed to think and yearn the way she did. No-one seemed to want more than what they got. Stories of gods and fairies fascinated her, creatures of power that were not sway to mortal rules, not bound by normality. Fernie tutted when she brought them up, but if pressed with a glass of mead in the evenings, would give Rue just such stories, stories Fernie had heard in her own youth.

Rue reached the back door to the cottage and opened it up, now glad of the chance to put on some clothes, at least for an hour or two. Come lunch it’d be too hot for much except a summer skirt and muslin shirt.

“That you Rue?” called a voice. Rue sighed. Trust Fernie to get back before she did.

“Yes,” she responded, stopping to squeeze out her nightdress and hang it outside on the line to dry. She dressed in her room and skittered meekly into the kitchen, noting that Fernie had already made tea.

“I shall do some food,” Rue said, trying her best.

“No need,” said Fernie. “We’re for herbing now, then it’s back to Woolmaker I go.”

“But… but Fern, you’ve not rested all night, I’ll warrant,” said Rue. “You need to lay down and catch some sleep!”

“She needs my help, dear, and herbs I’ve run out of. So to the woods we go to gather more, and then it’s brew making, and I’ve to get back to her as soon as possible. She’ll fade fast if not.”

Rue shuffled. “That’s silly,” she said at last. “You can’t treat someone when you’re exhausted.”

“This is the craft, Rue,” said Fernie, massaging her craggy cheeks. “It gets real hard sometimes and you just need to get through it. Who else’ll do it? Who else can? You must learn this as soon as you’re able.”

Rue poured herself a tea silently. She was hungry and herbing was dull. She sighed.

“We’ll take some bread with us, to chew on while we go,” said Fernie kindly. “And if you come across any berries, they’re yours. Pick some to keep if you want, and we’ll make some jam.”

Rue felt a familiar guilt stealing over her. Fernie could be very generous and fair when she had no call to be. It was annoying.

Rue ran her hands through the trailing leaves of a plant, peering at the dusty soil underneath to see if any blood herbs were hiding there. Fernie had said that particular family of herbs usually enjoyed keeping close to argenters, so it was best to scan across the wood floor for the tell tale glimmer of golden petals and then have a look at the ground nearby.

Something flashed out the corner of her gaze. She turned her head to see a squirrel clinging to a tree trunk near where she squatted. Its tiny claws dug into the bark, black eyes gazing at her. Then it was gone, the plump body disappearing upward into the foliage.

“If only Tro would turn me into a squirrel,” Rue murmured as Fernie approached, her feet crackling over dry twigs and leaves.

“Tro knows you wouldn’t last a day. You’re far too silly a creature,” said Fernie, basket stuffed with plant matter.

“Squirrels ain’t exactly the most sensible either,” protested Rue, as they made their way along the path. “They’re all nervy.”

“So you’d be if you were a squirrel.”

They tramped in silence for a moment. Bird calls pinwheeled across the dense canopy.

“Fern.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Have you ever lived outside of this village? I mean, gone to other places in Angle Tar, like one of the cities?”

“Cities are full of idiots with big ideas. Big ideas get you little in return.”

“They learn things, though. They do them mind studies. It sounds interesting.”

“Rue, my chicklet. You have to have money to do such idle stuff. Only rich people live in cities and learn. Us folk mind our own business out here, and they mind theirs in the cities, and everyone gets along fine. No good stirring things up, it always leads to trouble. Why you asking me such? Don’t want to be a hedgewitch any more, is it?”

“No,” said Rue. It always went the same way, these conversations. “I love hedgewitching, you know it. I just wonder about other places sometimes, is all. You know them dreams I get. I just wonder what they’re about. Are there other countries out in the world with weird people and everything’s different?”

“You’ve no call to be thinking about that,” said Fernie briskly. “Angle Tar’s the only place with a civilised bone in its body. The world out there is nothing more than a load of places with people in ‘em. And the people out there in are neither more interesting, nor better, nor lower, than us here in Angle Tar. It’s humans, Rue. We’re the same wherever you go, no matter what we surround ourselves with.”

Rue sighed.

CHAPTER 2

WORLD

White

He woke to freezing, draining cold.

Out of everything that had been done to him, it was the cold that was the hardest to bear. Hunger, now; that was a creature whose ways he understood. His childhood had not been a rich one; hunger he had learned to deal with. It was almost a comfort to see it again. A food unit might be free; credits to buy food from it were not. And life had been made harder than necessary for people like him.

But endless cold was insidious. You only got used to it for periods at a time, and to cope you carved your existence into blocks. Over this block and fine for a while. Barely even noticing it. Then it would stroke you gently over the arms and set you shivering with misery. You endured by begging each second to be the last, and when it was, you basked in the numbness, begging desperately for each extra minute, just another, and just one more, until the shivering began again.

So were his moments spent.

Back in the time pre-prison (as he liked to think of it, his entire life now firmly divided up into BEFORE and NOW), he had often thought about how he might cope if he were ever really and truly imprisoned; it was quite hard to imprison someone like him.

He had decided, if he were caught, that he would separate his mind from his body, and spend his time creating another life inside his head. It was easy enough for him to do; him especially. He would dream. Take himself away from this place, live another life locked inside his mind, and care nothing for what happened to him here, in reality.

But here and now, and just when he needed it most, his talent for dreaming had utterly deserted him. His thoughts were broken and confused, consisting mainly of thinking about how hungry and cold he was, and trying not to think about how hungry and cold he was. There was no energy left for anything else after that.

The door clicked.

He twitched, a tic he had developed in unconscious reply to the very particular sound of that door click.

He would be strong, this time. There was always another time, another chance to redeem himself. It wouldn’t be like the last time, nor the time before that. But his body had chosen to deal with these visits without his input, and before he could stop it, his voice broke into its regular litany.

“Please please please,” he said, in a babbling rush.

Then it was, “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you want.”

Good Man crouched next to him in his customary position. His hands were locked loosely between his legs, his eyes kind.

“I’m trying to help you,” said Good Man earnestly. “I’m the only one that can. You know this. Please. I hate watching you suffer.”

He believed Good Man. He’d even seen tears running down Good Man’s cheeks before.

“Please,” said Good Man. “I’m begging you.”

No, no. I’m begging you, he wanted to say. You’ve got this the wrong way round. What kind of torturer are you?

“Only dogs beg,” said the other, Bad Man. He was in a corner, in his customary shadowed position. Good Man’s face was earnest and sweat streaked. Bad Man could have had the face of an elephant for all he knew – he’d never seen it. Bad Man never came close.

He hated Good Man, quite a lot more than Bad. In the earlier, more lucid days, he had wondered if it was because Good Man was real and close to him, and so gave him something to focus his hate on; or whether it was because Good Man seemed human and kind, in spite of what he was doing.

“What I want to know is,” said Bad Man from his corner, “why don’t you just leave? Why can’t you just disappear, like you’ve done before? They tell me it’s the drugs they give you, the cold and the hunger that keep you confused. But I don’t believe it. I believe it’s instinctual, like a dog when it needs to hump something. It’ll come out, and there will be nothing you can do to prevent it.”

Later, in his mind, they would pay. Later, he would run fragments of the conversation through his head and reply in the way he should have, with a cool, collected screw you. Sometimes, when he re-ran the scene, there was a lot of violence involved. A lot of him bursting up unexpectedly from the ground, delivering a calculated series of crunching, precise kicks and blows, disarming the guards. Taking a knife from one of their belts. Throwing it in a beautiful arc, burying it in Good Man’s chest, who would drop to the ground, a surprised look on his face. Then he would crouch over Bad Man, cowering in the corner. He would look at the fearful face before him, lean in, and whisper softly, “No. You’re not even worth killing.”

But out loud, and in the present, it never seemed to go the way he wanted it to at all.

“I can’t do that! I’m not. I just. I’m just. It’s not,” he said, stuttering painfully.

Good Man grabbed White’s arm, gripping it at the shoulder joint. “You’re moving your hand.”

White looked down. His wrist was very dirty, he realised. When was the last time they had washed him? Washing in this place consisted of shoving him, naked and grime-streaked, into a Hot ‘n Dry, a hideously ancient contraption that blasted dirt from you with chemically treated, moisture heavy air. He hadn’t felt the soothing, cleansing touch of liquid on his skin for weeks. It was amazing how much you could miss it.

“You’re moving your hand and you don’t even realise it,” repeated Good Man, a little sadness creeping into his voice.

“I wasn’t,” White managed. “I wasn’t.”

“I told you,” said Bad Man triumphantly. “It’s automatic, they can’t help it. It’ll be soon, you’ll see. And when you jump, we’ll track you. Remember the new implant. Yes? It will track you within seconds to wherever you go. And if you jump out of World again, we’ll know.”

“I don’t DO THAT.”

Good Man let go of White’s wrist and hung his head. “I can’t help you if you don’t want to help yourself.”

“No,” said White, knowing he was begging again. Hating himself for it.

“What you’re doing. What your little terrorist group is doing; it’s wrong. Why do you want to move around all over the place? It’s unnatural. You have everything you need right here. Why do you want to hurt people? Why do you hate us?”

“We don’t hurt anyone. We don’t hurt anyone. We don’t do anything!” White screamed, his voice splitting. The worst thing about it was trying to make them see. They just wouldn’t see. It was the despair over this, over knowing he was trapped by people who would never change their minds about him, who would always see him as a dangerous, scabby little mutant, that scarred him the most.

Good Man stood up.

“Goodbye,” he said, his voice resigned.

White woke.

For a moment he floated in nothingness, and a voice told him to enjoy it as much as he could, to soak up the blank comfort.

Then he remembered, and wished he’d listened to the voice.

Every wake day began the same. They were wake days now because he could only count his life between being awake and being asleep. There was no concept of time in this tiny, dank place. There were no windows to let in the light, and the strip lights overhead were never turned off. They glowed a pale, heartless sort of blue. The exact shade of blue, he thought, designed to drive you mad. They must have done studies on it. They must have tested each imperceptible shade on prisoners until they found the one that broke people the fastest.

Sometimes, when he woke, his fingers ached. It took him ages to figure out why; in his sleep he would do the hand rituals. It was as if his body could not let go of who he was, even though his mind was being smashed into fragments.

Only the truly mad and dangerous would have no control over their own bodies. Or maybe they thought that he did it on purpose, a last defiant gesture. If they did, they would keep him here until they broke him. What he couldn’t convince them of, no matter how much he sobbed it in their faces, was that they already had.

The new implant really hurt. Of all the physical things that had been done to him, that galled the most. That they would use something as normal, as natural as the implant against him. Make him hate them more. Surely that was not what they wanted? Surely they wanted him to love them? He had already told them so. Told them he loved World. He loved it. That he would never leave. Could they somehow detect the lie in his voice, even when he screamed it with everything he had? Even when he actually believed himself in that moment that he said it out loud, because what was more convincing than desperation for this all to end?

Even as a child, White had been aware that there was something about him that didn’t fit. The other children he knew were not like him, so unlike him that he found them incomprehensible and alien. They cared about pointless things like games he had never heard of, famous people he had heard of but couldn’t muster up any interest in, and stuff like holographic shoes that his family would never be able to afford.

Each time his father had suggested that White should try to get to know the other children at school, he had found the idea so absurd he would choke on it and be unable to speak. He felt bad, sometimes, because all his father needed was for him to agree, or comfort him with trying, and he would be happier. But instead, when his father sat him down and told him that those children were not so different from him, that he should ask them what their favourite snack was or which Life game they liked best right now, he just looked back at his father, choking silently.

The truth was he had really grown to hate other children, and the truth was that at first they made fun of him and then ignored him totally as if he wasn’t even worth their spite, and the truth was even if any of them did like the same snack that he did, that would only make him hate them more. He didn’t want to be anything like them. The idea made him ill.

There was a popular slang thing going round, using old ways of speaking; a little rebellious thing kids did as a nose-up to adults, because everyone knew that World’s past had been a stupid, dangerous place, weren’t they told so in school? So the other children’s favourite nickname for him was ‘jesus freak’. He didn’t even know what a jesus was – he’d had to look the term up in Life’s historical files. It had made him angry when he understood what it meant. He and his mother were not religious. Religion was for crazy people. The rituals he did were not for a god. They were for people. Church of Transcendence didn’t mean Church of Something That Didn’t Exist. It meant a place to practise, to come together and channel everything you had into bettering yourself. He’d tried explaining this to his stupid, pathetic peers, but somehow he could never find the right way to say it, and they just laughed at him and screamed ‘look at the jesus freak speak!’ in the rhyming way some of the older ones liked to do.

He didn’t dare do any of the rituals at school, now. It hadn’t been the other children’s name calling and violence that had stopped that. Sometimes he’d done it in front of the biggest group of them he could find, to enjoy their incredulousness at his courage. No – it hadn’t been them that had stopped him; it had been the teachers. If adults could react in such a way, then he knew that it wasn’t limited to his behaviour as a child. And that meant that they felt there was something wrong with his mother. And that meant that his mother, and everyone else in the Church, could be wrong. And that led to thoughts he didn’t want to have.

There was a time, branded forever onto his brain and relived in moments of silence and loneliness, when a teacher had actually seized his hand to stop him doing a ritual. The look on her face was like someone had forced her to suck on a strip of metal.

“Stop that,” she had squealed. “You’re disturbing the other children.”

He had been too frightened to talk back or give her the cool, calculating gaze he had always given her whenever he played the scene back in his head in later years. It was the irritation that dug at him, that he picked at like a scab. She hadn’t been angry but irritated, as if he was doing something unutterably childish and mildly disgusting, like picking his nose. It was the way she had reduced it to a dirty habit, not something that was so much a part of his existence as a living, breathing creature that he felt faint and shadowy without it.

The door clicked, and he twitched, and half of him was relieved that at least there would be someone in the room with him, someone he could talk to. The other half was revolted at himself, that a person could sink so low as to be grateful for the company of people whose job it was to hurt him as much as they could.

But instead of Good Man and Bad Man, there were two guards he had never seen before. They dragged him upward and out of his room and down the corridor, presumably to the wash room and that horrific creaking machine.

It was rare that he got to leave his room, and the first couple of times he had looked forward to it, to the opportunity to look around, try and memorise the layout, in the back of his mind nurturing the hope of a daring plan of escape. But the corridors all looked the same, and nothing gave him a clue about anything, and after a while it was too hard to concentrate on anything much except trying not to fall down between the arms that gripped his. And a while after that, a small seed of fear began to sprout, a fear that told him he didn’t want to leave his room anymore, that it was easier just to stay in there. Safer.

They didn’t go to the wash room this time. They went through a series of doors, doors that weren’t even locked, and ended up in a small room, completely bereft of furniture. Four walls, and nothing else.

He was stopped in the middle of the room, and handed a small bundle of clothes and a pair of soft shoes. He stripped his dirty one suit off and stood naked, hastily shaking out the non-descript trousers and tugging them on. It had been a while since he could make the effort that embarrassment took, being naked in front of strangers. They never looked at him, in any case, but neither did they turn away; as if he wasn’t worth the consideration. The shirt they had given him was scratchy, but clean.

He was led through another door set into the side of the room. Behind it was a woman in a chair, and a desk in front of her. She smiled at him.

“Hello, Jacob,” she said.

He stared at her dumbly. If this was a new tactic they were trying, he couldn’t yet fathom it. Perhaps they thought a sweet motherly type would bring out his inner child. At least they couldn’t read his mind yet. It had been gnawing at him ever since they had put the new implant in his head. What if that was what it did, somehow?

But so far, it seemed not. If it had been able to read his mind, he was sure they wouldn’t have had to keep him in here for much longer, and the operation had been a long time ago. Or perhaps it just seemed a long time ago. He had no way of knowing. He was pierced with a sudden, yearning need to know what date it was, what time precisely. His new implant could have told him, presuming it worked anything like the old one, but he couldn’t access it in this place. They blocked it somehow, or maybe it wasn’t even activated yet.

The woman was looking at him, with the glazed smile of someone unsure if she should keep waiting for him to say something. She decided against it, and spoke again.

“I’m afraid we don’t have the clothes you came in. Regulations, silly really. But I hope those will do. They’re not very exciting, I’m afraid.” She gave a fluting laugh.

It took him a moment, and quite a lot of effort, but his reply was worth the energy.

“Why,” he managed. Stopped. Took a breath. “Do you think. I would give a fuck. About some clothes?”

He put everything he had into the fuck. His voice was raspy. Another time he might have been pleased about that. He had always wanted an interesting voice.

Her face had dropped, and turned uneasy. She would know what it meant. It was a hot topic on Life news at the moment; the degradation of today’s youth by the awful, aggressive language of the past.

He felt a flash of guilt, then a tidal wave of fury that overrode everything else. So what if she was kind? So what if she went home to her three children at night and read them stories, and tucked them in, and always volunteered for extra civic duty shifts, and was the loveliest woman in her block? She worked here. Here. That made her either deeply stupid or plainly evil, neither of which he could forgive. She deserved it, and more. She deserved everything he could throw at her, which was only one hurtful word, after all. He would have done more if he could.

“Well,” she said brightly, as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “Everything is in order. You didn’t have much on you when you came in, so nothing to give back. If you’d like to step through that door to your right, Jacob. Thank you so much.”

He considered saying no, and seeing how far that got him, but his legs were trembling, and he felt tired. He hadn’t walked around this much in quite a while. He considered telling her that his name, as far as he was concerned, was not bloody Jacob, which was a weak, blobby kind of name; but White, a purer simpler name, a name that suited him much better. But the fight had gone out of him in the face of her bland cheeriness. It was an effective weapon.

So he went to the door and it opened up automatically for him, and beyond it was bright light, painful and fierce.

He stood, tears leaking from his eyes.

“Jacob.”

There was a vague shape beyond, but the light was still too bright.

“Jacob,” the voice said again, with a tremble. “It’s me, Cho. It’s your sister. I’ve come to pick you up. They’re letting us take you home.”

He heard the door behind him click shut.

Science Fiction poll

2011-07-27T17:00:00.001+01:00

Say you have a friend, family member, or other toe-rag absolutely insistent that science-fiction books are for greasy nerds with too many teeth and no friends.

Say, despite your most eloquent and thoughtful points to the contrary, arguments both logical and witty that highlight the suffusement of modern pop-culturama and mass market entertainment with science fiction, said person still refuses to believe the merits of reading science-fiction.

Say this person is a bit of a twat.

Say you only have one shot at this.

What ONE BOOK would you give them that would change their mind and make them see how very silly and wrong and well, downright fricking nobular they are?

Tentacle Tuesdays: self-publishing v. traditional publishing round up

2011-07-26T11:30:00.001+01:00

Hey folkses,

Week 2 in the Tentacle Tuesdays story! If, like me, you're still feeling skeptical on the ongoing, growing, debate-causing saga that ist the rapid rise of self-publishing, this weekly round-up is designed to inform you as much as poss on everything currently being said, and i suppose, if i continue it long enough, will also be a chart of the evolution of the publishing industry as a whole as it goes through these seismic changes.

A Virgin's Guide to ... surviving your first Comic Con

2011-05-24T20:01:00.004+01:00

A Virgin’s Guide To... Surviving your first Comic Con

I’m no stranger to the concept of Cons. If you’ve ever been into genre art you’ll have come across them sooner or later. This year, and really on a spur of the moment thing, I came across a weekender called Kapow being chatted about on Twitter, decided to take the plunge, and bought two entry tickets; a cost I could equate to a couple of cinema visits plus snacks, and this was spread over two full days worth of entertainment. Score, thought I.

Saturday morning: I faced myself in the mirror and strapped on my boots.

I ramped up my geek-o-meter.

I resignedly carried one of three oversized bags of comic books my con partner absolutely needed to take with him to get signed.

I was ready.

And I was not disappointed. Ho no. Pics below!

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So having experienced my first Con from the virginal eyes of the newly initiated, here are my top tips for surviving:

• Embrace the boredom. Learn to love the queue

Man, there’s a lot of waiting around. Bring snacks and reading material, or just buy some comic books from the stalls, and prepare yourself for the queues. If you’re not happy waiting in line, resign yourself to the fact that you won’t get to do any of the good stuff.

• Plan, my friends. Plan.

Grab a program as soon as you can and plan your day to an inch of its life. You’ll need to – there’s usually far too much to do and see and you’ll have at least one situation where two panels or signings that you want to attend coincide. Suck up the tears of rage and choose your absolute favourite.

• Talk to strangers.

Con goers tend to be a friendly bunch. People who have never met before will happily chat in a Con queue – after all, they’ll be stuck there together for a while. Do the same. Ask someone which panels they’re attending and who their comic writer hero is. It makes everything more fun. The other advantage is that a lot of them will be experienced Con attendees – they can give you tips that will make your day go easier, and guaranteed some of them will be in on any rumours flying about.

• If you came to the Con to impress upon your comic book artist/writer hero that you are in fact the best and most interesting person they will ever met, and they should absolutely go out for a beer with you later, get a grip.

You’re one of hundreds, possibly thousands of people your hero will see that day. And then he will see thousands more the next day. If he attends several cons a year, which he will if he’s a big name, just keep multiplying. He’s there to be nice to you for the forty seconds it takes for him to sign your rule-breaking stack of forty five comic books and your breasts. And don’t forget that he is just a regular joe. Well, mostly.

• If you came to the Con to impress upon your comic book artist/writer hero that you are in fact the best and most interesting comic book artist/writer yourself, and wouldn’t they totally be so impressed with your collection of fanart that they will immediately get out their mobile and call their agent... see above.

At best, they’ll be embarrassed that you think they have that much sway with their agent and guilty that they don’t have the time or the means to help you. At worst, they’ll think you’re an unprofessional idiot. A lot of Cons have a specific portfolio submissions booth set up for talent scouts looking for fresh and exciting blood. Prepare as early as possible beforehand, then prepare some more. Treat it like it’s the only shot you’ll ever, ever get and you’ll make sure your portfolio is as pro and polished as it can be. Those are the ones that will immediately stand out.

• Turn off your mobile phone in screenings and panels.

Seriously – it’s embarrassing.

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Kapow is a new Con to the scene, set up by writer legend Mark Millar and self-confessed comic book addict and all-round geek champion Jonathan Ross. You can find out more here.

Eurovision Song Contest 2011

2011-05-16T14:02:00.001+01:00

What thrills and spills this year's melting pot of Euro talent provided! As always, Eurovision delivered, in every way imaginable. However I can't help feeling that the Germans, this year's hosts, managed to make the whole thing a little more credible and demure than usual, which was a slight disappointment. The level of contestants' genuine class and talent has been steadily and surprisingly rising over the years, though whether that is down to the newish voting system, designed to filter out much of that pesky political voting, or to more obvious links to the success of singing talent reality shows in recent years, one cannot say.

What one can say is that Eurovision will continue unfailingly to deliver on certain fronts:

Scandinavian countries, regardless of talent, will all give each other top marks
Spain will give Portugal 12 points, and vice versa
Cyprus will give Greece 21 points, but if Cyprus has made it to the final Greece won't give them any
There will always be a white rapper
Eastern European countries will vote well for each other
There will, since the success of Lordi, always be a metal/rock entry
There will inexplicably always be some sort of circus act themed entry. When i say this i'm thinking less of Cirque du Soleil and more of Cirque du Surreal Prats.
The UK will unfailingly vote, not according to talent, but according to the most outrageously bad entry
Malta will always give the UK good points, but if Malta have made it to the final the UK won't give them any

The list goes on. Let me know some trends you've spotted that i haven't listed here in the comments. Worth a laugh.

In the spirit of today's immediate style of coverage, i tweeted live throughout the event like so many others, keeping it short and snappy. So here are all the entries i covered in tweetage below:

And here's a link to previous Eurovision posts and this one too.
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Boy says Denmark are like 'a gay Roxette.' I see it. #eurovision

Hungary - not much movement possible in that fab number. Hats off to the 90s techno. Well done! #eurovision

Oh. My. God. I actually think Jedward are going to win. #eurovision 1

Sweden channel Bros. Badly.#eurovision

Yes yes YES! Greece contributes the obligatory white rapper entry! Hats off! #eurovision 2

Russia channels Chesney Hawkes. France contributes a Corsican opera number. At least Greece was funny. #eurovision

There's always one entry that's a little too classy for Eurovision, and i think Italy have it nailed this year. #eurovision

Go, Blue, go! Even though i think you're shit, normally! #eurovision

Moldova channel the B52s via Barnum! There does always appear to be a circus kind of number these days. Add that to the list. #eurovision

She's a sweet little thing, isn't she, the German champ? #eurovision

County Durham hide their faces. #eurovision 3

GOOD thighs. #austria #eurovision

The problem with Azerbaijan is that they can never, ever, top that angel demon number from a few years back. NEVER. #eurovision 4

Boy is convinced that Ukraine will deliver on the the trash front. I sit in hope. #eurovision 5

Iceland's version of Mumford and Sons. Quite a sweet song, though, in a bland sort of way. No points for them, guaranteed. #eurovision

Thank you, Spain! Thank you! I was beginning to think this year was yielding disappointingly little really shit fruit. #eurovision

I'd be into the Supremes retro styling if the song was actually any good. #serbia #eurovision

FINALLY! The token rock/metal number! Don't disappoint me, Georgia. #eurovision 6

Every time i see the recap of the French entry, it gets more and more surreal. #eurovision

Greece is only getting funny points, surely? #eurovision

AZERBAIJAN, people? Seriously? Did they do something politically astute this year? #eurovision

WOO HOO!!! Italy second! Taste nearly wins! #eurovision

1 Jedward really do suit Eurovision. It's like watching Einstein realise he should be a physicist.
2 The white rapper, Graham Norton amusingly informed us, is a lecturer in music at Westminster. All music students from Westminster burst into tears at this point.
3 Apparently the lead singer for the Romanian entry was from County Durham. Of course.
4 See previous Eurovision post for a link to that song. You HAVE TO WATCH IT.
5 They didn't. They did, in a blatant use of popularity, use the sand lady in the number that everone has now seen on YouTube. If you haven't, Google Ukraine's Got Talent.
6 And they didn't.
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It's like you were there, isn't it?

Movie / film review: SUPER

2011-05-06T23:38:00.002+01:00

Plot:
You’re sick to death of being that guy. You know the one – works as a short order cook in a bog standard cafe, has a beautiful, drug-addicted wife that has run away and shacked up with her dealer. You’re average, a loser, a loner, and nothing without her. Life is unfair and filled with misery. So you turn to comic books for meaning and empowerment.

Not blessed with any superpowers of your own (despite having had a vision of the finger of god touching your brain), you become the Crimson Bolt, selecting a trusty wrench as your weapon of choice. And things start to take quite a surprising turn.

Super was the surprise ‘Movie X’ showing at this year’s Kapow Comic Con, and I’ll put my hand up and say that I had honestly never heard of it before it came up on the screen, so it’s difficult to give an estimate of what I thought it would score. When the brilliant credits rolled up, however, it gave the impression of something between a Kevin Smith film and Mystery Men. So far, so snoogins.

Rainn Wilson has the face of a weirdo. Starring in The Office (US version) doesn’t help. His character Frank in Super, however, has a sweeter, quieter kind of pain about him. After the requisite life tragedy (left by his wife, played by Liv Tyler, impossibly lovely even when she’s playing a junkie), he decides to do something about the crap that happens to him, namely by donning a costume made on his wife’s sewing machine and swinging a wrench at people’s heads. Graphic violence ensues.

So far, so Kick Ass for adults. But if you’re reading this prepping yourself for good times and easy laughs, think again. This film turns you gradually on your head, using that clever device horror sometimes employs – namely by being so relentlessly, realistically violent that scenes you were laughing at a minute ago start to mutate into something really horrific. Frank begins in your eyes as awkward loser and ends up damaged, psychotic and unpredictable. This is not a clownish, over the top serial killer – this is a real man with problems, a way of seeing the world that doesn’t quite mesh with reality, and a lot of rage. He’s not a Lee Harvey Oswald, a ghostly pariah who doesn’t feel real. He’s that quietly podgy man people make fun of without a thought. He’s everyone who has ever dreamed of bloody revenge against queue jumpers, drug dealers, or paedophiles. He’s you, in fact.

And there’s the rub. Frank is us. As he says in the film, “we’re not ready, that’s the whole point. No-one is ever ready. You either just do it, or you don’t.” He does it, and he does it the way we, in our dark secret souls, wish we could do it. He is our vengeance fantasies made flesh. The trouble, which is hopefully what would stop us from actually doing what Frank does, is that murder is horrible. It’s gruesome and pointless. The extreme graphic nature of the violence in the film forces you to stop laughing at the deranged path Frank is pursuing and start seriously questioning how desensitised you as a viewer have become.

It’s not perfect – the ending is wrapped up too neatly and the body count doesn’t even come close to having the repercussions it should. But it should be seen for its surprisingly topical nature, and for a brilliantly fresh take on what may be dubbed the ‘superhero as nerd’ genre, and for the chance to think twice about the level of violence we direct towards each other – even if it is only in our heads.

Rainn Wilson gets some terrific support from deluded psychopath ‘Boltie’ played by a rapidly maturing Ellen Page. She is at turns hilarious and discomforting, clumsily aware of her own sexuality and desperately manipulative. Kevin Bacon does a fine job as outstandingly amoral dealer Jacques, and Liv Tyler is suitably credible as a woman coping just as badly with life as Frank is. Watch out for a genius and barely recognisable cameo from Nathan Fillion as a superhero televangelist, and also a more than brief shot of Hentai – the first use of which I’ve ever seen in a film. Colour me impressed (and slightly horrified).

Final score: 9/10 – If Todd Solondz did a superhero movie...

Shut up Crime!

Tentacle Tuesdays: awesomage news blog article roundup

2011-04-26T15:58:00.001+01:00

Welcome! Herewith a new regular feature at Write You Lazy Git, a maelstrom of wit and entertainment all in one place, and clearly more than I could ever achieve by myself. Tentacle because it alliterates nicely with Tuesday (#verbcrime) and suggests a spreading of virtual limbs to other places. Tuesday because I genuinely find it the dullest, most apathetic day of the week, and therefore tend to cheer myself up by attempting something active, word wise.

Yes, of course it makes perfect sense. Why do you ask?

Tentacle Tuesdays shall be amalgamations of stuff on:

Books
Publishing
Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror
Miscellaneous awesomage.

This week, I'm looking at self-publishing, and more specifically, blogs who might help you on your way to that tremulous first step of publishing your writing as online e-books. It's a daunting thought, one I haven't even taken yet, but the more you read around, the more you understand how many people, both in and out of the industry, think it's becoming increasingly relevant.

So here are some brill blogs i've come across to help you on the first stage of your self-publishing career: research. I've tried to consciously avoid places that sell themselves as self-publishing or marketing companies, and instead gone for individuals who have either blogged about it or do it themselves.

A Tale of Many Reviews - guest blogger Amber Scott gives you a nice succinct list of things to think about before you go it alone as an author.

The Savvy Book Marketer - free and interesting resources to start you off on learning how to make the best of your online presence and gain the attention of the e-book reading public.

Kindle self publishing - plethora of links to news, articles, marketing tips and the like on self-publishing. Indispensable.

The Creative Penn - I've linked to links again here, but this is bloody comprehensive stuff about how much you need to think about when marketing yourself as a writer online.

POD - everything you could want to know about what people are saying on self-publishing, the pitfalls, the articles, the movers and shakers.

J A Konrath - I've mentioned him before, but I actually find his blog indispensable in finding out as much as I can about someone who is actually self-publishing as we speak, and championing it like hell. Beware, though - I can rarely find a negative post about online self-publishing, so get a balanced view.

This little lot will keep you going, and on each of these blogs you'll find outgoing links to other blogs and sites that could keep you going forever and ever. Take the time. Do the research. Feel overwhelmed, then remember that if you want to do this, you have to be prepared to work hard. This is the world. Suck it up. I'm really talking to myself here. Feel free to join in the self-beration.

The whole New York Times Games of Thrones debate goes on and of course I will totally change things by adding in my own opinion

2011-04-19T22:46:00.002+01:00

Ginia Bellafante, author of this now infamous New York Times review of Game of Thrones, has posted a response to the backlash her rather rash generalisations caused.
Catch the original article here - it makes for some incredulous reading.

Ms Bellafante's response to the hordes of outraged emails, tweets and comments her ill-advised words have generated is here, where she invites you to 'pull up a throne and let's talk'. She's encouraging comment and response to her (slightly lame) response which is basically the only sensible course of action at this point, the other option being to bury her head in the sand until all the geeks get bored and bugger off. And never review another fantasy film, tv series or book ever again.

Because I clearly felt the need, I posted a comment - an attempt at a considered response to her bemused and defensive riposte, mostly because I feel quite strongly about it, but also because she's had quite a lot of unnecessary hate directed at her and adult debate, rather than an emotionally heated slanging match, always makes everyone concerned look better.

So here's what I said:

Here's my penny, because of course you really need another one after all this.

Having followed this whole debate out of personal curiosity, i think i can say the vast majority of people were affronted less by the notion that George R. R. Martin's fiction has not been declared by you as a work of genius and more by the sweeping dismissal of fantasy as a genre, and also by the remark you made about how women could only really like fantasy if it had sex in it.

There's a lot about those two inferrals to dislike. First, people who like fantasy and people who like reruns of House are hardly comparable. Fantasy, as a genre, is now so wide reaching the market for it is enormous. Let's forget the whole genre for a moment and concentrate on perhaps what you perceive as hardcore fantasy, i.e. swords/sorcery/Dungeons & Dragons type stuff. Given that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is very firmly rooted in this genre, and how wide reaching that was, it's a bit weird to say that only men went to see those films - which is what you would need to assume from your article. There's no overt sex in Lord of the Rings, so women can't be into it, right? I think the viewing figures might prove you wrong, there.

I don't read and watch fantasy for the sex, violence, magic, or elves. I read it because it builds intricate worlds, gives me complex characters i can believe in and themes i'm interested in exploring or being challenged on - just like ALL good fiction. It's the snobbery that sometimes springs up hand-in-hand with genre fiction that i can't abide - as well as the laughable assumption that only teenage boys with social interaction issues read it.

Let's put it one last way - to some, Margaret Atwood is a dystopian science fiction writer. Would anyone think her books were unworthy of serious review, if they had been positioned and marketed as SF? Entirely, and absolutely possible. That's what gets me.

Again, to stop you right there - i'm not saying Game of Thrones is Margaret Atwood, because it clearly isn't. But don't dismiss fantasy as niche crap that only goths and roleplayers are into.

I'm sure you've got your own opinions - that's why we love you. What do you think?

Top Ten (fifteen) fictional characters that have inspired me

2011-04-14T13:44:00.004+01:00

Really, honestly and truthfully, these are the ones. The list would change on a given day depending on my mood, but I've gone for the truth as opposed to characters I'd like people to think inspired me.

n.b. these are characters who have inspired or influenced me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they would make my top ten list of favourite or best fictional characters. Same goes for the books they appear in. That’s a whole other kettle of fictional fish, my friends.

Give me your top ten fictional characters, either in the comments or a reciprocal post. I'd love to see your choices.

In no particular order (and click through the title links - I rooted around for some articles and videos for your distraction pleasure):

1. Lolita - Lolita. I realise what this looks like.

2. The Goblin King – Labyrinth. I think watching this at an early age had some very interesting effects on the development of what i find attractive in men. Not men who look like David Bowie, by the way.

3. Persephone Crozier – The Whitby Child. Pear was the first character I came across in fiction that represented, to me, what a realistic, contemporary witch would be like. The relationship between her and Jennet, and where her shapeshifting power comes from is genius, considered, intelligent and utterly convincing.

4. Granny Weatherwax – Discworld books. I realised very recently that I’ve been writing a character that’s a pale imitation of her. I’m hoping no-one notices.

5. Darcy – Pride and Prejudice. I defy ANY WOMAN not to put him on their list. Come on. He’s the archetypal perfect man. Aloof, attractive, arrogant, and bodice-rippingly passionate underneath all that saucy English repression. You secretly want every man to be him. You’re secretly hoping to meet him one day, but clearly because you’re not delusional you know you probably never will, so you write characters that remind you of him. Well... I do, anyway.

6. Arnold Rimmer – Red Dwarf. The world’s most self-sabotaging, sarcastic man. He’s like a female version of me. I adore him. Or i do in theory. In reality if we ever met, it would probably be like that bit where he manages to make a copy of himself and it turns out to be the most horrific thing that has ever happened to him.

7. Buffy Summers – Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Kick ass AND vulnerable AND believable AND complicated AND not always nice, beautiful, right, or in control? Now such characters are all the rage, of course. Never forget twas Buffy who paved the way. The original and the best.

8. Chocky – Chocky. I read this when I was quite young and it did something to me. It was the first believable alien encounter story I’d come across, and felt right - of course aliens would use their minds to travel space! The book has dated horribly, but the character has remained special to me ever since.

9. Jadzhia Dax – Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Geek! You scream. But of course, say I. This might be on men’s lists for somewhat different reasons, but Dax has been influencing me from forever. Someone that is made up of herself plus something else that has already lived other lives with other someones and she remembers all that all day every day, so it’s like she’s actually a person made up of like nine other people? AWESOME. Plus she has them cool body tattoos.

10. Agent Cooper – Twin Peaks. Just about the coolest man ever. Manages to make being syooper nice attractive. Also totally open to weird dreams about dwarves in red rooms speaking backwards. Accepts the inexplicable. *Really* into coffee and pie. That’s a man I could settle down with.

11. Nancy – The Craft. Your life is crappy. You’re a big ball of rage and revenge. Now suddenly you’ve got lots of witchy powers you didn’t have before, and now suddenly here is a chance for you to go COMPLETELY OFF THE DEEP END. An evocative, deliciously dark and sexy teenage representation of the corruption of power. It's.. it's just so teen. It's just so the way I was when I was a teen, except less attractive. There's a picture for you.

12. Roland Deschain – The Dark Tower series. This is my thing about strong, silent, complicated men coming into play here. I talk more about Roland and The Dark Tower here.

13. Findhorn – Elidor. Truthfully, any character in any of Alan Garner’s books has me reeled in like a fish on a line. This one has stayed with me the most, perhaps because it represents the unattainable, the wild, the ultimate in fantasy.

14. Patrick Bateman – American Psycho. This would be my fascination with psychological make up coming into play here. No-one has gotten closest to writing as a psychopath, in my view. Yes, I’ve met Bret Easton Ellis. No, he didn’t appear to be a psychopath. But then that’s a thing about psychopaths, one could argue.

15. Pennywise the Dancing Clown – It *. I don’t know. It’s just fascinating. Is it an alien? Is it a demon? Is it, in fact, a giant spider? What the hell are the deadlights? How come It can actually be really funny at the same time as terrifying the shit out of you? WHY AM I SO OBSESSED WITH THIS BOOK?

* those with clown issues probably shouldn't click through to this link.

Well shit, my friends, the times they are a-changin. And i don't even like Bob Dylan. On self publishing and the industry as a whole.

2011-04-07T14:20:00.001+01:00

Jeebus H. Christie, i've been reading a hella lot of exciting stuff about self-publishing recently, what it means for the industry, and how the internet is doing a large bum number on traditional publishing as a whole.

Here are one or two thoughts for your perusal, but before i go any further, i think the following articles are more informed than i am about the current state of self-publishing. Small disclaimer - i haven't yet found a completely negative opinion that i find useful, but will add when i do.

------------

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/ebooks-and-self-publishing-dialog.html
http://comicbookgrrl.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/is-publishing-going-to-end-up-like-the-music-industry-and-is-that-a-bad-thing-any-what-is-bon-jovi-whining-about/#comment-298
-------------

I work right in the middle of the commercial print publishing industry. When i say commercial i mean i work on some of the biggest authors in the world. And it's easy to say that the whole industry is a bloated ball of crap, and it's easy to say that it should be doing this or that.

The truth is, it's an industry and a business. One wrong move, in this environment, and a whole company could go under. That's why they can't/won't take the plunge when it comes to something that seems so small and easy to consumers, like, say, publishing ebooks at knock down prices like self-publishers are able to do. Authors have to be satisfied. Agents have to be satisfied. Like most large businesses, they're beholden to a good deal more than you might realise.

I agree with comments that publishers act (if metaphors make your eyes bleed, skip the next sentence) as a gardener, weeding out the crap and leaving us as consumers beautiful golden flowers of art that we can be introduced to and be bowled over by. I also agree that if a publisher chooses not to publish something shit hot, that's a hell of a loss to everyone. They're not right all the time. They're not right a lot of the time. They make choices based on what is commercially viable and not necessarily what they love the most.

The golden trophy, if you will, of an editor, is to find something you love the mostest ever and manage to persuade everyone else in your company that it is the best thing ever AND also totally commercially viable. Of course, this doesn't always happen.

I have met staggeringly successful authors that were rejected hundreds of times in their early careers, and took many years to get anyone to even say 'possibly' to their work. It's not just whether your stuff is good enough. It's whether it can sell, now, in the current market. That's the beauty of the internet - it gives you endless choice, and i do believe that consumers will make that effort to find what they want. What authors need to do is make it easy as possible for them to find what they want. Clearly i'm being blase about what exactly that entails, and book marketing is a whole other essay which i may tackle soon.

Speaking as an author though, i'm finding the idea of self-publishing cautiously shit-hot.

ON FICTION BOOK TITLES

2011-02-20T21:27:00.006Z

I reek at titles for my stories; I reek like babies' bums. It took me about 6 months to come up with my latest title, and i'm not at all sure about it. With fiction, it doesn't necessarily need to say anything much to do with what the book is actually about; in fact quite often, the more enigmatic the better.

Sometimes a short, sharp word works (ROOM; WICKED; LIGHT; AIR).

Sometimes the rhythmic, poetical approach does it (NEVER LET ME GO; SO COLD THE RIVER).

There's the perennial THE titles, far too numerous to mention here, but still an old favourite of all, and usually with good reason. This category is the most prone to boring titles, though.

Then there's the plain bloody weird which catch your eye just because they are, and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't (A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRAINIAN; FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID).

And lastly, there's the titles that do exactly what it says on the tin (PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES; AMERICAN PSYCHO) which i suppose only works if your story has an exceptionally clear hook as with those two examples.

There isn't a magic title formula in publishing, though some publishers like to think so. Poetical three word image-heavy titles for commercial fiction, please (BEFORE I FALL, THE LOVELY BONES); some kind of attributary space word for sci-fi, please (insert words NEBULA, COSMIC, STAR, somethingWORLD); and often what one person thinks is a genius title eight other people will deride.

I worry slightly because i want my books to be as interestingly titled as Philip K Dick's, but i also want people to pick up the bloody things if i ever get them published. Is it better to play it safe and do a THE title, or take the risk and go for outlandish?

What be some of your favourite titles, and why?

Reasons why The Crow is a brilliant film

2010-06-11T12:00:00.001+01:00

1.    This is not just for Goths. If the underbelly, the leftfield, urban darkness, the desire to escape mundanity, and the feeling that most superheroes are annoyingly camp and goody two shoes have ever held any interest for you - watch it.

2.   Brandon Lee. He might have had a tendency to ham it in the emotional scenes, but he played the part with a beautiful intensity and showcased a budding talent, proving that he was more than just the son of a martial arts legend. Those of you with a morbid turn of mind will doubtless want to watch him in this for other reasons.

3.   The music. Not only did the soundtrack showcase the best and up and coming alternative bands of the day, it was used to great emotional effect and heightened every scene. Witness the cut from “Victims… aren’t we all” to the first few bars of Medicine on stage, as well as the moment when The Cure’s Burn is playing as Eric makes up his face into the face of The Crow. Other bands on the soundtrack include Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, Violent Femmes, Helmet, Pantera and The Jesus and Mary Chain.

4.    The script. Here’s a few goodies:

T Bird: Abashed the Devil stood and felt how awful goodness is.

Top Dollar: Greed is for amateurs. Disorder, chaos, anarchy: now that's fun.

Funboy: Jesus Christ!
Eric Draven: Jesus Christ? Stop me if you heard this one: Jesus Christ walks into a hotel…
[Fun Boy shoots him]
Eric Draven: Ow. He hands the innkeeper three nails, and he asks...
[Fun Boy shoots him again]
Funboy: Don't you ever fuckin' die?!?
Eric Draven: … can you put me up for the night?

Grange: I saw him too. He had a guitar. He winked at me before he jumped out a fourth floor window like he had wings.
Top Dollar: He winked at you? (tuts) Musicians.

Skank: [fast and hysterical] That's him that's him! But he looked different he was all painted up white like some sort of dead whore! I seen him! T-Bird he sent me in some road beers right then he took him away, but I chased him down and he flash fried T-bird to his fucking car aww, T-Bird here's to you buddy!
[drinks his flask]
Skank: Fire it up! Fire it up! Fire it up!
Top Dollar: Maybe we oughta just video tape this, play it back in slow motion.

Top Dollar: Childhood's over the moment you know you're gonna die.

Albrecht: Police! Don't move! I said, Don't move!
Eric Draven: I thought the police always said, "Freeze!"
Albrecht: Well, I am the police, and I say, "Don't move" Snow White. You move, you're dead.
Eric Draven: And I say I'm dead, and I move.

5.   Top Dollar. I’ll stop mentioning him at some point in my life, but it may not be soon. Sorry bout that. Michael Wincott’s voice is enough to steal any film, and never has it been used to such great effect. With a sinful Southern drawl and a sound like he’s chewing on a mouth full of gravel, any scene he’s in he commands. You know he’s an amoral psychopath but you still dig him.

6.   The pulsating urban atmosphere. It rains here almost as much as it does in Bladerunner. It holds more detail, imagination and dirty beauty than most movie cityscapes. Spitting neon signs, a colour palette of grimy shadow hues and an underworld to which everyone belongs or dies. You have to be a little bit criminal to survive. Purity is murdered, sin is rewarded. Even the protagonist, formerly a good 'un, must torture and murder to find his redemption and peace. Hell, he even seems to enjoy it, and this is someone we know was a nice guy in life. This isn’t a moral, Christian, ‘act proper and you’ll win’ story, and it’s all the more interesting for it.

Scriptwriting

2010-05-04T11:13:00.000+01:00

Yes, i have decided to make life difficult for myself by taking one of the greatest doorstop books of all time and turning it into a screenplay. Possibly as a TV miniseries, because any kind of film will not do it justice. At the moment, i envisage it as a series of 6 or 7 one hour episodes.

No, i am not going to say what the book is that i shall attempt to adapt. I'm laughing at myself as it is, and perhaps don't need anyone else joining in at this early stage.

Yes, it is true that i have never, in fact, written a full script before. Just small spec scripts for that particular unit of my creative writing degree.

Yes, it is also true that i do not own a scriptwriting program, nor can i afford to get one.

All these are true.

But what would we be if we did not but try?

We would be as lesser men. Or women.

To that end, my first move toward this creation of greatness is to obtain some of those coloured sticky note things to mark places in books. This will give me an illusion of control and mastery.

~~Fuck.~~ I look forward to the challenge! Bring it on, and all that bravado talk!

BOOK REVIEW: Tales of the Dying Earth

2010-04-23T13:09:00.001+01:00

Quick summary for those coming to this virginal fresh (lifted verbatim from Wikipedia, yah. I’m lazy. Yah. We’ve covered this):-

--The stories are all set in an undefined far future Earth, when the sun is nearing the end of its life. The sky ranges from pink to deep blue, lit by a dim red sun, and many strange plants and animals exist.

The setting is marked by the presence of unaccountably ancient ruins and other fragments of now-decayed civilizations. The human population is shrinking, and most live in the remaining structures built long ago, in varying degrees of ruin, squalor, or luxury. In addition, many people make use of technology or magic which was created long ago, but which they no longer understand. No distinction is ever made between technology created through science and that created by magic; the line between the two is blurred, and it is heavily implied that the two are ultimately indistinguishable. The characters in the stories are aware that they live on a "Dying Earth" and often make carefree, nihilistic references to the fact that their planet does not have much longer to live, assuming that the sun will soon burn itself out.

Many of the most important people in Ascolais are wizards. In the Dying Earth, wizards use magic primarily by memorizing lengthy formulas for spells, and then activating them by speaking the proper commands. Once cast, the spell formula is instantly forgotten, forcing the wizard to reread and re-memorize them. Because even talented wizards can only memorize and "load" a handful of spells, wizards also have to rely on magical relics and on their other skills and talents to protect them. There are only one hundred spells which are still known to mankind, out of thousands which were discovered over the course of history. Pandelume implies that what the people of the Dying Earth call "magic" actually has a scientific origin; he indicates that many spells were invented through the use of mathematics and mundane sciences.--

I’m actually finding it very difficult to write a comprehensive review of this, and I’m not sure why. It seems to resist being broken down into manageable points, and there’s also too much to remember considering how many settings, peoples and stories are involved. Thus follows some overall general remarks or key points, if you will. I’m afraid I’ve filled the whole thing with quotes, as I feel they best describe my remarks:-

Imaginative inventions know no bounds – the stories absolutely teem with brilliant, odd, frightening and plain funny creatures, plants, cities and races, the origins of some of which are never explained, some of which are. But the one thing that stands out particularly from the whole collection is just how funny Vance’s writing is. Dry, acerbic, ironic and basically brilliant, it serves to repeatedly highlight how deranged, silly and bizarre people are. His barbed stabs at religion remind me particularly of Pratchett:- ‘We prostrate ourselves before the fish-god Yob, who seems as efficacious as any,’ says one worshipper. Religions are based on archaic rituals that mean nothing, mostly done because… well, that’s the way things are done round here, as illustrated by another devotee: ‘We worship the inexorable god known as Dangott. Strangers are automatically heretics, and so are fed to the sacred apes.’

The other point which shouldn’t work, considering its absurdity, but really does, is the dialogue. From the most powerful wizard, to the humblest mudhut dwelling filth-covered peasant, to demons made of eyes and horrifying creatures about to rip your throat out, every single character possesses the eloquence, formality and verbal profundity of most Oscar Wilde characters:

‘I must order you secured, contained, pent, incarcerated and confined.’

‘It expresses the symbollic significance of NULLITY to which TOTALLITY must necessarily attach itself, by Kratunjae's Second Law of Cryptorrhoid Affinities.’

‘I am forced to believe you guilty of impertinence, impiety, disregard and impudicity.’

All the characters are bastards. Perhaps because of the apparent imminent destruction of all life when the sun goes out, pretty much everyone you meet in the Dying Earth is out for all he can get. Mostly merely selfish and self-serving, frequently nasty and occasionally psychotic, moral law is fairly non-existent and one only survives by being a bloody powerful mage of some sort or extremely quick on one’s feet. Protagonists of the stories include Cugel, who is in fact a complete git with an overinflated opinion of his charm and abilities. There does seem to be some sort of Karmic law in effect in place of any other, since every time Cugel manages to trick someone he is, within a few pages, tricked himself and back to where he started (in one memoral ending, a completely literal sense). Justice is arbitrary; good people get bad endings and bad receive good.

I can see why both Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett cite Jack Vance and his Dying Earth stories as influences. Take, for example, the following smattering of quotes:-

'Today occurred the concatenation; the 'creature' as you call it, pervolved upon itself; in your idiotic malice you devoured it.'

'The creature displayed the qualities reminiscent of both coelenterate and echinoderm. A terrene nudibranch? A mollusc deprived of its shell? More importantly, was the creature edible?'

'So now, be off! Or I inflict upon you the Spell of the Macroid Toe, whereupon the signalized member swells to the proportions of a house.'

'It is an unthinkable discrepancy that fifty-four men should consume the food intended for fifty-three.'

‘I become drunk as circumstances dictate.’

‘Only the fact of my broken limbs prevents me from leaping at your throat.’

‘Cease the bickering! I am indulging the exotic whims of a beautiful princess and must not be distracted.’

‘ "Does Zaraides the Sage fear to identify himself with the cause of justice? Does he blink and draw aside from one so timid and vacillating as Iucounu? In a word – yes," said Zaraides.'

Summary: Although I’ve emphasised the funnies, there is a lot of dramatic content here which mostly resides in the setup. What would in fact happen at the end of our Sun’s life? The clever mix of science fiction and fantasy also has me applauding, done to greatest effect in the story of Ulan Dhor and his visit to the rather sci-fi sounding Ampridatvir. The writing is endlessly inventive and incredibly witty, and if the stories become a little repetitive with Cugel’s endless mishaps, it is to no great detriment to the collection as a whole. He’s known in the genre, of course, but Vance should be more widely known in a general sense. 4/5

RIP Peter Steele

2010-04-17T20:44:00.001+01:00

No idea what he was like as a person - I suspect difficult, irritating, unpredictable, and challenging.

No wonder i liked him so much.

A 6 foot 7 inch Brooklyn Viking mess of morbidity, intelligence and self-deprecation. He looked out of this world, as if he belonged to another time where the words 'rape' and 'pillage' were used more often.

Click here for one of his best 'lighthearded' songs with more than a touch of wry.

RIP. You and your music have been a huge influence on me. One of the very few bands i still listen to since i heard you first at the tender age of 14.

Psych 101

2010-04-09T12:10:00.000+01:00

Dreams are a constant, vital source of inspiration for me. I feel funny about sharing them with people sometimes, as so many of them make their way into my writing in one adapted form or another – in fact I can’t think of one instance where the first scene I’ve written for something hasn’t been directly taken from a dream.

In this way, as well, I start to run the risk that all writers run – some fundamental parts of my psychological make up become rather embarrassingly obvious. But then, that’s the risk you take, isn’t it? Artists expose themselves all the time. To many, it’s the point of making art – expose yourself and thereby others, commenting on humanity as a whole.

In other words, suck it up.

And I fully intend to. As long as no-one I know reads any of my stuff, I’ll be absolutely fine.

Ha – I’m being stupid, anyway. I’m fully aware that I can no more hide my true feelings than a fly can stop itself from heading straight towards the nearest turd. I’m simply no good at dissembling. I used to be a little more practiced at it, though I suspect I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought I was. I also have a suspicion that the reason is less to do with inability and more to do with being too lazy to make the effort. It’s such a time consuming affair, lying. So I’ve gone the opposite way – I revel in giving my honest opinion, asked or unasked for, and even if it embarrasses me. I take pride in being truthful with my emotions, and I go so far as to mock people who hide their true feelings.

This would be why I rub the English the wrong way, then.

This would also be why some people think I’m a blunt, abrasive weirdo. Rest assured, it does not stem from arrogance; it’s pure laziness. I just can’t be frigged to lie. I think that may be a reason everyone can understand.

Of all that we might have done which we did not do, mainly re: Ghost Whisperer

2010-03-30T14:14:00.001+01:00

How did my evening go last night?

See below, re: differing itineraries. Yeeeeaah. Except substitute Flash Forward for Ghost Whisperer.

YES! I'm ashamed, okay? Every time i watch it i'm self-horrified. Last night's was an especially awful christmas themed episode that every American series ever seems to feel it necessary to do, about 'giving and receiving, and receiving and giving, being nice to everyone, trying to behave like Santa, doesn't everyone forgive and grow closer at christmas, isn't it great when an episode ends with everyone singing along together and drinking fluted glasses of champagne, looking at each other nostalgically'?

I'd grab my own head in pain if it hadn't already exploded from shame.

It often starts off really well. Scary noises and all that, ghosties who have hung about instead of going into the light specifically to be mean to people, some of them really quite nasty. And then by the end, the family/girlfriend/flatmate of the ghost is standing around whilst he/she/it gets all teary eyed about how tragic it is that he/she/it didn't do x while they were still alive and how they'll always love everyone ever and ooo look, what's that light, it's so pretty! And the still living people stand there, hearing and seeing nothing except a crazy woman with questionable dress sense who appears to be translating for their lost loved one, except everything that comes out of her mouth is so generic she might as well call herself a spiritual healer and have done. Why does one of the following two things never happen:

1) the still living family member/loved one sues Melinda for whatever borderline criminal offence she's committed (stalking, breaking and entering, rifling through people's stuff when their back is turned), or records the drivel she spouts at the end and compares it to some Mystic Meg quotes, thus clearly proving the one-size-fits-all method to her therapy babble

2) the ghost concerned goes to hell instead of heaven where he clearly belongs, having spent most of the episode delighting in making people miserable, scaring the living shit out of them, and occasionally trying to make them kill themselves/each other. That would be something to see. Instead of the generic 'awe' expression upon perceiving said apparently celestial luminescence, how about an expression of pure, shit creek terror and a mumbled, "Fuck me, he's got big black wings" or "Getting a bit hot in here, don't you find?"

Also... i basically just need to stop watching it.

An evening in the life

2010-03-29T14:26:00.002+01:00

As Easter fast approaches, I’m hoping postage will be of a more food-oriented bent.

I’ll be making mini simnel cakes with my sibling and taking badly lit photos of the entire process for your viewing pleasure. Hurrah!

Meanwhile, this is my intinerary for the next few nights.

Itinerary 1: evening should be thus

18.30 – 18.45 arrive home. Dress in more comfortable clothes, switch computer on. Check email and any other stuff.

19.00 fire up piece of writing. Put interesting music on ITunes to inspire whilst tapping away.

19.45 gather foodstuffs to eat in front of television.

20.00 Star Trek begins. Eat and watch.

21.00 Flash Forward begins. Prepare tomorrow’s lunch during the breaks.

22.00 go back to computer and carry on with writing.

22.30 think about getting ready for bed.

22.50 lay out tomorrow’s clothes, clean teeth and face.

23.00 read jack vance and then drift off to sleep.

Itinerary 2: evening will be thus

18.30 – 18.45 arrive home. Dress in more comfortable clothes, switch computer on. Check email and any other stuff.

19.00 fire up piece of writing. Stare at it for several minutes. Put interesting music on ITunes to inspire. Get distracted by music. Decide to play online word game to ‘focus’.

19.45 gather foodstuffs to eat in front of television.

20.00 Star Trek begins. Eat and watch.

21.00 Flash Forward begins. Sit on couch and think about preparing tomorrow’s lunch during the breaks.

22.10 realise lunch isn’t done. Get up and make sandwich.

22.30 go back to computer with every intention of writing. Think about getting ready for bed. Go back to word game guiltily. Stare at writing. Venture a word or two, then erase. Feel suddenly tired.

22.50 lay out tomorrow’s clothes, clean teeth and face.

23.00 read jack vance and then drift off to sleep, firmly stamping itinerary in mind for tomorrow evening.

Top Ten: Movie Villains

2010-03-26T13:51:00.002Z

See previous Top Ten Posts here!

As with Empire’s sidebar disclaimer, I’m going to have to be specific about it: in other words, I've only included actual villains, as opposed to anti heroes or evillish characters with redeeming qualities. No redeeming qualities here, thank you. No supernatural or otherworldly characters have been included.

In no particular order:

Norman Stansfield, Leon
Basically, if you’re doing a top ten of pretty much anything related to movies, one of Gary Oldman’s performances will always make it. Always. Why? Why?!? Because he’s the best actor currently alive, that would be why. Example:
Top Ten Real People Portrayals: pick from his rendition of Joe Orton, Sid Vicious or Beethoven.
Top Ten Sexiest Movie Characters: his Dracula. Rawwr. No wonder everyone thought he and Winona were having an affair.
Top Ten Best Actors Ever: see above, re: best actor on planet.
Norman is Gary at his most villainous. No other character of his has such a distinct lack of redeeming features, except Mason Verger. Norman is psychopathic, sexually aroused by the combination of extreme violence and Beethoven, completely amoral and therefore horribly frightening. He’s also offset more dramatically by Jean Reno’s incredibly likeable anti-hero, which makes us hate Norman all the more when he tries to destroy him.

Quotie: ‘Death is... whimsical... today.’

Amon Goeth, Schindler’s List
There are very few performances on screen where beauty has been so successfully used as a mask for blank evil. It’s easy to think of female examples – women are easily beautiful and easily evil. It’s more accomplished when it’s a man.
Thus Ralph Fiennes’ lovely face covering the black emptiness of a casual mass murderer chills us all the more to the bone than it would if Goeth had been a dumpy, potato-faced git. Witness his relaxed ‘morning exercise’ posture as he casually picks off prisoners from his balcony. Some might argue that the desire he feels towards his Jewish servant is a redeeming feature, but it ain’t. The desire is to possess and master, and ultimately destroy.

Quotie:
Reiter: ‘Herr Kommandant! I'm only trying to do my job!’
Amon Goeth: ‘Ja; I'm doing mine.’

Leatherface, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
I’ve mentioned him before (see this in Top Ten Films that have left a psychological scar), so enough said really. The very definition of sickness, as if he personifies evil as some kind of disease. Horrific horrific horrific.

Buffalo Bill, Silence of the Lambs
The mumbling, awkward Jaime Gumb exterior hides a horrible, filth ridden mind who likes nothing better than to starve plump women and then skin them in order to fashion himself a suit. I can’t actually watch the poor actor in Monk, because I’m convinced at any given moment that he’s about to break out the lotion.

Quotie: ‘It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it’s told.’

Hannibal Lecter, Silence of the Lambs
Yeah. He kind of has to be here, doesn’t he? Later performances have watered the whole thing down (though I still think he does a fine job in Hannibal), but Lecter does have an amazing power to beguile. You always think there might be some small mercy in there because of his fascination with Clarice, but you soon understand his treatment of her doesn’t stem from love – it stems from curiosity. If she started to bore him, she’d wake up without a liver.

Quotie: So endlessly quotable, but I think this be my favourite: ‘Amputate a man's leg and he can still feel it tickling. Tell me, mum, when your little girl is on the slab, where will it tickle you?’

John Doe, Seven
The horrifying thing about John Doe is that his motives are actually comprehensible. Come on, you’ve thought about it. Get rid of the drug dealers, the murderers, the scum? Trouble is, John seems to take such pleasure in his work, it does negate the whole moral tone of his argument just a dinky bit. The patience, skill, nay FREAKISH PSYCHOPATHY it would take to torture someone for over a year leaves 99% of us cold. And the other 1% need some serious psychiatric help, like, right now.

Quotie: ‘Only in a world this shitty… could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face.’

Hans Landa, Inglorious Basterds
A recent addition, but this performance is already legendary, and deservedly so. It’s his mouth and the way he smiles, and there’s something repulsively wet and sticky about his voice. Witness his masterful torture of farmer LaPadite in the beginning of the film – he tortures with smiles and eloquence. He’s small and unassuming. He has no hatred of Jews in particular – he simply does not see them as human. He enjoys his work, but with a quiet sort of satisfaction that never spills over into anything as unrefined as passion. He is completely unpredictable and possesses no compassion whatsoever. In short, he’s horrific.

Quotie: ‘What a tremendously hostile world that a rat must endure. Yet not only does he survive, he thrives. Because our little foe has an instinct for survival and preservation second to none... And that, Monsieur, is what a Jew shares with a rat.’

Kevin, Sin City
Kevin has been somewhat overlooked as a character, which might perhaps be due to the fact that people are too repulsed to think on him too long. And let’s face it, there’s quite a lot of evil to choose from when it comes to Sin City. The heroes are all multiple murderers and almost everyone in a position of power is a paedophile.
But there’s something about Kevin.
Other evil people at least appear to have a personality, something that could distinguish them as human. But Kevin doesn’t even have that. He moves like a frog and never speaks, and his taste for sucking people’s flesh off their fingers whilst they watch is about the pinnacle of everything fundamentally wrong. His presence on screen makes you want to vomit. I get the impression Elijah ‘sparkly eyes’ Woods had a hell of a good time playing this part.

Annie Wilkes, Misery
What an obsessive, nonsense-word spouting, figurine fixated bitch. That matron-like figure hides the beating romantic heart of a crazed, delusional, ankle-whacking freak. There’s no appealing to her better nature. All you can do is play her game and hope that she doesn’t decide to get the hammer out.

Quotie: ‘At the feedstore do I say, "Oh, now Wally, give me a bag of that F-in' pig feed, and a pound of that bitchly cow corn"? At the bank do I say, "Oh, Mrs. Malenger, here is one big bastard of a check, now give me some of your Christ-ing money!" THERE, LOOK THERE, NOW SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!’

Eve Harrington, All About Eve
The very definition of sociopath. She knows what mask she needs to assume to manipulate everyone around her. Eve raises some uncomfortable questions for actors everywhere, not only in her amoral desperation to become a star of the theatre, but also in her desperation to play anyone but herself. She’s an empty shell, a blank canvas, and she needs to play something in order to be. She never just is something – she is always, always acting. What then, is left? What is she when no-one is watching?

Quotie:
Karen Richards: ‘A part in a play. You'd do all that just for a part in a play?’
Eve Harrington: ‘I'd do much more for a part that good.’

Honourable mentions:-

Sid 6.7, Virtuosity
Yes… I know I talk too much about this film. Nyah. What a dude. What a ham loving dude. Couldn’t include him because he is technically a computer program. Possibly the most villainous character ever, though, since his personality is literally made up of 200 plus real life serial killers, terrorists and genocidal maniacs. Genius.

Quotie: 'You're the only guy on my dance card, Parker.'
'Just because I'm carrying around the joy of killing your family inside me... doesn't mean we can't be friends.'

'Hey buddy! How's the wife and kid? Still dead, huh?'

'I'm a fifty terrabyte, self-evolving, neural network, double backflip off the high platform. I'm not a swan dive.'

'Which god would that be? The one who created you? Or the one who created me? You see, in your world, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, but in my world, the one who gave me life doesn't have any balls.'

Kurgan, Highlander
The scene in the church? Hells, yeah. Couldn’t include this 8ft giant totem pole of evil because he technically of the superhuman/supernatural bent. And… I find him attractive.

Quotie:
Priest: 'This is a house of God. People are trying to pray. You're disturbing them.'
Kurgan: 'He cares about these helpless mortals?'
Priest: 'Of course He cares. He died for our sins.'
Kurgan: 'That shall be His undoing.'

Top Dollar, The Crow
Couldn’t in all conscience include this guy because he does have some redeeming qualities. He really likes his sister. Also… I find him attractive.

Endlessly quotable. This is probably the most poignant: ‘Dad gave me this. Fifth birthday. He said, "Childhood's over the moment you know you're gonna die." '

Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin Hood
Too hilarious to be a proper villain, but totally needs a mention as he single-handedly saves the film. Also, he is played by Alan Rickman, who is in fact a god.

So very endlessly quotable:
Sheriff: ‘I’ll cut your heart out with a spoon!’
Guy of Gisborne: ‘Why a spoon, cousin? Why not an axe?’
Sheriff: ‘Because it's DULL, you twit. It'll hurt more.’

‘What a beautiful child. So young, so alive, so unaware of how precarious life can be. I had a very sad childhood, I'll tell you about it sometime. I never knew my parents; it's amazing I'm sane.’

[to a wench] ‘You. My room. 10:30 tonight.’ [to another wench] ‘You. 10:45. Bring a friend.’

How to get published

2010-03-25T10:27:00.005Z

I like reading about or talking to authors who share their experiences on how they got published, and so I found this article very interesting.

At the end of it all, though, what else can you say that hasn’t already been said? There’s no formula to follow – such is life. How To Get Published – The Definitive Guide. This stuff is mostly pep talk. All you can do is everything you can, and then you have to wait around and rely on luck and circumstance.

If this doesn’t sound proactive enough for some, note the ‘everything you can’ bit. I think everyone would agree that writing something and then sitting back and waiting for it to bring you fortune and glory is stupid. Everyone would, out loud, agree with this - but not everyone, in their heart of hearts, would take the advice. Yes, there will be some people out there who think that because their work is good and because they deserve to be published, they will be (that was me age twenty. A little ego does you good, I find). Try a little more cynicism with your breakfast, please. A spoonful a day. You may find it helps with your mounting puzzlement and disbelief.

Meanwhile, Easter rears its chocolate covered head and I’m about to have almost two weeks alone in the house, which I’m hoping may spur me to get some serious frigging writing done, but may in fact result in me making a depression in the couch large enough to fit large, fat things in whilst I sit watching Criminal Minds reruns and vomiting up all the sugar I just ate out of the jar. What a visual treat for you.

The ‘new’ book is the one I started writing because I wanted to come up specifically with something that would sell. The more I write it, the more it starts to resemble everything else I write. Sir Sigh-a-Lot. At least it’s straight up fantasy. After a fashion. Except for the middle bit. But at least it has magic and stuff in it. Sort of. Except for the fact that magic may not actually exist and everyone might be making everything up. Okay. At least it has a thumping good storyline with lots of action. Exceeeept… for the long chunks of not doing much.

You may begin to see my problem.

Meanwhile I’m reading Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth. I’m only three stories in and already very impressed. I really enjoy his writing. He chooses interesting, visceral wording and formal language that sounds natural and not stilted. In short, he’s much better than someone who’s written comparable fiction, and who is arguably more famous, that I’ve also read recently.

Hint: his initials are MM.

_______________________________________

Listening to: Chuck Berry.

Watching: tonight it will probably be more Crimmies (lit.Criminal Minds).

Reading: Tales of the Dying Earth, a French grammar book, and !YES! I’m still in the middle of M. John Harrison’s short bloody story collection. This will probably continue forever. Argh argh argh.

War - the fiction and the reality

2010-03-24T12:06:00.005Z

Books I’ve recently read have so far failed to captivate me. I just finished The Forever War and something about it left me cold. The ending also seemed like a bit of a wishful cop out. One might argue that I have little endurance for your more military sci-fi, but I wouldn’t say that’s true. I read John Scalzi’s Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades not too long ago and enjoyed them immensely. So… I’m still undecided about why The Forever War failed to have any kind of impact. It wasn’t the serious indictment of war that people have made it out to be, and it wasn’t much of anything else, either. The concept was fascinating – a man can keep coming back to his home planet between war campaigns to find that hundreds of years have passed and everything about him is now incomprehensibly ancient. But I found these bits between the military campaigns far more interesting to read than the campaigns themselves. This might all have been deliberate – war is boring, complicated and messy, and there are no straight answers – but it just didn’t feel as clever as that. Feel free to curse my very existence as punishment for such affrontery.

All of this segues nicely on to something buzzing briefly around my brain, and which I realised I’ve never really talked much about, even though it was probably one of the most important incidents in my life. Edwin Starr’s War came on my Ipod yesterday as I was making my way home. Every time I listen to this song I have but one very distinct memory – the day I joined in the March in London against the war in Iraq.

I was but a student at the time, and certainly more idealistic than I am now. Students got to travel down free, as I recall, with trains put on specially for the occasion. A group of us went down together in the morning. I was nervous, actually. I’d never been on a march before. Everyone was chattering and laughing – there was no gloomy seriousness pervading the carriage, but as I think on it I’m persuaded that the noise was due to tension rather than excitement.

We needn’t have worried. When we got there and joined the main lines snaking through the streets of London, it was like a carnival more than anything else. The emotional impact was overwhelming – like being at a gig. It’s the feeling of being somewhere with thousands of other people who are all in the same place as you, and feeling the same things. It’s a sense of oneness we never get to experience, so when we do it bowls us over. As we marched onward, chanting ourselves silly, we passed people hanging out of their balconies on either side of the street, pumping fists and chanting with us. There were enormous dancing puppets, shaking their thing ahead and behind me, swaying precariously and visible from so far away. One particular block of flats was blasting The Beatles’ All You Need is Love out onto the crowd, and we would sing the song as we approached their spot and could actually hear it – a ripple effect moving all the way down the throng. Those people must have felt good, high on the power to make thousands of people sing a song as they passed.

And of course, War was playing everywhere.
And of course, I was disappointed when this mass movement had no effect on the government’s decision whatsoever. I felt the futility of it keenly. But I can’t forget that feeling of togetherness, that feeling of seemingly the whole of Britain unanimously giving a shit about something. The British don’t do this, you understand. The French march all the time. For them it’s practically a rite of passage as a student. The British, in general, are not easily persuaded into potentially embarrassing action – they prefer to keep inflammatory stuff to themselves. If you argue your opinion or become even a little passionate about something in general conversation, they look at you as if you’re mad. I know. I know that I’m considered an explosive loon by some people who’ve known me, even though to me it’s a normal state of being to argue with passion. I’m not angry or in a bad mood – it’s just… talking, to me!

So believe me when I say that day in British history was a good one. It was an unusual one. Yes, there’ve been marches in England before, but apparently never with such magnitude. The organisers say more than 2 million people marched in London that day; the police play it down and say more like 750,000 (a fairly ludicrous figure, in my opinion). Whoever is right, and we’ll never know, it felt like the entire country to me, and I’ll never forget that overwhelming sensation of so many people giving a shit, in an age when people (including myself) don't.

And the one hope I comforted myself with, afterward, was the hope that people living in Iraq saw just how many of us were against what was being planned for their country. That hopefully, news coverage got through, that people could see on television and the internet what we were trying to communicate to them. That would have made the whole thing worth it.

Top Ten: Nine Inch Nails Songs

2009-12-11T12:03:00.006Z

I realise i don't ever talk about music on this blog, but i love Nine Inch Nails. I really do. Every time i listen to Trent's attractively scratchy voice i am reminded of just how damn talented he is and how his songs pluck at my solar plexus. His lyrics really really need to be listened to, rather than just the songs - not for nothing has he been called 'tortured genius' so many times by the press the term might as well have been invented for him.

These are simply in a loose chronological order, because i could not face the task of pinning down my favourite song. It will, like favourite movies and books, change with my mood. Also note, there are no songs included from Year Zero, Ghosts I-IV and The Slip (which you can download free and legal here), simply because i haven't heard them yet. Pathetic, i know. Call myself a fan, and all that. If anyone wishes to rectify this miserable and embarrassing situation, i would graciously accept your donations.

1) Terrible Lie
Album: Pretty Hate Machine (1989)

Makes me want to sway my butt and screech at the sky.

Sample lyrics:
Hey God
Why are you doing this to me?
Am i not living up to what i'm supposed to be?
Why am i seething with this animosity?
Hey God
I think you owe me a great big apology

Click here to see a damn good live version.

2) Head like a Hole
Album: Pretty Hate Machine (1989)

Makes me want to dance around crazily.

Sample lyrics:
God money, i'll do anything for you
God money, just tell me what you want me to
God money, nail me up against the wall
God money, don't want everything he wants it all

Click here for the song only (no official music video).

3) Something I Can Never Have
Album: Pretty Hate Machine (1989)

Makes me want to sob. Sob.

Sample lyrics:
I still recall the taste of your tears
Echoing your voice just like the ringing in my ears
My favorite dreams of you still wash ashore
Scraping through my head 'till I don't want to sleep
Anymore
You make this all go away
You make this all go away
I'm down to just one thing
And i'm starting to scare myself

Click here for the sublime studio version.

4) Closer
Album: The Downward Spiral (1994)

Yes, that song. Makes me want to dance around sexily.

Sample lyrics (no, not the very rude bits):
You can have my isolation
You can have the hate that it brings
You can have my absence of faith
You can have my everything

Help me; you tear down my reason
Help me; it's your sex i can smell
Help me; you make me perfect
Help me become somebody else

Click here for the controversial, unedited original version of the music video (please don't click if you don't like weird, graphic, explicit stuff. And... don't listen to the song either. The lyrics are also graphic. In this day and age, none of this would be considered particularly bad, but i'm including the disclaimer just in case.)

5) Heresy
Album: The Downward Spiral (1994)

Makes me want to say the lyrics over and over.

Entire lyrics (because they're so damn good):
He sewed his eyes shut because he is afraid to see
He tries to tell me what i put inside of me
He's got the answers to ease my curiosity
He dreamed up a god and called it christianity
God is dead
and no one cares
If there is a hell
I'll see you there
He flexed his muscles to keep his flock of sheep in line
He made a virus that would kill off all the swine
His perfect kingdom of killing suffering and pain
Demands devotion, atrocities done in his name
Your god is dead
and no one cares
Drowning in his own hypocrisy
If there is a hell
I'll see you there
Burning with your god in humility
Will you die for this?

Click here to listen to the song only (no official music video)

6) Hurt
Album: The Downward Spiral (1994)

Makes me want to give up in despair. In a good way. Famously and beautifully covered by Johnny Cash.

Sample lyrics:
What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

Click here to listen to Trent and a piano version (much more beautiful than the album version, in my opinion).

7) The Day the World Went Away
Album: The Fragile (1999)

Makes me want to lie in a darkened room and be transported somewhere beautiful, windswept and sparse.

Entire lyrics:
I'd listen to the words he'd say
But in his voice i heard decay
The plastic face forced to portray
All the insides left cold and gray
There is a place that still remains
It eats the fear, it eats the pain
The sweetest price he'll have to pay
The day the whole world went away

Click here for unreleased music video (except as an easter egg somewhere, i believe).

8) We're in this Together
Album: The Fragile (1999)

Makes me want to create something radical and angry.

Sample lyrics:
well they've got to kill what we've found
well they've got to hate what they fear
well they've got to make it go away
well they've got to make it disappear
the farther I fall I'm beside you
as lost as I get I will find you
the deeper the wound I'm inside you
for ever and ever I'm a part of

Click here for the brilliant, 1984-esque music video.

9) Into the Void
Album: The Fragile (1999)

Makes me want to attempt bodypopping in time with the rhythm. So funky it hurts.

Sample lyrics:
Tried to save myself, but myself keeps slipping away

Click here for music video (song has been edited and cut together slightly differently than the album version)

10) Every Day is Exactly the Same
Album: With Teeth (2005)

Makes me want to throw off this life and do anything that means something.

Sample lyrics:
I believe I can see the future
Cause I repeat the same routine
I think I used to have a purpose
But then again
That might have been a dream
I think I used to have a voice
Now I never make a sound
I just do what I've been told
I really don't want them to come around
Every day is exactly the same
Every day is exactly the same
There is no love here and there is no pain
Every day is exactly the same

Click here for a brilliantly edited music video using Wanted, the movie in which this song appears.

ADDENDUM: I've now listened to the entirety of The Slip and a lot of Ghosts I-IV and all i can do is sigh. If nothing else i should probably do a Top Ten Nine Inch Nails Instrumental Pieces post. The kind of music that you listen to and feel a thousand ideas instantly crowding into your brain, attempting to nest there and breed more ideas. Gah.
Listen to this one to get an idea of what i'm going on about.

True Blood: a mile and a half of entertainment

2009-12-02T23:44:00.003Z

Blood fountains enough to sate the most gruesome of gorehounds.

Sex scenes graphic enough to be mistaken for pornography.

Podgy gay vampires being bled to death in basements for their addictive blood.

Not the sort of stuff to make you laugh out loud, and yet True Blood has the admirable quality of, say, Evil Dead to be both outrageous and funny with it, funny enough that you're mostly amused rather than sickened. I say mostly, because there are times it cuts close to the bone, in a series of calculated moments designed to pull you in amidst the revelry and give a damn about the characters. It's a great show that has you rooting for people that couldn't be less black and white. Every single character in there has at least one skeleton or three, and they all display rather off-putting sides to their personalities. Of the 'good' people, one is a caustic (and hilariously witty) bitch with an awful alcoholic mother who seems to have damaged her beyond repair, her cousin is a drug dealer who seems to have no shame or holds barred when it comes to making money, and another is a fairly stupid soon-to-be drug addict who seems to have an innate talent for getting in over his head and being quite awful to his sister, the only person who probably gives a crap about him.

It's addictive stuff, much like the vamp blood or V that everyone seems to be either dealing or getting high on. And finally, if that wasn't enough to whet your appetite, how about this?

**If you are of a faint-hearted disposition, don't click that link. I mean it. Don't do it.**

Blog redesign part deux

2009-11-30T15:48:00.001Z

So if you notice the images on the right hand sidebar?

Yeah. I'm kind of into the homemade look. I haven't yet reached the heights of patience/time on my hands/ability with photoshop to clean them up properly, so i'm persuading both myself and you that they actually look nice like that.

With me so far? Jolly good.

Blog redesign and promises of reviews

2009-11-27T14:57:00.006Z

Right, folk, this is the best I can do 'til I get my hands on photoshop gear to make a decent header and do something about the horribly blocky sidebar photos. Clearly I simply messed with the HTML until it resembled something I preferred. Clearly also my subconscious has chosen to go with a decidedly more sci-fi look. Hmm. This was unplanned, which goes to show what happens when you start digging in your code with only a vague idea of what you want to achieve. Suffice it to say it semi-pleaseth me for now.

Soon will be back on the straight and narrow with more reviews on the way (including the new Star Trek movie which I've already seen but have now acquired on DVD and must watch again to refresh).

p.s what the frig has happened to Blogger in Explorer? I can't do a damn thing with it. It won't let me copy or paste and its idea of image placement is kind of a joke.
Technology rant fini.

Twin Peaks

2009-11-26T22:07:00.004Z

.... getting there.

In the meantime, how about this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36_vlZha7bg

God, this stuff is genius.

Blog redesign

2009-11-26T17:13:00.003Z

OH MY GOD. Life is very difficult when you don't have photoshop at home.

If you've happened upon this blog today, probably in some midway state of horrifying clashing colours and bizarrely placed sidebars, i apologise. This is going to take me a little longer than i thought....

2009-11-26T14:47:00.002Z

Things on my mind today

2009-11-25T18:20:00.006Z

Ginger and honey ice cream is frigging delicious, with the added advantage that you can fool yourself into thinking that what you’re eating is healthier than regular ice cream.

6 people complain about an advert and it’s enough to make national news. What’s the deal? Nothing much happening in the world today? That would be quite a thing to claim. Personally, I think Noemie prancing in her pants is the best bit. Does that make me sexist? If so…. do I care? Does anyone? Aren’t there more important things to think about?

I’m trying to get through a collection of M. John Harrison stories, and have been trying now for several weeks. I genuinely think he’s a brilliant writer, but reading him for any length of time has the unfortunate effect of persuading you that you’ll probably end your days in a bedsit in Hackney, rolling around in the turgid grime of four hundred years, consulting fat pasty demons that smell of stale clothes, drinking pale PG tips diluted with rat wee and wondering about how best to kill yourself. Slowly.

True Blood is actually getting kind of depressing – alcoholic mothers and drug addicts and kindly grannies getting stabbed forty times in the chest. Until Jason Stackhouse shows up, that is, who’s just about the most hilariously stupid character I’ve ever seen in a tv show.

It’s amazing what a bit of exercise does for your mood. It’s also amazing how difficult it is to get your rounding behind doing it in the first place.

Red nail polish really is the most flattering colour.

Writing something purely for the cynical reason that it’ll probably make you money, or at least get looked at for two seconds longer than the stuff you usually like to write, is harder than you might think. A lot of other people seem to manage it rather well. How irritating.

Book Review: The Immortals Series

2009-11-25T17:28:00.011Z

So I'm going to ignore the long gap between posts and pretend it doesn't exist, and hopefully you will too.

Moving on!

Tamora Pierce – The Immortals Series
I absolutely fell in love with these books when I was about twelve, mostly for the reason that the main character, Daine, had a power I had secretly craved for ever since I could remember – she could talk to animals. In later books she can also shapeshift into them, something I wanted to be able to do so badly as a child I actually used to have recurring dreams about it.
I’ve re-read them recently, knowing that I would find them averagely written and somewhat puerile at times (yes, I know they’re aimed at a YA audience, but must hold up a hand and state firmly, through much experience, that it is certainly possible to write childrens’/YA books that adults can read without feeling like they should in fact be regressing backward in order to stop wincing at the writing).
And indeed, they have some faults, which I shall attempt to dissect here with the cunning use of my much favoured bullet point list:

* ‘Splainy time’: a tendency for large chunks of action to take place to one character and then for the narrative to halt for a moment while a sentence is chucked in that sounds something like ‘she explained what had just happened to X hastily while they prepared to give chase.’
Really?
She explained everything that had just happened to her to the other guy in a succinct and informed manner, with enough detail so he now knows as much as the readers and we can now all happily carry on the story together?
This is amateurish and reminds me of Dan Brown, who has the wonderful habit (among his many other attributes as a writer) of having characters expose large amounts of plot and backstory to another character whilst in a car chase or on the run or being shot at. This just wouldn’t happen. It hurts to visualise it. It mocks the framework of storytelling. If you’re going to present me with a story and ask me to believe in it, don’t then kick my belief in the cojones with a crappy write-off like that.

* ‘cos they’re my fwiends’: a tendency for almost all of the animals Daine communicates with to be eager and willing to do so. As Pierce has taken pains to point out in the story, all the animals Daine encounters have minds and personalities of their own. Why would it then follow that they all give a crap about what she has to say? She manages (mostly without using her magic, but simply by asking) to convince entire hoards of them to pay attention to her and then risk their lives by attacking naughty invading humans, when they could simply go somewhere else where two leggers aren’t offing each other left and right, and are in fact leaving the local wildlife in peace.
The only ones that don’t actually like her are the rats. And of course, everyone knows that rats are ugly, shifty buggers, so that fits.

* ‘cutesies animals have cutesies names’: a marmot named ‘Quickmunch’? Wolves called ‘Fleetfoot’ and ‘Frostfur’? A squirrel who goes by the apt ‘Flicker’? Jesus Hesus Christie. Why the craps would animals give themselves names like that? Why give themselves names at all? Cos they cutesies animals on the side of good, that’s why. Note the kraken, who helps out the heroes in book 1 but also possesses dubious morals at best, doesn’t call himself ‘Longlegs’ or perhaps ‘Inky’, but is simply referred to as ‘the kraken’. I realise that the point, perhaps, was to give those animals who are a large part of the story more of an individuality by naming them, but please. Why did it have to be names like that? Surely it is possible for a writer to imbue their own characters with personalities without the cutie names?

So; they can be somewhat formulaic and have that stamp of ‘conventional fantasy story’ pressed all over them, but they do also have some nicely fleshed out ideas and really great characters:

Daine: luckily, the main character is an engaging lass, or there’d be some big ass problems. A touch too old for her years, perhaps, but it’s refreshing to see that a fourteen year old can be portrayed as haunted without resorting to gothy mannerisms, as well as possessing of a healthy sexual interest, though this is dealt with in strictly PG terms and doesn’t really come about in full till the last book in the series.
Daine is a practical sort and disgustingly talented; as well as possessing magic so unusual it’s seen as a myth by most, she can also shoot any bow you give her and has survival abilities enough to make Ray Mears chew off his own paws with envy. Handy, since she spends most of her time living off the land or fending off determined and well-armed invaders. She grows believably throughout the books, though seems able to absorb rather crazy things happening to her without much of a problem SPOILER (e.g. oh dear, I seem to be in another dimension where my mother is alive and my father, previously unknown, is actually a god).

Ozorne: only talked about in the first two books, we actually get to meet the fearsome M. Bison of the series, the blinking annoying Emperor who keeps attacking everyone. Cannily, the exploration of his character is rather well rounded, so much so that your viewpoint of him shifts between ‘perhaps not so bad after all’ and ‘crazier than Patrick Bateman’ every time someone has a conversation with him. Even when he does something a touch chilling, we’re still expecting him to turn out okay in the end, or at least be slightly agonised by his own amorality because of that seed of uncertainty Pierce plants in your mind from our very first meeting with him. But no – he does indeed reveal himself to be your finest A grade lunatic, deranged enough for even the most demanding of readers. A pity that he becomes so sidelined and one dimensional in the fourth book, then, even though he remains the chief antagonist to the story – the villain that must be overcome.

Despite its somewhat immature faults, I do have a fondness for these books. Perhaps I view them with the glaze of nostalgia - it's hard to shake those tween influences (witness my belief that Type O Negative may be one of the best bands of all time, despite the fact I realise this to be impossible) and perhaps that's what's happened here. But I think, for anyone into YA fantasy, they're well worth a read. They are a little more girl oriented, though there's a lot of delving into weaponry (archery, in particular) and survival tactics, which I found to be some of the most interesting parts of the writing, which may suit the boy folk. All in all, some nice ideas.

3/5. YA tween magic, with a lot more death and archery than one might think. Yay then.

Updates

2009-05-28T10:43:00.003+01:00

In a bid to quiet the many voices who say my social networking updates consist almost entirely of posts about what i've eaten/am planning to eat/fantasising about eating, i've decided to reproduce them here.

Silence, minion! This is not a lazy blog post! This is a complex daily insight into the mind of a fertile artist!

When i say fertile, i mean.... someone who writes when they can be arsed.

First up, Facebook:-

Perilously excited by Star Trek movie. Wolverine doesn't look that bad, either (oh god. Help me.) In my defense, it's got Liev Schreiber in it as Sabretooth.

I had forgotten how attractive Clancy Brown was as the Kurgan... yeeaah. It's not wrong.

Phantasm is actually as odd as i remember it being from childhood.

Just had half a custard cake and an almond croissant for breakfast. Yeeeaaaah, well. Never mind.

... and followed that up with a chicken enchilada, two banana milkshakes and a bowl of potato wedges for lunch. Ergh. God. I feel like an unmilked cow.

Trying very hard not to eat any of the donuts and mini muffins perched happily in the kitchen, wiggling their sugary flanks at me.

Spent lunch in glorious sunshine, watching little red robin bounce happily across the grass near my feet. Why can't England always be like this?

Already planning Easter food. PigRoast will feature heavily.

Had four fat baklava in a row earlier and feeling queasy. Have a vague idea that now washing it down with valve-choking greek sausage is perhaps not the way to go. But gonna do it anyway. Such are the sacrifices i make.

Am cutting out sugar from diet. No, is not a wry joke. Is real.

Sugar free diet out the window. Tried to alleviate this afternoon's oddly acute hunger pangs by eating no less than 6 ryvita smothered in butter. Still starving. Went down to machine and got yorkie. Ate yorkie. Felt much better.

In response to last night's fiercesome sugar withdrawal, had greek yoghurt and jam instead of 8 baklava in a row. Feeling pleased.

just done strenuous ballet workout, and therefore feel completely justified about eating a lot tonight.

is having a baby. A curry baby. My belly is quite angry with me.

Ladyhawke, Clueless, then The Cat Returns in a row on film four. Clearly i wasn't meant to get anything done today.

has mucho left over cake from birthday soiree. What's a girl to do? Why, fit as much as possible into her mouth, of course.

Eatin’ cheese.

Gearing up for yurovizyon tonight. How? By making food, bien sur.

can feel the call of the baklava. It sounds like someone trying to sigh lustily through a mouthful of syrup and pastry.

Annnnd..... Twitter:-

worked out how to twitter well; keep it jaunty but confusing. Such as: "Sat with Buggrit's dog. He's as punctilious as ever."

Am now, perhaps overly, curious about Party Seven.

And some Watney's Party Seven, while you're at it.

Still wondering vaguely about Watney's Party Seven.

What?!? Lux Interior is dead?

Have recently realised new tv package includes Sci-fi channel and Zone Horror. Slightly worried may never leave house again.

May just have committed intrusive faux-pas by emailing someone who barely knows me and hasn't heard from me in 3 years for large favour.

Just bought JCVD. Feeling unnaturally excited.

Sheepishly prodding meagre publishing contacts and pointing out that i'm definitely someone they want to spend money on.

Have decided that watching Iggy Pop play a Vorta has to be one of the most surreal experiences of my recent past.

According to a friend, the new Walker’s hoisin duck flavour tastes like fear. This is impressive.

thinking, thinking. Ryanair hostess or Rocker?

Yes! Have found faux leather studded glove as final essential piece to tonight's outfit.

Am contemplating JCVD as tonight's entertainment, but may yet savour possibility and put off until another time to enhance flavour.

The People Under the Stairs is a frigging strange horror film. Makes you feel slightly sick, like eating a four year old werther's original.

JCVD may just be the best frigging film i've seen in my ENTIRE LIFE.

Seriously.

In my life.

I am prone to exaggeration

But still.

It's now the next day, and it's still as good as it was last night, when was still experiencing the flush of first viewing.

A tip: don't ever go to a matinee performance of anything ever again. Especially not at half-term. Well done.

Visiting the hallowed Towers of Alton tomorrow. Shall consume too much sugar and possibly die of organ failure.

One sentence: Rita, Queen of Speed. All hail to thee, my fiendish pile of metal.

Orange and cinnamon tuiles are actually quite difficult to make. And give you wind.

Thoroughly enjoyed Eurotrashion. Not sure how Norway's cutesy High School Musical entry fucked everyone else so resoundingly, though...

Kind of into Simon Baker. In a deeply sex way. I feel odd about it.

If i were gay... i'd definitely be into Estonia's Eurovision entry lead singer.

Had 3 pieces of fruit today in a desperate binge. The entire tub of carrot cake squares i cannily made yesterday is winking at me.

Have tramped the whole of Alderley Edge and can proclaim it beautiful. Except for the irritating teenagers having a barbecue and rapping.

See?!?

Fascinating, isn't it.

*stifle yawn*.

Eurovision 2009

2009-05-20T08:58:00.004+01:00

God i've been slack on the old posting lately. My real life keeps intruding most unfairly. And then whenever i come up with something for a post the bloated guilt node in my brain starts flashing painfully and commands me to actually write something i'm going to try and sell.

Enough of the squawking.

On with the show!

Good old Eurovision. Always a guarantee for fun and laughter, and this year was no exception. A couple of significant changes though to the classic format, which i feel i should mention.

1) Perhaps in response to Wogan's heartfelt disgust at the political block voting that has dominated the contest in recent years, a change to the rules was announced. Now, instead of telephone voting in each country, there would also be a panel of judges, the vote being split equally between the judges and the public. Who these murky judging types were was not revealed to us - not even the UK's own panel, who remain anonymous. Can't blame them, though. You don't want to be known for judging Eurovision, over here.

2) Wogan is gone, no more. In his place we have Graham Norton, who might as well be a young, gay version of Wogan - and that's fine by me. Norton does a wonderful line in caustic bitchery, whilst seeming to actually enjoy commenting on the contest more than Wogan ever did - but give him a few years at it and no doubt the weary cynicism will kick in.

Now, if anyone has ever played any Eurovision drinking game, you'll know how much fun it can be, and how drunk you get if you follow the rules. How many were broken or kept to this year? Answers in bold next to the rule.

This is a small sprinkling of some of the rules you can use in the game:-

Drink if:

Andorra give Spain 12 points true
Cyprus give Greece 12 points true
The Scandinavian countries all give each other high points true
The Balkan countries all give each other high points true
There is one very bad white rapper entry true!
There is one very fat singer entry true
There are at least 3 entries of ethnic dance pop featuring a hot lady in small bits of clothing true
The female presenter changes her outfit during the show true
Any of the songs go up half an octave in the last refrain true

I have to say, i did feel points were spread slightly more fairly than usual - which is probably why the UK did so well. 5th! Well done. Less of the Baltic states fawning all over each other, less of the Balkans tag teaming, less of the Scandinavians slapping each other on the back.
Here's the final results. Next to each entry are, in the spirit of professionalism, the notes i scribbled on them during their performance:-

Norway - High School Musical gypsy violinist with a fairly shit voice. Cute. If you're 12.
Iceland - classy pop ballad plus hideous blue meringue dress.
Azerbaijan - no angels or demons, therefore shit. Will probably win or come in the top 3.
Turkey - flesh-o-rama ethno pop. Will probably do well.
UK - Diva ballad. Good, reliable, safe old Lloyd Webber. Try not to get your eye poked out by a violin bow, however.
Estonia - hot classic chicks with rather nice song. Deserves to come in the top 3. Won't.
Greece - Jesus Hesus Christie. Euro gay techno. Leaping 40 year old man. Greece should be upset by this.
France - Edith Piaf-a-like with crazy vibrato voice. And a very good dress.
Bosnia & Herzegovina - erm. Dull.
Armenia - hand twisty ethno beats plus heavy eyeliner. Nice.
Russia - good aging video. Bad song.
Ukraine - eurgh.
Denmark - Scandinavian Ronan Keating. Seriously. He must have won their version of Stars in their Eyes.
Moldova - rocking ethno with a nice beat. Won't do well - no half naked chicks.
Portugal - points for use of accordion in act.
Israel - dull diva duet - one of them is hot, which will guarantee some points at least.
Albania - disturbing tween flesh-o-rama ethno techno pop.
Croatia - dull trio. Dull ethnic. Dull.
Romania - haven't we both seen and heard this already? Get some ideas.
Germany - 30s retro Cab Calloway styling and Dita von Teese? What the fuck is not to like? The lead singer's silver leggings, if you're asking.
Sweden - opera techno. And a very bad dress.
Malta - fat woman ballad.
Lithuania - classy piano dude. Dull song.
Spain - hot woman. Generic balls.
Finland - there's always one, and Finland was this year's white rapper entry. Fuck me.

And there you have it. Good fun had by all.
What's that, you say? My top three? The three best acts of the competition, in my opinion? Without laughing?
K.
1) Estonia. If they release an album, i might actually buy it. I'm serious.
2) Moldova. They did ethnic in an original fashion, without being generic or taking a lot of clothes off, and they were cool.
3) If i'm honest, Germany. But only because of the retro fashion of the song. Talent wise, France. That well-dressed lady can sing. Weirdly. But well.

Top Ten: Films that have left a psychological scar

2009-04-28T10:04:00.007+01:00

When I say this, I don’t just mean out and out horror. I mean a film that affects you so profoundly, you are left with a physical sensation of having being punched in the gut. The kind of films you don’t really ever want to see again because that sensation of gut-punched is not the pleasantest.

Spoilers abound.

1. Happiness
Dylan Baker gives the performance of a lifetime as a paedophile. The film is filled with squeamish scenes, but the one near the end when Baker’s 10 year old son confronts him about what he is, made me feel physically ill. Never again will I watch this. It’s upsetting to the point of extreme.

2. Schindler’s List
Maybe a rather too obvious choice to some, I still cannot get over how disillusioned about the human race this made me feel as a young teenager. Far too overwhelming in its ability to make you ask how, why people can do this to each other. I felt such acute misery at the end of this, I thought my heart would break.

3. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The girl runs screaming out of the door and to freedom, escaping from that nightmarish house right quick. Yes! Yes! You think. She’s out! Movie convention dictates that she is home free! Look, her feet are off the porch! Totally home free! Then Leatherface appears, as enormous and clumpy as Frankenstein’s monster, takes two strides, scoops her up and carries her back inside. Then he impales her on a hook. You can feel it going into your back. She’s still crying, except now she’s making wet, gurgling noises. Oh god. Oh god. This film feels like a disease that will infect you if you don’t stop watching it.

4. The Orphanage
Anything involving children is usually shit scary, but never has it been done to such great effect as in this (apart from possibly The Shining). The real, nauseous unpleasantness comes when the mother realises that those terrifying banging and crying noises she’s heard in the night are from her son…. who was still alive whilst he was making them. Suddenly, the most upsetting thing about the film is not the scary ghost children but the fact that she unknowingly killed her own son. Horrified sob-inducing.

5. The Green Mile
“John Coffey, suh. Like the drink, only s’not spelled duh same.”
Everything that happens to John Coffey is such a violation of natural law, it makes you feel sick and wrong inside. The horrific execution scene was one of the most excruciating things I’ve ever watched. You don’t really believe they’ll go through with it. They can’t. They know what he is. There’ll be a reprieve. Or Tom Hanks will turn around and tell the execution audience that he can’t do it, and throw his cap down, or something. But no. They go through with it, alright. One look at Barry Pepper’s crumpled, tear-stained face spears you to your seat. Coffey’s hoarse singing as the lever comes down: “Heaven…. I’m in Heaven….”
The idea of justice not only ceases to exist, it is mercilessly crapped on. Another illusion torn down.

6. Blair Witch Project
There has been so much merciless parodying of this film that it’s easy to forget how stomach churning it is to watch. If you can get past the nausea-induced handheld camera business (I personally have no problem with that stuff), it’s harder to get over so many terrifying scenes. People will automatically jump to the conclusion, with that enigmatic shot of someone standing in the corner of the room, but I personally find the night scene with the crying voices outside the tent fucking horrific. The whole thing is so real, even the act of them getting lost in the woods in daylight is heightened to awful levels of trauma. I did not enjoy watching one moment of this film. In a testament to its power, I have never watched it again. Despite numerous opportunities. I have always declined.

7. Blue Velvet
The first film to show me just how sick and awful sex can be. Dennis Hopper is always a merciless scene chewer, which was used to great effect for this character. What a nightmare. The sort of person who makes you pray fervently that you never meet anyone like him. Other serial killers would merely, say, rape and dismember you, but Frank would damage you as much as possible first. And really enjoy it.

8. Heavenly Creatures
This film is generally a pretty odd feeling one, dealing as it does with that surreal, magical time of pubescence when your body tingles with violent emotion. Obsessional isn’t the word. So the story of the friendship between two girls sits uncomfortably with you anyway. Of course, when they decide to murder the mother of one of them so they can stay together, that’s something else. But the really horrible part, which I had never seen on film before, is what happens when you hit someone over the head and don’t manage to kill them right away. Instead you damage their brain and they stagger around making the kind of groaning noise that you didn’t even think could come from a human mouth. So you have to hit them again. And again. And again. And that is the kind of sound that will stay with you forever. Never, for me, has murder been so realistically represented on film.

9. Un Chien Andalou
It’s just fucking weird. What you might expect from Bunuel and Dali, the front runners of the surrealist movement. But that now famous eye-slicing scene still makes me wretch to my soul. It doesn’t matter that I now know it’s a cow’s eye. It’s a razorblade! Slicing! Into an eye! Really actually! No special effects here! They’re really doing it!

10. Funny Games
Aside from the intellectual points it makes, about people’s complicity in extreme violence, getting through this film feels like you’re coming down with the flu. Shivering and achey. There’s simply no redeeming feature about it at all. It doesn’t matter how much you love your family, how determined you are to survive, how resourceful you can be, how much you beg or what you offer to do to stay alive; those two boys don’t care. And worse… it’s just a game to them. Psychopathy in all its fine glory. They’re like the child you were, playing with your toys, making your He-Man chop your Dinosaur with his plastic sword until you make believe the Dinosaur is dead. That’s the level of reality that this holds for them. There’s nothing in this world that fucks a human being up more than being shown the minute level of their significance.

In which we Top Ten everything - literary villains

2009-04-15T11:58:00.005+01:00

In true copycat fashion, and because I am too intellectually lazy to come up with an original blog post of my own, I’m following in the footsteps of such greats as Stephen King and Empire in fashioning my very own Top Ten series.

First up: villains of literature.

As with Empire’s sidebar disclaimer, I’m going to have to be specific about it: in other words, i've only included actual villains, as opposed to anti heroes or evillish characters with redeeming qualities. No redeeming qualities here, thank you. No supernatural or otherworldly characters have been included, and some choices may make you go ‘whaaaaat’? because you’ve seen the movie version of the book, in which said character was about as villainous as Mary Goodshine. Keep in mind, I’m talking about the original literary version; movie villains is a different list that I may just tackle next. If you're good.

In no particular order:-

Jack Torrance (The Shining)

Murderous freak is an understatement. The whole 'listening to ghosts' thing is a convenient sidebar allowing him to do what he really wants to do; chop up his family into small bits.

Napoleon (Animal Farm)

Fat, cruel and selfish. That he's a pig only underlines the point. I wanted him to die die die so that he could stop fucking everyone for the sake of his own hideous lust for power.

Alec D’Urberville (Tess of the D’Urbervilles)

The ultimate expression of wanting what you can't have. He will do anything to get it, destroying anyone who gets in his way - including the object of his desire. He doesn't even love her; he just wants to possess her. Fucker.

Marquise de Merteuil (Les Liaisons Dangereuses)

Beware the seductive wit and charm of this one; underneath beats the heart of pure evil bitchery. When the one person she loves tires of the sadistic and empty game of life they've chosen to play, she destroys him in every possible way she can think of. Even if she had confessed her love to him and finally allowed herself to be seen as weak, you get the impression she'd have screwed him over the first chance she got.

Shift the Ape (The Last Battle)

What a miserable little shit. One of those characters who is the cause of everything - you spend the book thinking that if only he didn't exist, then none of the misery that transpires would happen and no-one would suffer as much as they do. Stupid but thinks he's clever; greedy and evil in that aimless sort of way that comes from being selfish, which is somehow much worse than pure evil.

O’Brien (1984)

There's nothing else that grips your heart with cold numb fear than being at the mercy of someone who is so psychopathic that he couldn't give less of a shit if you, his mother, eighty small children and four bunnies died screaming in front of him. Quoth he:-

'Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.'

Great.

General Woundwort (Watership Down)

Terrifying in his brutal physicality and almost sexually attracted to sadism, the world he wants to create is one of absolute obedience or death. Having your ears ripped open is the least of your problems when he's around. Never have rabbits been so freaking scary.

Rune (Duncton Wood)

Insidious and far too clever. The kind of character who will start poisonous rumours about someone just so he can watch them eventually be lynched by their own friends. Made more disturbing by his overtly sexual desire to possess and destroy innocence, in the form of Rebecca. Makes you feel slimy reading about him.

Steerpike (Gormenghast)

Ambitious is hardly the word. At first you reluctantly root for him as the underdog trying to make it to the top. Then you start feeling a bit repulsed by his methods. Then you really start to fear him when you read what he does to Cora and Clarice. Shudder. A loathsome little beast.

Patrick Bateman (American Psycho)

Far more likable in the film version where the most likely reaction you have to his character is to be rather entertained by him. Not so in the book. The scene with the homeless man made me cry, i was so disturbed by it. Intersperse horrifically graphic murder with long, dull essays on bad eighties pop singers and you come out of the whole experience intensely aware that you've been in the presence of someone so mentally off the wall he might as well be alien.

Nearly made it:-

Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights)

His love for Cathy saves him from complete evil, as his villainy mainly stems from his all-consuming obsesssion with her.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Perfume)

Erm... i just kind of admired him too much to put him in the list. I am aware that this is a bit of an odd reaction.

In which we make Spaghetti Bolognese

2009-03-30T22:15:00.008+01:00

It's been a while since my last food post, so i thought i would start things rolling again with a quick run through of one of my staples; spag bol, as it is so delightfully shortened to here in Blighty.

It's frigging easy to make, even for a seasoned fool such as i, and always tasty. Plus the 'extra' ingredients can vary according to what you happen to have lying about the place: for my purposes, they usually consist of red pepper, carrot and celery. If you have a Mediterranean living in the house, you'll find that you always have tinned tomatoes and pasta in the cupboard. And if you have (more specifically) a Greek living in the house (such as i) you'll find, sometimes to your surprise, seemingly inexhaustible supplies of oregano, beef, olive oil and feta, which i'll admit is now my favourite cheese to have with... well, most things. Pasta dishes, certainly.

These are the laughably small array of ingredients you will need for two:-

To whit, and from left to right:- salt and pepper, red wine, olive oil, garlic powder (the shame! this was pre-garlic crusher, though, which i now have and use gleefully), beef stock (about 200ml-300ml; just make up a cube of 450ml and use as appropriate) 1 red pepper, oregano, 2 cans 400g tinned tomatoes, 1 celery, 1 carrot, 1 onion. You'll notice that neither the beef nor the pasta are herewith represented. That's because, like a singular fool, i decided to take photos halfway through cooking, so the beef is already sizzling nicely away in the pan. And the pasta i just... forgot. For your purposes, though, about 250g beef should do it, and this much

pasta. We use wholewheat because we're middle class. And because it's good for, you know, roughage. 2 cups should do it. Don't fill to the top. This may be too much pasta for some (but not for the Boy, ho! no), so scale back a bit if you wish.

Right. Chop your onion, carrot, red pepper and celery up; carrot and onion can be diced, celery sliced into small chunks. Although i prefer big bits of onion myself, so i tend to chop it haphazardly for different sizing.

Heat a bit of olive oil (for 'bit' read 'about a tablespoon'. I used to hate recipes/people that were vague about quantities of even the tiniest things, until i actually started cooking daily, and then i realised you just kind of guess. Enough to oil up whatever is going in the pan, not enough to coat your throat with olive slime).

Chuck in onion, carrot and celery on a medium heat (add 2 crushed/chopped garlic cloves here if you're a good person. If not, guiltily sprinkle in a bit of garlic powder. A little tends to go a long way with powder. No more than a level teaspoon, i'd say). Brown everything for about 10 minutes until nice and soft.

Separate your mince as much as possible with your fingers whilst sprinkling into the pan. Add chopped red pepper with mince and fry together for a short while, stirring occasionally until meat is brown.

Generously pour in red wine. As much as you like. Clearly not half a bottle, though. I'd say half a small wine glass at most for this little meal for two.

Now add your two cans of tomatoes, about 100ml of stock, salt and pepper, and a half a jug of oregano. Kidding. But you can never have too much, i say. Bring the whole lot to the boil, and then reduce the heat to let it simmer away.

Oh, my.

There's just no need for this sauce, madam.

Cover your pan while simmering, i'd say for a good 20-30 minutes. Then uncover and check your liquid level. If everything is looking a bit dry, put a tiny bit of stock in, just enough to unstick it all. But it shouldn't be. If anything it should be a case of trying to get rid of some liquid. In which case, open it up. Let it be free. It should become a thick mass of tastiness.

While all this is going on, bring your pasta to the boil until al dente (read 'sort of hard and soft at the same time'). If you like your pasta softer, then go to it, i say.

Serve with sprinkled chunks of feta.

Rowr.

Look at how shininess of meat sauce offsets matte creaminess of feta. Rawwggh.

I stop now.

Film review: Watchmen

2009-03-16T16:07:00.002Z

There are two ways Watchmen can be reviewed:

* from the point of view of someone who has read the comic, and
* from the point of view of someone who hasn’t.

This could supposedly be argued for any film derived from recognisable, successful source material, but it is even more true of something like Watchmen, where the comic on which it is based is usually described with such tiresome words as ‘seminal’ ‘genius’ and ‘landmark’. And I think it is fair to say, with such a close adaptation as this, that if you’ve read the comic, it would be very difficult to be able to see the film from the viewpoint of someone who hasn’t. As words of warning, then; my viewpoint is firmly in the ‘yes I have read the comic book’ camp.

Off we go!

1) This is one of the most slavish film adaptations I’ve ever seen. It is something of a double-edged sword; while in many respects a good thing, the things that I didn’t like about the comic book, I inevitably didn’t like about the film.
Such as Laurie Juspeczyk, otherwise known as the Silk Spectre. To me she’s the character with the least redeeming qualities. Yes, yes, whatever, try not to cry with disbelief because it’s true. She’s such an annoying fuck up.
**spoiler** This is why I hate Manhattan’s decision to come and rescue the previously ant-like mortals at the end, because she is the one who convinces him. He looks at her and sees all the beautiful possibility of human life, the endless permutations that have produced her and only her. As a concept, this is great and all, but really…. her? He looks at her and sees the stunning originality of the human race? She’s an insipid idiot! That bodes well for the rest of us, doesn’t it? Malin Akerman’s performance was fine, she gave her the requisite amount of fire and blah diddly blah, but the character is still sucks buns.

2) Performances all round were very decent, and the most pleasing thing about the film. Most were utterly convincing as real, complicated people with a strange compulsion to dress up as superheroes, a need that they struggle to understand. Standouts: Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach was absolutely mesmerising, but the best performance was from a gently podgy Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl. A less meaty part than some of the others, he managed to convey more multiple levels with his character, at once nostalgic, pathetic, heroic and cowardly. I really need to see Little Children.

3) Zach, my man. You need to reign in this orgasmic love of slow motion action scenes. Remember, like dijon mustard, a little goes a long way. The taste of anything good becomes dull after you’ve pasted it across the entire screen forty times in two and a half hours.

4) Be warned: there are some bits in this that will make small chunks of half digested popcorn rise back up your throat. It is an 18, by the way. So, SO glad Snyder decided to keep the gore in. The exploration of violence wouldn’t be the same without it. It’s no good sanitising these superheroes; if he had, no-one would realise how freaking psychotic they all are.

5) Some reviewer somewhere on the net was bleating about how the soundtrack was ‘too cool’ and the film was trying too hard with its deliberate use of hip music. Get over it. It worked.

6) There was some strange pacing along the way; some inconsequential shots of characters walking, for example, were stretched out past their prime for no discernible reason. Usually in this respect it’s used to slow the action down, but because I noticed it, that kind of means that the action didn’t need slowing down. This only happened a couple of times.

7) **spoiler** The contrasting sex scenes between Laurie and Dan were well played. The first was an exquisite exercise in impotent humiliation; the second was apparently supposed to be the romantic version, where Nite Owl can finally get it up because he’s just played the hero, and thus this seems to be what revs his engine. Strange then, that the music chosen completely undermined it and made it seem funny. If this wasn’t the intention, then… bad choice. If it was, I’m glad, because even in the comic I could never believe in the sexual relationship between these two people. Probably because of Laurie ‘whiny 2-D’ Juspeczyk.

8) Another thing I’ve seen knocking about the reviews-iverse is much commenting on Dr. Manhattan’s glowing blue genitalia. Really? Is this even worth making a point about unless you’re fourteen and still flush and giggle uncontrollably when you see naked people on a screen? He’s naked. Wouldn’t it have been a little weirder if he was smooth, or they put a fuzzy circle over his groin? I can’t help but think this is some prudish, cultural thing that I don’t get. So…. a man’s arms are sawn off and he wanders around screaming with spurting stumps, yet the blue penis is what gets a shocked mention?

9) Alan Moore apparently said (quick disclaimer: entirely mis-summarised by me, I’m sure) that he couldn’t imagine a Watchmen film, simply because the comic book only reveals its wonderful levels of detail on repeated readings, and with a comic you can also skip back and forth between pages and storylines to remember or check up on something. While in a sense this is true, Alan…. erm.... this is what DVDs are for. It’s called ‘watching films you have on DVD more than once’, and a little device named ‘chapters’.

10) I agree that the comic book is a different form to cinema, with its own merits and disadvantages. I don’t agree that this is reason enough not to adapt one art form into another. The form will always change with the medium, that’s inevitable; Snyder has tried very hard, however, to bypass this issue and literally pick the book up and plant it on the screen. Tried, and whilst not completely successful, neither is it any near a failure. I think, just like the comic book from whence it comes, it will prove itself admirably on repeated viewings. And in the end, aren’t some of the greatest films the ones that get better the more you watch them?

3.5 / 5.
I can only give it this much because the comic, for me, was 3 / 5. (try not to die with shock; yes I’m talking to you, the fervent Alan Moore geek who thinks that he shits gold). The .5 is for the sheer effort that has gone into making this the best possible adaptation it can be.

In which we mull over the interesting discoveries we’ve made recently about writing

2009-03-13T12:36:00.002Z

1) The trouble with writing weary, miserable characters is that it’s wearying and miserable to write them, so you very often don’t want to do it, especially if you’re generally happy in your own life at the time.

2) I've read many of Stephen King’s musings on how his characters would come to life for him and seem to decide things about themselves which often surprised him and which he swore he felt he had no involvement in. I love The King, but I used to secretly laugh at such guff, thinking it not much more than the product of an over-active imagination. This was until recently, when a minor secondary character suddenly decided, without any apparent input from me, that he would be much more important and mysterious than I had at first conceived him, and thus merit his own storyline, which I had not yet written. This is after I had completed the book. Furthermore, he informed me, he would also be making an appearance in the second book, which I definitely hadn’t originally planned at all, and perhaps even several books after that if he felt like it, and if I was successful enough.
Hmm.

3) Having someone else who has read your book talk to you about your characters is an unsettling experience. I mean, talk about them as if they are real and not just squatting listlessly inside your head forever. It’s even stranger when said person discusses their personality traits with you and those traits are the same traits you think they have, too. It makes them more real than you think they have a right to be. It also makes you uneasy about leaving them stuck in your head and not disseminating them into other people’s via the means of publishing. Think about it. You wouldn’t want several other personalities in your head, sitting there idly and getting more and more alive, would you? *

4) Writers are generally fairly abnormal.

5) Books are life. **

* This does not make me insane.

** As is food, relationships, sleep, films, music and disillusionment.

In which i talk about myself.

2009-02-26T16:32:00.002Z

Instead of a real post, i thought i'd put up a couple of these questionnaires that do the rounds a lot. Because i can, as it's my blog. CORRECT.

As we all know, people are generally quite narcissistic, and it seems i'm no exception. Who knows if these are even interesting? But. Eh. I haven't seen Watchmen yet and i've nothing else to say until that seminal event.

Oh. Apart from.... the first book is finished and i've moved on to book 2.

Off we go!

Music stuff

1)The first record you ever bought?
Errr… it was probably a Now compilation but I’m going to go with the one I hope it is, which is Nevermind by Nirvana.

2)The song that led to your first popstar crush?Can’t say I’ve ever been attracted to a popstar. Friends would moon over Gary Barlow, I’d be busy making up fantasies about Gary Oldman. There aren’t any I like these days, either; or none that could be accurately described as a ‘popstar’.

3) The song that reminds you of your first true love?
‘How soon is Now?’ by The Smiths

4) A song that's guaranteed to make you dance?
Good lord, there are thousands. An absolute guarantee? Anything by Chuck Berry. ‘Love Man’ by Otis Redding.

5)Your favourite holiday track?
Depends what kind of holiday.

6)The song you'd most like to sing on stage?
Probably either ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ by Queen, or ‘Chain of Fools’ by Aretha Franklin.

7)The most embarrassing record you ever bought?
‘Spaceman’ by Babylon Zoo? That’s fairly embarrassing. There’s a few.

8)The one song you wish you'd written?
A million. Most songs by The Beatles.

9)The best guitar riff ever.
Thousands. Depends on my mood. For kicks I’ll say ‘Holy Wars...The Punishment Due’ by Megadeth :D. Otherwise… Guns ‘n Roses, Metallica, Type O Negative, the list is long. And I can’t be bothered.

10)Your favourite love song?
‘Wild Horses’ by The Rolling Stones.

11)The track that reminds you of your best mates?
‘Friday I’m in Love’ by The Cure, ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ by Toploader.

12)A singer or band you really shouldn't like but do?
Girls Aloud. I know.

13)A singer or band that really has no merit whatsoever, and frankly you'd rather take a chunk out of a diseased dog's leg covered in urine than have to listen to their songs?
Westlife, i'd say.

Okay, so i made the last one up. But it's a good question. Onward!

More music stuff

1. Put your favourite media player on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS!

IF SOMEONE SAYS "IS THIS OKAY" YOU SAY?
Put Yourself in My Place

WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Digging Your Scene

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Rape Me (oh no. I swear this is the one that came up)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
The Hunter

WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
Find Love

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
…A Dish Best Served Coldly

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Mondo Generator

WHAT IS 2+2?
Catamaran

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Sittin’ on Top of the World

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Sunshine of Your Love

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
Deep Inside

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Every Little Thing She Does is Magic

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
Trapped Under Ice

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
Talk Show on Mute

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
The Show Must Go On

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
I’m Going Slightly Mad

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Hand Held in Black and White

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
High Voltage

WHAT'S THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN?
Live to Win

HOW WILL YOU DIE?
Fat Bottomed Girls (Jesus. H. Christ.)

WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
Gospel Plow

WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
Should I Stay or Should I Go?

WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
The Sun Always Shines on TV

DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
April Showers

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
Cryochamber

WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
What’s Behind the Mask

Film review: JCVD

2009-02-16T12:02:00.002Z

And...... OFF we go.

Just in case you have no idea what this is... click here.

1) If you have ever had any affection for Van Damme, you will feel vindicated and no longer slightly embarrassed. If you haven’t, you’ll be taken aback by proof that he can actually act.

2) This is not just about showcasing Van Damme; the direction and cinematography are very engaging, and the characters around him (specifically the psychotic long-haired robber, the much loved Zinedine Soualem) are interesting and well-rounded. Kudos specifically to the director, who comes across as skillful and one to watch.

3) Usually, post-modern deconstructions of truth and artifice hack me off. Strangely, in this case, it really does work. If you know anything about Van Damme’s personal life (I didn’t particularly), you’ll recognise that at least some of the ‘truths’ in the film are ‘true’; he did have a custody battle for his child, and he went into rehab for addiction to cocaine. But you end up not caring what they’ve changed from his life and what they’ve used, because it all seems real. This version of Van Damme that we see is a real version of him and the facts end up not mattering. This is impressive.

4) He still has enormous muscles.

5) If I had an agent like that, I would strangulate him.

6) The pot shots at certain people (John Woo, Steven Seagal) are more funny than they should be. Normally I don’t condone this sort of thing (oh, hell yes. I do. In-jokes always amuse) but when he mentioned the lopping of Seagal’s pony tail, I couldn’t help it. It was fucking funny. It probably wouldn’t be so funny if I didn’t find Seagal such an uncharismatic chump.

7) !!!Spoiler!!! The revealing monologue, if you know about it beforehand as I did, really is as good as you hope it could be. I’d heard how they’d done it, lifting him out of the action with set lights behind him, and felt the lightest touch of a shudder. But it really is incredible. The artifice of the background only serves to highlight how real his monologue might be. He’s lifted himself out of the film for a moment to talk directly to you, the audience, about himself. It’s incredibly moving. The best thing about it is that it doesn’t feel like justification, nor righting any wrongs he thinks the world has done him, by exposing the real him. He does expose the real him, and he’s ultimately as flawed as you think he is, and he knows it. As he says, “I'm just a regular guy… I still ask myself today what I've done on this Earth. Nothing! I've done nothing.”

Ultimately, if you’re a Van Damme fan, you’ll be delighted with this film. If you’re not, you’ll be taken aback at the possibilities it opens for his career. It may appear, in earlier posts, that I’m biased in favour of the man, but I’ve tried to be as objective as possible. I can’t think of a single negative about the film, but nor can I justify giving it five stars, simply out of guilt that I’m over compensating from relief that it’s as good as it should be. See and judge for yourself.
4/5

In which we discover the horrifying truth behind the ipod shuffle function

2009-02-04T12:06:00.001Z

There’s something extraordinarily depressing about the ipod shuffle function, and I suspect this has largely contributed to my growing spiritual malaise.
Allow me to fill you in.

The shuffle function is the most perfect, everyday representative of coincidence. Coincidence, we are told, is the universe being random, shoving in our faces the refutation of all things pre-determined, and therefore, the notion of a higher power. There is no fate, says Coincidence smugly. No destiny, nothing supernatural nor extraordinary about the world you live in. You are alone, you Godless nothing, and you shall die alone.

Witness, then, coincidence within the shuffle function of your garden variety ipod. Twice now, in the 3 or 4 years I’ve had mine, it has played first one a-Ha song, and then another, from a completely different album, one after the other. It has also played two songs in a row as they appear on an album (e.g. once it played Smells like Teen Spirit and then In Bloom from Nirvana’s seminal Nevermind album). Some might even say the ipod can sense your mood and shuffle songs accordingly; perhaps it feels heightened body vibrations coming from your ears which means that today you are angrier than usual. Accordingly it plays some Sex Pistols as an entrée, followed by a soupcon of Pixies at their most pissed off, and rounds off with a sorbet of Type O Negative to bring you nicely back down. And some days, it plays 95 songs in a row that you don’t really like DELIBERATELY, because it’s in a bad mood.

You could choose to believe this, if you were a loon. Unfortunately the more balanced of us are forced to admit that an ipod is an inanimate object with no artificial intelligence (unless Apple are running some kind of conspiratorial experiment on the world, in which case, Apple PLEASE READ VARIED SCIENCE FICTION STORIES TO SEE HOW BADLY THIS COULD END) . And marching on from that conclusion, we are then forced to admit that sometimes extraordinarily coincidental things which happen with the shuffle function, are simply random and meaningless and have no purpose or life.

You see where I’m going with this.

In which i post on some era-specific nonsensica

2009-01-30T14:35:00.003Z

Today i have learned that:-

1) Jessica Simpson is apparently fat

2) No-one can agree on whether drinking 8 glasses of water a day is a fucking dumb idea or the only way you'll survive to your next birthday

3) Cereal chocolate cake things are alarmingly edible

4) It is, in fact, okay to do no work

5) I really wish i could write space opera

6) People do not tend to share my perhaps unnecessary enthusiasm for Shrove Tuesday. A day that officially sanctions eating nothing but pancakes? COME ON.

7) When Angelina Jolie wears a dress backwards, it is cause for world consternation

8) There is a reason why i try not to keep up with the news

9) Small airlines seem to take a positive, nay unabashed delight in trying to fuck you and forcibly extract more money from your protesting bank account by way of charges for hold luggage, breathing, sitting down and the privilege of paying them

10) Britain is basically buggered.

Miscellanea

2009-01-29T14:11:00.002Z

I've recently realised how long it's been since i've done a nice food post, with photos and everything.

For shame, pretender to the throne of greed!

Henceforth this shall be rectified. I plan to bake bake bake this weekend (or just bake). Muffins, i muse, raising my eyes heavenwards in anticipation? Cookies? Cake things?

Whatever. Photographic evidence shall be presented here.

In the meantime..... i have a confession to make. You heard it here first.

I'm kind of into Cute Overload.

Look. Even if a facet of your personality finds itself gooing up inexplicably at the sight of small, rounded mini versions of animals, it does not make you any less frightening and rude. In fact, in FACT, i would say it adds, enhances, nay highlights your bad self. What could be more upsetting, for example? A sadistic dictator that likes to take time out to look at pics of kittehs? Or a sadistic dictator who acts sadistically the same all the time?
SURELY the former. The man who confuses you keeps you on your fearful toes. The predictable man loses his flavour of fright.

Not that i want to be a sadistic dictator. I'm just pointing out that it's okay, nay even positive for my image to visit Cute Overload. Bunday? Cats 'n Racks? Stubbular pawsitude? Come on.

In which we grit our teeth and get the fuck on with it

2009-01-20T16:17:00.006Z

Just finished another read-through of The Book. Less pleasant this time around. More, ‘what the fuck is this piece of crap?’

Still, I gritted my teeth and decided what needed to be added or taken away. Still a couple more scenes to write. At the moment it feels like the kind of book that could be read in a couple of hours, and how disappointing is that? But I’ve had this problem in my head from day one. I am not an epic writer. I cannot produce doorstops. If I ever do, it will be a hard-learned skill. I am in awe of writers who can keep it up for that long. This story is not one of those. Then I methodically remind myself of all the books I’ve read, as short as mine, that have affected me profoundly. Then, after this mental exercise, I haul myself out of the fetid pit of self-doubt and lumber blindly on.

With that out of the way, I give you some lighter stuff.

Jeepers Creepers

1. Rubbish.

2. Well… not completely rubbish. It started out pretty damn fine. Some major conventions broken:
a) no love interest, no blossoming romance or hot sex to give the protagonists a reason for staying alive, just a catty, childish, well-scripted banter between brother and sister
b) no requisite idiot and/or malicious character; the one whose on-screen time you spend hoping for him/her to die messily
c) no cutting of off characters from all forms of help; the two leads frequently managed to get away from the big bad and find themselves in crowds of people, some with guns. Not that any of this helped.

3. *slight spoiler* Cavern of corpses! Yeerrss!

4. Justin Long is funny and watchable. He’s doing a nice line in affable, wide-eyed geek. Let’s hope he breaks away from that soon.

5. Worst let down? The big bad. He blew, loud and hard. Say no more.

It tries to be different, whilst staying true to its slasher roots, and this divisiveness is its downfall. 2/5

The Name of the Wind – Patrick Rothfuss

1. First, if you know your fantasy, you’ll find this deeply unoriginal. If you don’t care, you’ll like it.

2. The writing flows easily and it’s clear we’re in the hands of a great storyteller. Having said that, he’s a little too handy with the clichés, which tend to make me twitch and lose my focus. Sort of like going over a pothole, or similar.

3. He’s got some good humour going and he’s not afraid to mock story conventions. The device is a little obvious but he says it well, so you tend not to mind.

4. The main character is a big fat pompous prick. This is great and also annoying.

5. Unfortunately, there is a section in the second half of the book which has been likened already by other reviewers to Harry Potter. Truthfully, in this post-HP climate, anything with someone going to some sort of school to learn about esoteric arts is going to be likened to Harry. In this case, it’s not an undeserved assessment. The character, like Harry, is extraordinarily good at certain things; like Harry, cultivates a reputation of epic proportions; and like Harry, has several teachers on his side and a couple who despise him; and has two best friends as well as the requisite Malfoyesque arch nemesis. He also seems to get away with an awful lot of shit. Like Harry. Still. If this doesn’t bother you, it’s pretty entertaining.

6. I did come close to tears at one stage. Through, you know, sadness, not agony from bad writing.

This is the first book in a continued storyline, so it does leave you wanting more at the end. It’s not going to change your life, but if you like good storytelling with a strong element of ‘what happens next?’ and a healthy dose of adventure, (kind of like Ha…. Sorry. I’ll stop now) then you’ll enjoy this. 3/5

Film film film

2009-01-14T16:45:00.004Z

Films I have recently seen which mostly sucked, and that I can’t be bothered to write proper reviews about because they sucked that badly:-

XXX 2 – The Next Level
Having not actually seen the first one, I settled down expecting an enjoyably car crash romp, more than a little excited by the prospect of the world’s hardest, most renegade secret agent played by a tubby rapper. Ice Cube did his best to look coolly menacing, but was rubbish. The jokes were lame, and there was a strange scene towards the end which was pretty much ‘hard-ass gang homies helping out their old friend Ice in exchange for the government clearing up some of their, as one of them puts it, “immigration issues”.’

Mission Impossible 2
This film wearies me to the point where I can’t even be arsed to mock it. Me. Mock Queen. That tells you all you need to know. Thandie Newton is wasted and Dougray Scott needs to do something about his career.

The Hive
Can’t tell you much about this one, since I did only watch about 20 minutes of it. That was enough. If you like your B movies lower down the scale (C for Crap, D for Dire, E for Extremely low-budget… and so on. Make some up, it’s fun) then you’ll like this. Probably a TV movie, to be fair, since its production values were on the scale of British drama in the early 90s.

The Grudge 2
The US version. Poor. A couple of nice scares which were the same nice scares as the first film, after that it descended into the murky, fetid waters of unoriginal atmosphere plus alarmingly nonsensical plot. There was also a moment where several people had been ‘grudged’ and resembled the demons from Evil Dead. This would be fine in an Evil Dead film. Watch out for Jennifer "Flashdance" Beals in a disappointingly small role.

And now! Two films I have recently seen which didn’t suck!

Rec
This little Spanish gem was good fun (‘fun’, in my vernacular, means tit-hardeningly scary). Spanish cinema in general is flying high at the moment. This film is one of those that prove the age old, ‘yes it IS possible to do a very good film with a storyline that has been flogged to death and then pissed on’ argument. Zombies in an apartment building, and not even that many. Talented use of darkness and hand-held camera work for that now familiar ‘reality’ feel. And the ‘monster’ at the end actually sickened my stomach, rather than making me roll my eyes in mild disappointment at the bad make up job. Shudder.

In Bruges
This is actually as good as everyone said it is. Skillfull mix of childish comedy and violent tragedy. All three main male characters are complicated, believable and actually likeable, despite being paid murderers, and I was especially impressed with the handling of Ralph Fiennes' Head Gangster. Colin Farrell is a great actor. If he turns in a couple more performances like this, it may just balance out Alexander, for which I still have not forgiven him.
Upsetting and stupid and funny, and very hard to pin down.

Books wise, it’s been fairly dry; Christmas holidays not being an encouraging time for reading. I am at the moment perusing The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, which I shall hopefully blog about soon.

And as to my own writing, well… I did promise myself I’d have a couple of copies in the post to some agents by the end of the month. We’ll see how that one pans out. Damn that laziness.

BOOK REVIEW: The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

2008-12-08T16:49:00.003Z

On trying to write this review, I found myself stymied time and time again. What to say about this seven book megathon? What to describe without giving enormous and enjoyable plot points away for those who have not yet tackled this opus?

It’s a fantastical, blood soaked epic Western. It’s all Stephen King’s previous books rolled into one (divided by seven) and the culmination, one could say, of his life’s work and his mind’s preoccupations. It’s got robots.

As ever, I think I’m going to have to do the bullet point list, in an arbitrary, whatever comes to mind first fashion, only slightly tweaked into alternating pros and cons.

Ready?

Spoilers, I’m sorry to say, are imminent. I’ve tried to keep them kind of vague, and prefaced them with a little *** sign just before the actual spoilery sentence.

1) PRO: Roland Deschain of Gilead

He is the protagonist, the ‘moving the story forward’ guy, he is the reason for the story itself. Having a very rough knowledge of the poem the story was inspired by (Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came) is a useful starting point, but ultimately serves no deeper purpose than to understand the atmosphere the story likes to wallow in. Ditto for the Arthurian legends, which really only helps knowing about in the last couple of books.
Roland starts out a walking cliché, the author himself admitting that he’s pretty much a vague sort of Clint Eastwood. He ends up one of the most beguilingly attractive characters ever to walk the landscape of literature.
Roland is complicated, erotic and completely unaware of it, brutal, gentle, unwavering, and tragic. The sort of man, indeed, who makes women say faintly, “Oh my…” before collapsing daintily onto a sofa. A man’s man, a killer, and possessed of an unconscious reverence towards women. Can ya perhaps see where the attraction lies yet?
*** The decision to write the fourth book, Wizard and Glass, entirely about Roland’s past, was a smart one. Anyone reading him would ache to know more about how past experiences formed him and what love he has had. In this, it doesn’t disappoint.

2) CON: Odetta/Detta/insert name here of New York

Allow me to introduce Odetta Holmes and Detta Walker, a split personality inside a woman who Roland needs to complete his quest. Detta is what you might wearily term as the ‘bad side’ of Odetta, the bitch we all want to be sometimes, the one who acts out and hurts people because it gives her pleasure. She’s a bit of a cartoon, and King tries to get away with this by acknowledging that she’s a bit of a cartoon (see references to her speaking voice), which oddly doesn’t detract from the main issue of her cartooniness. It’s a device that sits very uneasily alongside the main plot *** (especially when it happens again in later books… boy oh boy, is that one a reacher) as some sort of antagonistic ploy shoehorned in to create danger. As an aside, the fact that she is also disabled (not much of a spoiler as this fact is introduced along with her almost right away) actually creates a lot of interesting sidelines. As this is predominently a journey story, with the main characters travelling big distances and mostly on foot, it becomes interesting to see how her inability to walk is taken care of.

3) PRO: The interweaving of characters, names and stories from other books

King has done this before, but never with such magnificent plentitude. For an example list of his other books that have ties to the Dark Tower series, check out this link: http://www.stephenking.com/DarkTower/connections.html. It helps to know that the first book in the Dark Tower series was written in 1970, and the subsequent novels have been written in between all his other work. It’s like a grand tie-up of all his work into one encompassing meta-narrative, and if you’re already a fan of King, you will enjoy spotting the links, both big and small. If you’ve never read King before, it in no way detracts from the story to understand that he’s written about these characters before; it’s just interesting.

4) CON: Dammit, I’ve just realised I can’t write about this without it being one giant spoiler.

***** You have been warned. Skip down quickly to number 5 if spoilers make you scream in impotent rage. *****

The decision King made to insert himself into the narrative as a character is another uneasy one. He explains his reasons in his open letter at the end of the relevant books, and they are good reasons. But arrogance in any form automatically makes us cringe. Just look at what happened to Shyamalan when he decided to play an influential writer in one of his films. I am in slight fear of saying that what King did was a bad thing, because I actually like arrogance. As if he knows what people will think when they read it, he paints the character of himself as a bit of a prick. And thus, as with someone like Bret Easton Ellis and his Lunar Park, it becomes about how much of the character of Stephen King in the book is real, and how much is made up. And it shouldn’t be about that, but it is, in a small way. That’s human nature, I guess. Always searching for the truth. I hated reading Lunar Park for the same reason, because I didn’t want to think about how much of the writing was true, I didn’t want to care, but the book was all about making me care, making me think about the reality of someone’s life and what is written about them. This irritated.
In the end, you just have to acknowledge what he is trying to do with this. You can acknowledge it, but you don’t have to like it.

5) PRO: God, he’s good at writing children. Jake Chambers of New York

Jake is another of those brave-ass kids that populate King’s novels and make your heart melt like butter (think Stuttering Bill Denbrough from It). Brave, childish, complicated and intelligent, and never once cliched or dull. Not much more to say without spoilers, but he never feels like a secondary character even though, in many ways, he is. This is another of King’s abilities as a writer; secondary characters always feel as real as the protagonists.

6) PRO or CON, depending on your point of view: Destiny

If you think fate and destiny are complete and utter shash (like me), you may find your credibility stretched beyond breaking point, reformed and made into a series of small, irate question marks. This is something you’re going to have to accept. It’s not just a small part of the story, it is one of the very themes from which the foundations of the story are built. It is so prolifically integral that almost nothing happens without a reason, and almost everything is connected to something else by way of ‘purpose.’ Suck it up.
If you think that there’s no such thing as coincidence, you’ll be happy as a pig in shit.

7) PRO: The evil people. For there are many

The Taheen are repuuuuuuuulsive. Their eating habits are so highly offensive I actually felt my throat convulse threateningly. King is good at gross. And the story is so epic there’s plenty of time to cram all sorts of baddies in there; mischievious robots, naughty humans (or humes, as the Taheen call them) vampires, zombies, witches, crazy trains called Blaine (“Blaine is a pain”) and lobstrosities (“dad-a-chick?”).
This will be the longest review ever if I allow myself to start rattling on about all the baddies. I could write a review on them alone.

8) CON: The Crimson King

The Crimson King is the equivalent of the Big Boss at the Last Level on any given computer game (see M. Bison, Death Adder) *** and as such, has been built up so much throughout the course of the seven books, that when we actually finally meet him he’s somewhat of a disappointment. In keeping with my perverse nature, I thought this was a great idea to have the big baddie an evilly pathetic sort of thing, a kind of deflatory premature ejaculation. I’ve since come to repent of this opinion, mainly because he’s just so easily defeated. He’s called the Crimson King, for Christ’s sake. And look how frigging cool Jae Lee makes him (see sidebar). He’s the most throwaway character imaginable. I would have like to have known a bit more about him, frankly.

9) PRO: The ending

I’m not even going to write it down, lest you previously infuriated spoiler enemies are tempted. Suffice it to say, it is oh-so-most definitely one of those polarising endings that either make people screech in disgust and proceed to make a small bonfire out of the books; OR the only ending that makes sense. The kind of ending, when you read it, you think; well… it just couldn’t have been anything else. If it had ended any other way you would have been somehow disappointed. The most perfect, satisfying ending. The only ending.
Guess which camp I fell in.

Conclusion:
READ THEM. Fucking un-putdownable, in that feverish way that makes you cry when you realise you’ve finished book 3 and haven’t yet had time to buy book 4, because you’ve spent every spare hour of the last week doing nothing but reading book 3.
Sometimes deeply flawed, bravely fiddly, disgusting, epic, beautiful… so many adjectives, so little time. One of those series that makes writers wish, wish, WISH they’d be able to do something similar (and similarly good).
Some ideas will make your face scrunch in disbelief, but the payout of the rest is such that you won’t give a shit.
4/5

Q & A session; or why the world really puzzles me.

2008-10-31T16:31:00.002Z

1. Why does the council send out a man with a leafblower to blow all the leaves off the pavements and into the roads, where they get swirled up by passing cars and fly back onto the pavements and into your face? The leaves aren’t harming anyone. Do you know anyone who dislikes crunching through leaves?

2. Why does the media always latch onto something and blow it up and up until people are screaming hysterically for blood and the ones involved are probably receiving death threats? And all this usually over a topic that no-one really gives a fuck about except lunatics and stupid people?

3. Why do English people automatically hate their own Prime Minister?

4. Why is one Fru never enough?

5. Why is dressing up at Halloween so much fun?

6. Why do people gloat over other’s misfortune?

7. Why is thinking about sex often better than doing it?

8. Why can’t we all just get along?

9. Why is there not yet a film version of Good Omens made by Terry Gilliam, which might be the best partnership in the history of everything?

10. Why am I not yet a successful writer?

--------------------------------------------------------------

1. Because English councils enjoy spending money on pointless things.

2. Because, en masse, the Media gets bored of talking about things like world famine and politics, and encouraging people to have a scrap over Radio DJs and their unfunny version of humour is much more interesting.

3. Because… er.

4. Because Frus are the Devil’s food, and thus bewitch you into greed.

5. Because you are a show off and also enjoy pretending to be other people. This could indicate psychological problems, but I shouldn’t worry about it too much.

6. Because of the ‘better you than me’ principle. Because people are gits.

7. Because the chase is better than the catch.

8. See Freud, Charles Manson, and John Lennon’s Imagine.

9. Chance, circumstance, and Hollywood sucking a bit.

10. Because you have inherent laziness laced into your bones and are pathologically incapable of finishing anything.

Film review: The Fall

2008-10-13T11:07:00.001+01:00

And herewith it be.

1) I am now quite significantly attracted to Lee Pace.

2) Tarsem has a very recognisable visual style; I guessed that he was also the director of The Cell when I first saw the trailer, without being told. This is not a bad thing. His style is beautiful, epic, colour-drenched, a complete character of its own; every set piece takes your breath away.

3) Catinca Untaru turned in an incredible performance, on top of the fact that she was not acting in her native language. Everything about her was almost painfully natural, especially when she saw something she did not understand or she was frightened.

4) The decision to use improv’d dialogue scenes between Untaru and Pace was an interesting one, and I think it worked. At first they resemble outtakes, with the two talking over each other and Pace having to repeat something several times before Untaru understands him. It makes you uncomfortable, which is a reaction that pushes you to examine why. We’re so used to polished dialogue where everyone speaks their turn and no-one mishears or doesn’t understand something (unless it’s part of a character’s personality or used as a plot device) that it’s quite hard to watch people talking realistically in fiction.

5) If you want to be convinced you should see this film, watch the trailer or look at the beautiful images.

6) Nice to see Justine Waddell again; the last thing I remember watching her in was Tess of the D’Urbervilles, where she turned in a very memorable performance.

7) Nothing about this story is particularly original per say (especially since discovering it’s actually based on another film) but I tend not to care about this in favour of presentation. If it was merely beautifully done, then it was merely beautifully done, but the performances made me commit to Pace and Untaru as real characters, and their heartfelt conversation near the end moved me to tears.

4/5 – Phantasmagoric fun. A simple enough story, beautifully rendered.

Several things I have mulled over recently

2008-09-17T15:51:00.000+01:00

1) What is it about Ashley Judd and crap thrillers? I know there’s such a thing as typecasting, but I think we passed that point with ms Judd approximately 28 films ago.

2) Amanda Plummer is a really underrated actress.

3) It is actually quite difficult to believe that a writer who seems to have a fixation with something does not actually carry that over into his personal life. After reading several Stephen Kings, for example, you become overly, worryingly aware about the incredible amount of paedophiles that inhabit his writing world. This makes me wonder, if I ever carve a career out of being a writer, whether people will privately assume I physically brutalise men as a hobby.

4) See-sawing wildly between writing food diaries and agonising over how much processed meat and sugar I consume, to cramming six cakes and a burger in my mouth because I might die tomorrow, is fairly exhausting. The reason, I tell myself, is that I care about food too much to treat it offhandedly, as if it weren’t an important part of my life. Even thinking about this shudders me. Take away food and sleep, and what do I have left? An empty, hollow shell of a human, posterior fused to the sofa, watching dull-eyed at endless re-runs of Cash in the Attic.

5) Sometimes, just sometimes, I want to be one of those women that have huge oak kitchen tables, giant pestle and mortar contraptions and racks of essential oils in intricately (yet humbly) carved wooden boxes. The women who make hair dye out of pure Henna powder mixed with other natural stuff, and who wear natural fabrics which drape fabulously from their small, smooth shoulders. Who always have a Burnt Umber shade of red to their hair. Who wear silver jewellery and a copper bracelet to ward off arthritis, and who throw salt over their shoulder. Who cook vats of vegan food that actually tastes nice. Who have acres of garden in which to grow their mysterious herbs and whose salads are always made from vegetables they have grown themselves. Who could probably gather wild foods in the local wood and make something non-poisonous. Who wear lots of eyeliner but look similarly attractive without a wisp of make up on at all. Who basically live a natural sort of life in a huge mansion-like cottage surrounded by fields and trees.
To this end, I have:-
2 essential oils
Four herbs in pots of compost on my kitchen windowsill that refuse to grow
Lots of silver jewellery that I no longer wear
Plenty of eyeliner
A book called 1001 Natural Remedies
Some samples of Henna powder that I will probably never use because I’m too nervous to mix a batch up by myself
An aesthetic aversion to natural fabrics as they make me look pallid and aimless, like an old, shapeless duvet
A small second floor flat
No garden

One day.

6) Eloquently angry people are very funny. See Stephen Fry for an immediate example.

7) Reading a good book makes me angry when I’m not writing, and well…. mildly depressed when I am.

8) TV series boxsets will be my downfall.

On Hollywood ham and zombie westerns

2008-09-11T18:19:00.004+01:00

Why is it in Hollywood ham on toast movies, even those who would like to think they have emotional credibility, the uptight urbanite main character can only express his new-found faith in life by raising his arms slowly above his head in the pouring rain? What does that even mean? I would understand if he lived in a hot country, for example, and the rain was somewhat of a relief. But how is it forming a V with your arms whilst being wet is the ultimate liberating experience?

This is not just unexpected nonsense, by the way; I was spurred on by last night’s viewing of Instinct, with Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding Jr. The hamminess of which was gently topped at the end by the aforementioned blunder. Which is a shame, really, because the film had some interesting things to say. It simply chose to express them in a ham on toast way, which immediately made me stop caring about the important issues it had raised. Hopkins was good, perhaps a touch Hannibal in his violent moments. Cuba was his usual twitchy, bug eyed, jaw clenched self. I understand he adopts these characteristics in moments of high emotion. It’s what makes him such a good comedy actor, and such a bad straight actor (note: see Jerry Maguire for the former, and any other film he’s in for the latter).

Upcoming film wise, I’m quite excited about seeing Valkyrie. It’s got a great cast list, blah blah, Tom Cruise controversy, blah, but really there’s only one reason to watch this film for me, and that’s to see Eddie Izzard play a legitimate Nazi officer. The hilarity of this stuns me.

On to other things – I’ve trudged through a second complete drafting of The Book, and am now writing (or wallowing in the mire of) some much needed missing scenes. This does mean I do also have to start trying to, you know, get someone to publish it at some point. But fear not! I have my trusty Writer’s Handbook and a veritable stew of contacts from which to pluck the rotund fruits of success (for ‘contacts’, read ‘people I met once and will now email three years later to see if they might remember and want to help a complete stranger)’.

On the literary front, things are looking pretty dry. I haven’t found anything that makes me want to pick it up, and the only thing I can dredge myself from apathy to read is Joe Lansdale’s Dead in the West, which is so gleefully crap it’s sort of fascinating; like very bad schlock D horror movies that you have never heard of and discover on the T.V. at 3am on a Tuesday. If you’ve read earlier blog posts, you may have noticed I have somewhat of a soft spot for this exact stuff.
Other than that, I simply cannot be persuaded to anything. I have a small cache of book-o-philes (I am aware there is a proper word but I prefer this one) who gladly hand me their good reads all the time, but nothing seems to spur me en ce moment. If anyone has suggestions, I’d welcome them.

Film review: The Dark Knight

2008-09-01T12:47:00.003+01:00

Without further ado:-

!!SPOILERS!!

1) Heath Ledger’s performance is nothing short of genius. Genius. No, this is not because he is dead and i am over-emphasising with some sort of bizarre pathos. I spent much of his screen time trying to recognise him as Heath Ledger and found it absolutely impossible. I couldn't even see his face underneath. He’s funny. Funny in that high pitched, wide-eyed kind of funny that you do when you find something quite frightening but would rather laugh than pee yourself, for example. In this he displays the kind of fledgling chameleonic ability that Gary Oldman is a master of. I can’t think of any higher praise. A fitting swansong.

2) By contrast, Christian Bale’s Batman (or Flatman, as I’ve now renamed him) was stone faced, unvarying, and now seems incapable of progression. His expression was the same whether he was learning of the death of a loved one or eating cake (not… that he actually ate cake in the film). I liked the ideas they expressed with his character, especially his self-sacrifice at the end, but the actual portrayal of him on screen was dull.

3) Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Rachel was a damn sight better than Katie Holmes’; but then a retarded tortoise would probably have been able to turn in a more interesting performance than Mrs.Cruise’s attempt. It’s not an intricately sketched character, unfortunately like so many of the female parts in comic book movies (yes, I know; except Catwoman). What she was given, she did well with.

4) *Deep breath* What really stunk about this film… was the script. Let me give you an example.
“Because he's not a hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector...a Dark Knight.”
“The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming.”
Ham.
Ham ham ham.
These are certainly not the only examples of such hammery. Alfred was a one man band of hammery, as was every other ‘good’ character in the story. The only ones who got the good lines were, typically, the bad guys.

5) Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face is credible and sympathetic, so kudos to Aaron Eckhart for managing to make him so. Shame, then, that his scarred face was so over the top. It was very impressive to look at, but put a massive strain on your suspension of disbelief and worked against the realistic tone the film was striving for.

6) I have always thought Batman as the one superhero closest to losing it and becoming a villain. Apparently, so do all his nemeses, because all they ever harp on about is how alike he is to them. Which, really, he is. Fun, then, to see him deliberately break a mob boss' legs in a toe curlingly painful moment.

7) I was a little confused about the Scarecrow's role in this world. His cameo at the beginning seemed to suggest that he had become a vigilante good guy, but he never appeared again and nothing more was said to offer an explanation why he would do this.

8) Gary Oldman, was, as usual, great. Both his turns as Gordon in these films have been subtle, nuanced background performances, which may come as a surprise to those who are used to linking him with larger-than-life-off-the-scale-psychotics. The scene at the end in particular was heartbreaking. His despair at simply being an ordinary, frightened, decent man was palpable, and much more interesting than the serious, fat commissioner we're used to from the comics and earlier franchise.

Conclusion. This film is well worth watching: for both Heath Ledger’s performance and the character of the Joker; and for its successful exploration of human nature. But it is not as ravingly good across the board as it seems to have been generally perceived. Frustrating that the script couldn’t live up to the rest of the film, because it is the reason I can only give this 3/5 instead of 4/5.

Jean Claude and outlandishly bad films

2008-08-06T15:06:00.004+01:00

Ah, Jean Claude.

I faced off against the dilemma of my life last night – Kickboxer or Double Impact? Both were playing at the same time on different channels, you see. I ended up plumping for Kickboxer and thoroughly amused myself.
There’s something utterly shit yet immensely lovable about Jean Claude films. Perhaps it’s the way he can do the splits in the air. Kickboxer is brilliant, as well. Half the film is Monsieur Splits-a-lot undergoing a brutal training regime with a small, old Thai recluse who just happens to be a legendary Muay Thai kickboxing genius (as per usual). What a guy, that tiny man. Subtly funny and quite upsettingly brutal. And I think Jean Claude’s extensive comedic skills have been overlooked in favour of the whole splits thing. Is this not the funniest scene ever?

I have a penchant for shit films. Well…. everyone does, in their own way. But I tend to divide shit films thus:- boring shit, and funny shit. Funny shit becomes one of your favourite movies of all time. Boring shit becomes the tightly focused target of all the disdain and vitriol you can muster. That’s what shit films do. They polarise! You can’t walk away from a shit film thinking it was ‘alright’; that’s an ‘alright’ film. I’m talking outlandishly shit. Par example:-

* Streetfighter (I promise, the last Jean Claude film I’ll talk about in this post)
So outstandingly bad it stretches your face into an incredulous mask that only wears off several hours after the film has finished. Highlights include Kylie Minogue’s Australian slash stiff-upper-lip British accent, Raul Julia’s gloriously ham megalomaniac M. Bison (“Something wrong, Colonel? You come here prepared to fight a madman, and instead you found a god?”), and the incredible one liners.
Pure. Unadulterated. Genius.

* Virtuosity
Anyone who knows me personally will probably be well aware of my unashamed delight in this film. Russell Crowe before he became mega famous, Denzel Washington in one of his frequent career lows. Actually, he turns in a fairly good performance, nicely low key. But what else could you be when your co-star’s character is so unbelievably ham and evil that he says things like this?

“Just because I'm carrying around the joy of killing your family inside me… doesn't mean we can't be friends.”

“I am made of everything! I am the future! And you... you're losing your sense of humour.”

Try it. It’s glorious.

---------------------------

Another dilemma I’m currently facing is whether or not to post a review of a book I recently read. It’s written by a friend of a friend, and while I don’t know the author, I really don’t want our mutual friend to read it (no, he has no idea i've read this book). Clearly, I wouldn’t have qualms if the book wasn’t that bad. But unfortunately it’s a stinker. And I know I would have no other choice than to lay out precisely all the reasons why it is so dire.
This, of course, leads me to ponder what exactly people would tell me, if, upon reading my book, they fainted with horror at the hideousness.
What do you say?
There are ways to be polite and positive about it, of course. But if someone like me is prepared to trash books on my blog (and in person, actually, all the time) then shouldn’t I be prepared to take it well if someone trashes mine? And why do all the rules suddenly change when you know the author, or at least have a corporeal version of them in your head, rather than some faceless scribe somewhere vaguely out there?
It’s one thing resolving to say something face to face to someone along the lines of, “Look, I like you, but your book sucks, okay? Still friends?”
For some writers, this would be fair enough, after the initial period of bewildered hurt. For others, it would be akin to someone grabbing their child and strangling it to death before their eyes. A touch dramatic, granted. Not too far from the truth, though.
Which one am i?

Things that have happened, and the conclusions I have come to as a result of them.

2008-07-30T14:30:00.003+01:00

1) Don’t chat people up at the gym. This only ever works in porn and disastrously bad eighties movies. People are there to sweat a lot, not engage in foreplay (I realise this may actually be untrue for many patrons).
Particularly try not to flirt with them when they’re engrossed in stretching, listening to their I-pod so they don’t actually hear you muttering, “Got a boyfriend?” several times; this will make you resort to waving your arms in front of their face in an embarrassing manner until they look up at you with a puzzled expression and take the earphones out of their ears, the better to hear your incoherent chat up line.

2) John Woo is an extraordinarily bad director.

3) It’s actually both exciting and frustrating when someone else starts to read your book for the first time. You’ve been alone with these people and these stories for so long it’s nice to be able to talk about them to someone as if they actually make any sense. Of course, when the person reading the book takes a week to get through a chapter, it does tend to push you towards tactical moves to get them to depecher (such as bashing their head repeatedly against a wall, screaming, “HURRY THE FUCK UP!”). Which is not as nice.

4) Having a couple of days of beautiful, hot sunshine in between the long periods of low grade rain is actually far more upsetting than having none at all. It’s like repeatedly dangling a fish in front of a cat for a few minutes and then whipping it away for several hours. It hurts, man.

5) Robin Hobb is actually a pretty good writer. But her endings suck buns.

6) Baxter’s soup is without doubt the most tasteless thing I have ever forced into my reluctant mouth.

7) Re-drafting is more fun than you’d think. You get to find the golden nuggets of ‘Blimey, that’s rather stunning, did I really write that?’ as well as the small, hard turds of ‘Oh my cliché-ridden God.’

8) Sweet pastries cure all ills.

Reasons why Terry Pratchett is a genius

2008-07-17T12:38:00.004+01:00

Miscellaneous quotes:-

"You're dead," he said.
Keli waited. She couldn't think of any suitable reply. "I'm not" lacked a certain style, while "Is it serious?" seemed somehow too frivolous.

It became apparent that one reason why the Ice Giants were known as the Ice Giants was because they were, well, giants. The other was that they were made of ice.

Lady Ramkin's bosom rose and fell like an empire.

"Why's it called Ming?" said the Archchancellor, on cue. The Bursar tapped the pot. It went *ming*.

"Did I hear things, or can that little dog speak?" said Dibbler.
"He says he can't," said Victor.
Dibbler hesitated. "Well," he said, "I suppose he should know."

He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat.

Magrat was annoyed. She was also frightened, which made her even more annoyed. It was hard for people when Magrat was annoyed. It was like being attacked by damp tissue.

Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy Seriph of Al-Yabi was cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off.

Om began to feel the acute depression that steals over every realist in the presence of an optimist.

"YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE?"
"Yes. Yes, of course."
Death nodded. "IN TIME", he said, "YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG."

The question seldom addressed is where Medusa had snakes. Underarm hair is an even more embarrassing problem when it keeps biting the top of the deodorant bottle.

"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad."

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

After you'd known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way.

"Well, basically there are two sorts of opera,' said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. 'There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh, I am dyin', oh, oh, oh, that's what I'm doin'", and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely."

And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.

You never ever volunteered. Not even if a sergant stood there and said, "We need someone to drink alcohol, bottles of, and make love, passionate, to women, for the use of." There was always a snag. If a choir of angels asked for volunteers for Paradise to step forward, Nobby knew enough to take one smart pace to the rear.

This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts..."

"Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo."

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."

In the fetid fleapit of Rincewind's brain the projectionist of memory put on reel two. Recollection began to flicker.

Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called "Journey to Alpha Centauri". It was a screen with some dots on it. Because, he said, it happened in real time, which no-one had ever heard of until computers. He'd seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, "Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home."

A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"

English Burger Lords managed to take any American fast food virtues (the speed with which your food was delivered, for example) and carefully remove them; your food arrived after half an hour, at room temperature, and it was only because of the strip of warm lettuce between them that you could distinguish the burger from the bun. The Burger Lord pathfinder salesmen had been shot 25 minutes after setting foot in France.

The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?

Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.

"Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."