Failure Ahoy!

Review: The Grey is Either Good or Really Good and I Can't Tell Which

2012-02-11T08:27:00.000-08:00

My full review of The Grey is available at the Herald.

I gave The Grey a B. I thought it was harrowing and gorgeous, but that Liam Neeson's despairing badass sometimes descended into tough-guy cliches. My take turned out somewhere between the exasperated enjoyment of the AV Club's Scott Tobias and the visceral awe of the New York Times' A.O. Scott. But even as I was writing about how I mostly enjoyed The Grey, I thought I might be underrating it. Not because I was wrong to fault it for being soulful/manly to the point of ridiculousness. I'm never wrong in those reviews composed 48 hours after seeing a movie I've discussed with no one and purposely try to avoid knowing anything about beforehand.

But The Grey is a movie I could watch a hundred times.

This isn't necessarily a guarantee of quality. I could watch 2012 a hundred times, too. Even, God help me, The Day After Tomorrow. But my personal list of endlessly rewatchable movies also includes stuff like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Inception, and Zodiac, so it's not like it's all raw garbage, either. The one thing these movies good or bad have in common is an extremely well-realized setting.

I just get lost in those worlds. Even if that particular world involves wolves loping along the glaciers of New York City while the humans valiantly attempt to outrun global warming itself. The Grey has a landscape you can get lost in. Driving, blinding snowstorms. Looming pine trees. Misty peaks. Gleaming blue ice. Frigid rivers slashing down the slopes. So it's got that going for it, which is nice.

But I don't think that's the only reason I'd happily throw it on the DVD player every day until the DVD becomes unviable. I'm also highly attracted to wilderness survival stories. No no no, not like that--I mean I want to have sex with them. No, wait. I mean I really enjoy them, possibly because the plots are so boiled-down. Are these guys going to make it out alive? How are they going to get over that stream? Can they start a fire in the rain? The questions are pretty yes or no. Either they're going to get devoured by wolves or they won't. Not a lot of ambiguity there. I like ambiguity as much as the next guy--or do I?--but sometimes it's nice to be told a story that is what it is.

So The Grey very much has that going for it. It moves fleetly from one simple act of survival to the next while Neeson and the others are dogged (heh heh) by a pack of angry wolves. It isn't all violent pack-attacks, either. During one scene, Neeson and the others cluster together in the woods at night. Beyond the light, a wolf howls, but it's close enough to see its breath. A moment later, the pack answers. From sixty feet away, twenty other columns of breathy mist rise into the darkness.

It's chilling. It's the kind of moment that makes you happy to be there.

I have some issues with the support cast, though. Visually, they're all but indistinguishable, mostly white guys with dark beards and heavy clothes. One guy has glasses, I guess, and one guy's Hispanic, but most of their individual traits don't emerge until after the point where they've already become an amorphous blob in my head. They're basically there to be killed one by one in typical horror movie fashion. Even when they are given defining identities, a lot of it is this very simple storytelling/Hollywood thing where they're all defined by a single trait. One guy's whole personality is that he loves his daughter and tells this anecdote about her. That kind of thing. It's the illusion of depth.

But really, that's beside the point. This is Neeson's show. The only word for what he's got is gravity. It's a strange situation, too--Neeson's character is haunted by the wife he lost. Meanwhile, Neeson's real-life wife died in a skiing accident about three years ago. He's said on record he's chosen all these action roles lately for the specific purpose of working through that. The performance he gives is pretty remarkable and goes a long way to defray the action-movie toughguy cliches surrounding his character. I don't know if it's because of the specific emotions he's able to channel here, or simply that he's a great actor, but it's a hell of a performance. It works even when he's busy talking about death, which, like I said in the review, is extremely challenging to do without sounding stupid.

For me, there's a very simple truth at work here. One where the will to survive becomes a metaphor for persistence. Early in the movie, Neeson's ready to kill himself. He's sitting in the snow with a gun in his mouth. Then he hears the howl of one of the wolves he's paid to protect his coworkers from. The literal call of the wild reminds him of his own animal instinct to keep going. From that moment on, that's all he does. He keeps moving. He keeps thinking. He keeps trying. Even when it's down to him against the alpha wolf, and all he can do is strap some broken bottles to his hands, he keeps fighting. Anything else would be giving up--and his will can't allow him to do that.

I think that's what gets me about The Grey. I probably won't ever be stranded in a dangerous wilderness. If I ever find myself hunted by wolves, I would probably just laugh. But we all face discouragement every single day. Why keep trying? Why keep going?

Because there's no other choice.

Now Available on Amazon Kindle: Breakers, a Sci-Fi/Thriller

2012-02-10T15:51:00.001-08:00

From the product description:

"In New York, Walt Lawson is about to lose his girlfriend Vanessa. In Los Angeles, Raymond and Mia James are about to lose their house. Within days, none of it will matter.

When Vanessa dies of the flu, Walt is devastated. But she isn't the last. The virus quickly kills billions, reducing New York to an open grave and LA to a chaotic wilderness of violence and fires. As Raymond and Mia hole up in an abandoned mansion, where they learn to function without electricity, running water, or neighbors, Walt begins an existential walk to LA, where Vanessa had planned to move when she left him. He expects to die along the way.

Months later, a massive vessel appears above Santa Monica Bay. Walt is attacked by a crablike monstrosity in a mountain stream. The virus that ended humanity wasn't created by humans. It was inflicted from outside. The colonists who sent it are ready to finish the job--and Earth's survivors may be too few and too weak to resist."

Breakers is available for $2.99.

What's it about?

Well, read the description you apparently just skimmed! It is about the end of the world. Via plague. I love apocalyptic virus stories. This is a new one. It's about the end of the world, how two different people from two different places react to it, and how they respond when they discover they may be able to do something about it.

Where's it available?

I'm beginning to suspect you are just messing with me, as that information is also in the title. It's out for Kindle. Why Kindle-exclusive? Well, it probably won't always be that way. But because of the various benefits involved, I wanted to make it a Select title, meaning that, for either 3 or 6 months, it'll be Amazon-only. After that, I expect to release it through Barnes & Noble, Apple, Sony, etc.

If you are an interested reviewer, however, or anyone else who really, really, really, can't wait, email me (edwrobertson AT gmail) and we'll work something out.

Who did the cover art?

Foldout Creative, a Los Angeles-area book cover boutique. I don't think their website has launched just yet--think it'll be up any day now, though--but they're great guys, easy to work with, happy to take requests, and very thoughtful about making the right cover to represent what's inside. Oh, and did I mention generous? I won my cover through a contest they put on to meet a few authors and help support the local indie author scene. I give them a thumbs up. No wait, I have two hands. Make that two thumbs up.

What inspired the book?

This could be a pretty long list. To be honest, I doubt I would have written this if I hadn't read Stephen King's The Stand. And then reread the first third, where Captain Trips wipes out the world, like three or four times, because man, that grabbed my imagination. I haven't read it in over a decade, but I can still remember the descriptions of dead men behind the wheels of their cars, their plagued-out necks so swollen they looked like the tires on the vehicles they'd died in.

I had a different idea about where the virus came from, though. And while the scope is similar--the fate of the world--I think the approach is pretty different, too. I hope Breakers can be a part of the subgenre The Stand helped define while being something of its own.

Structurally, I was actually inspired by George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. This may come as a surprise, considering I've written and commented at length about how I think the series sucks, but it's a little more complicated than that inflammatory headline. I could rant about this for thousands of words, but in short, I both love and hate Martin's ongoing cliffhangers. While I found them so compelling I kept reading the series a full book and a half beyond the point at which I started to hate it, I also wound up feeling so manipulated by them--and rewarded with so few payoffs when the plot finally returned to whichever character was last in peril--that I'm still bitter to this day.

Still, there's no denying they're kind of great writing. I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to slash out the negatives from those techniques, making the plot (ideally!) very hard to set aside while quickly and regularly rewarding whatever cliffhanger I'd left out there a few pages earlier. That was my intent, anyway. I would be overjoyed to someday read a blog post from an angry un-fan tearing into me the same way I did Martin. It would mean the work got out there.

Also, I'm pretty sure every single book I've written has been from a single perspective. I've been trying to practice different structures recently, so I wanted to tell this story from two different characters' points of view.

The major settings were an easy choice. I lived in New York during college and moved to the Los Angeles area a couple years ago. Little-known fact: they're both huge. Also interesting. Full of very unique neighborhoods, styles, and people. I really like it here in LA, and I really, really liked it in New York. That makes them pretty easy to write about.

The characters come out of questions I've been interested in for a long time: what happens when you lose everything? What should you do to hang onto it? Is there any limit?

Also, I didn't realize this until a few days ago, but there must have been some subconscious influence from Breaking Bad, because the book is called Breakers (for the breaking of the world, mostly) and one of the main characters is named Walt. Then again, everything should be influenced by Breaking Bad, because it is awesome.

There's probably some other influences at work here, too, dating all the way back to my earliest reading days. The Tripod books, definitely. Maybe a bit of The Hitchhiker's Guide and the two Red Dwarf books, which I loved loved loved and are probably the main reason I expect every book to be at least a little bit funny. A little bit of John Gardner, as always (which he would probably find weird and possibly offensive, but what can you do). Other stuff I'm definitely forgetting. I always find it disingenuous when an author or artist tries to claim their work came out of nowhere--that much like ODB, there is no father to its style. There were dozens of works that influenced Breakers, and not just books. A lot of movies and TV shows, too.

That was really long. Could you shut up now?

Yeah. In exchange, please check out the book.

Review: Contraband Is Fast-Paced and Heist-Heavy

2012-02-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

As always, full review of Contraband is available at the Herald.

I have a complicated relationship with Mark Wahlberg. Actually, in a more realistic sense, our relationship is very simple, as it doesn't exist at all. But in the highly unreciprocal world of movie stars and the people who watch movies, it's complicated. As an actor, I mostly like Wahlberg a lot. I've liked him since Three Kings, and he earned himself a lifetime pass from me in The Departed. He's done fine work in movies like The Other Guys. Sure, he was also in The Happening, but for that I'm going to blame M. Night Shyamalan, because that's what Shyamalan does. He makes good things bad.

At the same time, Wahlberg seems like kind of an ass. The most obvious and recent example is that interview where he claimed 9/11 wouldn't have happened if he'd been on the flight, as if not only do his action-hero movie skills exist in real life, but he's a psychic as well, and, knowing the terrorists were about to execute an utterly unprecedented attack rather than diverting the plane and taking some hostages, would have catapulted out of his seat and punched all the bad guys into submission/death. He seems like something of a cocky jerk, is the thing.

But that's probably exactly why he's fun to watch in movies like Contraband. Contraband is essentially nothing more than a fast-paced caper movie. It's not going to make you think, except about how cool that scene is when the Panamanian cops are facing off with the truck-robbers. It's not glossy with style. It doesn't have whip-crack dialogue or Heat-level shootouts or anything, quite frankly, you're likely to remember three months later.

Even so, it's pretty good! Wahlberg is a smuggler-gone-legit forced to make one last smuggling run, but in a minor twist, he actually loves smuggling, and except when he's worried about his wife and kid, he seems extremely thrilled to have this final chance to commit some crime. Meanwhile, his support cast is top-notch. Giovanni Ribisi appears to have gone all Method and smoked meth for six months to get in character as an unhinged New Orleans drug-runner. J.K. Simmons gets to do a lot of barking and glowering as the captain of the massive container ship Wahlberg's using to do his smuggling. And Ben Foster, who should legally change his name to Awesome, is Wahlberg's best friend and former partner in crime.

Between these characters and others, including Walhberg's team on the boat, Contraband keeps a lot of balls in the air, but it's fast, fast, fast. The density of its plot is almost funny. When the ship stops in Panama, Wahlberg as all of like two hours to go collect the counterfeit money he needs to pay off Ribisi, yet he appears to have enough time to scrap his old plan, pull off a new one, and probably to complete a graduate thesis while he's at it. That part's a bit silly, is what I'm saying.

But for the most part, Contraband is, like many of Wahlberg's movies, sheer entertainment, with snappy dialogue, crisp editing, and some interesting turns. For pure genre stuff, it's not quite up there with Taken, but it's something I'd happily watch again.

Review: The Devil Inside Is Stupid and Should Be Hated

2012-02-06T09:32:00.000-08:00

Official review of The Devil Inside available at The Herald.

That review has no major spoilers. Warning: this will!

Because the ending of The Devil Inside is one of the worst in recent history. To provide some context, this is a found-footage movie about a woman who killed her husband years ago and might be possessed, but her now-grown daughter can't find out for sure because the Catholic church refuses to investigate. Except now she's run into two science-priests who think she might be right--and are willing to put their careers on the line to find out!

And it's all pretty boring, because none of these people have much in the way of personality, especially the god damn main character played by Fernande Andrade. Andrade's a Brazilian model, yet somehow that rigorous training and experience doesn't pay off in the context of a low-budget horror movie. Partly because of her worthless character, partly because the rest of the writing is equally dreadful, watching The Devil Inside is like eating bad calamari. You don't notice anything's wrong for a few moments after you start chewing, and then it's rubbery and awful but you keep chewing in the hopes it will get better and anyway you're not going to just spit it out, and then, well, no, it's still horrible, but at least it's almost over and you're ready to swallow and move on with your life. Whew.

SImilarly, The Devil Inside almost becomes tolerable as it nears its end. All the crummy setup is out of the way, Andrade's mom is undeniably possessed, and now she's started killing people to boot. Oh no! Now she's made one of the priests kill himself! That was actually kind of shocking! It turns out the mom is possessed by some kind of super-demon whose lesser-demon followers can possess anyone nearby. Andrade is possessed, too. In desperation, the surviving priest and the man who's been documenting this all throw her in a car and rush off to go see a super-priest who can presumably exorcise the Devil himself--because that, it's implied, is the monster who's inhabited her mom all along.

What will happen next?? Oh. The demons will almost instantly possess the documentarian, who's driving, causing him to crash the car into an oncoming truck. And everyone dies, probably. But if you'd like to learn more, the text on the now-black screen informs us, you can visit our website!

What the hell? Was this whole movie a commercial for a website? Why would we watch that? Who would possibly imagine that would be a satisfying ending? Other people in my audience shared my concerns. I didn't speak to them, but as the credits began to roll, a man yelled out, "Oh, hell no!"

I can't think of a better way to sum it up. No, The Devil Inside. Hell no. Now we're all going home angry. Thanks a lot.

Catch-Up Review: The Darkest Hour Blows Quite Blowfully

2012-01-16T17:03:00.000-08:00

My newpaper review of The Darkest Hour available here.

Oh man, this movie is bad. I said most of the really relevant stuff in the main review--The Darkest Hour is basically a SyFy Channel original that somehow made it to the big screen--but one thing I forgot to add/didn't have room for is that a whole lot of the movie just feels like it's missing. Basically every time a scene transitions to a new time, it's like something critical has been glossed over or cut for time.

And it's totally maddening. I don't have a formal education in this stuff, but over the last few years (goodness, I've been doing this for nearly five years), I've learned I place a lot of importance on editing. And The Darkest Hour's sucks. We're constantly seeing stuff we don't need to see and skipping past what we do. Most of the scenes just fade artlessly to the next, draining what little momentum it manages to establish. With some bad movies, you have to give them some thought before concluding they're bad. With The Darkest Hour, it's obvious within minutes.

Incidentally, at the theater, I mistakenly asked for a ticked to "The Darkest Night." If we're really lucky, that will be the sequel to the upcoming Batman flick.

New Story: "Baby, Your Body's My Bass" at AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review

2012-01-04T22:43:00.000-08:00

So the other day I mentioned I'd sold a new story at AE. Apparently, it's already online.

Fast turnaround! I've had stories take a year to go from sold to published before. This one took a few weeks. The internet: it is fast.

In a bit of trivia that may or may not be interesting to anyone, my original title was "Obsolution." It's appeared here as "Baby, Your Body's My Bass," a song title from within the story that is rather less pretentious than my own offering. Editors love changing headlines/titles! My newspaper editors change my suggested headlines at least half the time I send them in. And usually, they are pretty good at it. Editors bring fresh eyes, have a sharper nose for what the story's really about/what will draw readers than the author. I don't always agree with their changes (though I do like this one), but I've learned they're almost always made for good reason.

I'm really proud of this story. Authors are rarely the best judge of their own work, but I really, really wanted this one to find a good home. Now it's headlining at AE. I am happy.

Review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol Is Great (Also Brad Bird)

2012-01-02T12:17:00.001-08:00

Full review's over here.

This will be a rather less full review. In short: I don't think I've ever seen a fourth sequel (third sequel?) that's flat-out good. No fair counting A New Hope. Scream 4 was okayish. I think Jason 4 was oddly decent, and I heard surprisingly good things about Fast Five. But that might be the complete list. Generally by the time a franchise gets that deep, it's just milking what's come before; it's creatively bankrupt, shaking the loose change from the pants of passing fans before gearing up for the next duh-duh sequel.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is the fourth in the series. And it's good. Really good. Easily one of the best action movies of the year. A lot of this is because they hired Brad Bird to direct. You know what else Brad Bird has directed? The Iron Giant. The Incredibles. Ratatouille. A handful of great animated movies, in other words--but no live-action stuff.

So this was a bit of a gamble. A gamble along the lines of giving The Lord of the Rings to Peter Jackson or Spider-Man to Sam Raimi. And a gamble that paid off just as well, with vivid, colorful, kinetic action sequences that sometimes look like they could only exist in the anything's-possible world of animation.

Here's hoping Bird gets plenty more work--ideally, a whole new franchise of his own.

Things That Happened: 2011, 2012, and Where I'm at Right Now (Fiction Edition)

2012-01-02T08:01:00.000-08:00

Apparently I became a freelance writer this year. In one way, I've been one for years, but in another, more important way, this is the first year I've made anything even close to a living from writing or regularly sought writing-related work. I don't know precisely what I'm doing with this recap of 2011--mostly I'm recording what happened for myself, both for future reference and to help set goals for 2012--and it seems like a list of accomplishments could very quickly turn self-congratulatory. In that case, bear in mind my accomplishments for 2011 also included several dozen rejection letters, more than one unflattering review, and most importantly of all, remaining desperately poor. It was not an unbridled success. In fact, many bridles were involved. I've got so many bridles here I should probably pack in the whole writing thing and open a bridle shop instead.

That said, in 2011, I:

* Wrote 220,000 new words of fiction

* Finished 10 short stories

* Finished 2 novellas

* Finished 1 novel

* Began another novel, first draft approximately 1/3 - 1/4 complete

Funnily enough, this met almost exactly half of my extremely ambitious goals I set out near the start of 2011. Those were honestly so lofty (20 short stories, 4 novellas, 2 novels, 400,000 words total) that reaching just over half of that still feels pretty damn good. Also, I:

* Sold 5 short stories (not all written this year) to AE, Fantastique Unfettered, Sorcerous Signals, Fusion Fragment, and wrapped up the year with a second sale to AE.

I'm really happy to appear in all these magazines, but that first sale to AE was particularly exciting. They're a new pro-paying market, meaning I'll be able to join the SFWA as soon as AE's been around long enough to qualify. They were (will be, technically) my first pro sale, which is one of those things that simultaneously means nothing and a whole hell of a lot: nothing in that nobody's beating down my door yet, and if I stopped working now, no one on Earth would notice; but a whole hell of a lot in that it's a big milestone, the sort of thing that lets me know I'm heading in the right direction. The money was nice, too.

The second sale to AE confirmed I've found an editor who likes what I'm up to. That's always a tremendous boost, both for that "yay someone likes me" factor and because it means that, with the right kind of story, I've got a much better chance to find it a home. I had that previously with Reflection's Edge and M-Brane SF, but with RE closed and M-Brane on hiatus, Fantastique Unfettered is probably the only place I had left where my name would mean anything to the editor. That guarantees nothing--you still have to write a good story--but if they've liked your work in the past, they're (probably) much more likely to like it in the future, too.

On the other end of publishing, I jumped into the epub/self-publishing/indie author world in 2011, finishing the year with 2 novels, 2 novellas, and 3 story collections up for sale at just about everywhere ebooks are sold. I wouldn't call it a smashing success--I've sold maybe 400-500 books and given away some 1000 copies of the novellas--but it's resulted in a few hundred bucks I wouldn't have had otherwise and mostly favorable reviews.

I could write several thousand words on this whole experience, but I need to drive the breadwinner to work in a few minutes, so instead I'll say it's been somewhat frustrating but mostly fun, that I've learned a ton, that I plan to keep doing it, and that I don't really know where to go from here. I plan to keep submitting to traditional agents/editors; that world is far, far from dead. But I'm hoping my other work snowballs enough so that, by this time next year, my income from it is a good chunk of the monthly totals rather than a fraction.

Oh, and I will say this about self-publishing: royalties are so, so awesome. It is nothing short of stupendous to be paid month after month for work I finished long ago. It's intoxicating. I'm drunk on getting paid for stuff I already did! Even in my case, where it's only $10 here and $15 there, it adds up. (Side note: for most people, one of the keys to success is getting your work placed with as many distributors as possible.) Obviously, this is not exclusive to the indie world. I hear traditional authors have heard of these "royalties" as well.

But this is the first time in my life I've gotten them, and it's great. The economics of making a living writing fiction suddenly makes so much more sense. It isn't really possible to make support-yourself cash writing short stories. For new authors and midlisters, novel advances are typically between $5000 and $30,000, which after taxes, the agent's percentage, etc. is somewhere between half a year of grocery money and the upper fringe of the poverty line. Hello, caviar!

But if you can pull in $100-500 for a short story a few times a year, and pull in a modest advance every year or three, and supplement this with regular nonfiction gigs or the odd spec piece, and you can depend on a small but steady trickle of royalties on stuff you haven't touched in months or years--put all that together, and you might just not die in the gutter. Even on the lower end, you can be a spouse/living-in-sinmate who isn't a total piece of shit in the bringing home the bread department.

From where I'm sitting, that's a heartening thought. Because as productive as 2011 was for me--as of sometime last year, I could think of myself as a "working professional" without feeling like (much of) a fake--there's still a lot of road ahead.

And I suspect some of that road will be paved with nonfiction, and with metaphors like that, it's a shock I could barely afford a trip to the dentist. But more on that--nonfiction, not dental work--in a later post.

Review: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows Returns to the Well, Gets Poisoned by the Well (In Other Words It's Not Very Good)

2011-12-20T20:40:00.001-08:00

Proper Herald review of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows available here.

I liked the original Sherlock Holmes quite a bit. I mean, the Guy Ritchie original. Not to say I don't like the original original Sherlock Holmes. But we're talking about movies here. Try to keep up. The original Sherlock Holmes, then, was a welcome surprise: witty, offbeat, frenetic, very modern in its steampunk trappings and Ritchie actioneering, yet still faithful to the source. It was good in a way you don't expect these tentpole franchises to be.

In other words, kind of like the first Pirates of the Caribbean.

Not that anyone was comparing it to Pirates back then. Or if they were, I didn't hear it, and am going to continue to pretend as if such statements don't exist. Because if they did, that would make my comparison--that A Game of Shadows is an awful lot like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest--sound much less original.

But the comparison's pretty great. Big, wanna-be blockbuster that everyone rolled their eyes at becomes surprise success. Everyone's looking forward to the sequel. Second movie comes out and it's.. not so great. It's too much. It tries to deliver everything that made the original so charming and fun, only amped up to 11. It's overstuffed, confused, sprawling. It's not horrible, but in its excess and tone-deafness, it's exactly the kind of Hollywood-bad everyone expected the first movie to be.

That description fits both A Game of Shadows and Dead Man's Chest to a T. I don't want it to. I liked both originals. I even kind of enjoyed both sequels (though A Game of Shadow's very-forced repartee between Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law almost pushed me into dislike territory). They're just nothing I ever really need to see again.

Review: The Sitter Isn't Worth Standing Up For

2011-12-13T23:41:00.000-08:00

Two fucking awesome wordplay headlines in a row. I'm on fire. My full review of The Sitter is available here.

And you know what? Again, I'm not doing an informal review here. I like director David Gordon Green lots and lots, but he barely elevates this above a cliche-ridden script full of some loser venturing into the night to tangle with drug dealers and engage in wacky car chases. The Sitter is in many ways every nondescript comedy since 2008, with only a decent performance from Jonah Hill to try to elevate it.

It's almost midnight on a Tuesday. I have to go to sleep now. I would much rather do that than write anything more about The Sitter.

Lightless Is Currently Free on Kindle

2011-12-09T09:49:00.000-08:00

Oh, did I mention Lightless is currently free on Kindle? I didn't? Then consider this that announcement. That Lightless is free. On Amazon Kindle. For the next whole day and a half. At the end of Saturday night, it turns back into a pumpkin that costs $0.99.

Never had anything free on Amazon before. I'll be interested to see how it turns out.

Review: The Descendants Another Alexander Payne-esque Movie from Alexander Payne

2011-12-05T22:16:00.000-08:00

Full review of The Descendants available at the Herald.

And actually, there will be no real informal review here, other than to say this is not the best of Alexander Payne's movies, but it clearly is one of his movies, in that it shows people as petty, shallow assholes who are also capable of being funny and thoughtful and heartfelt. A step down from About Schmidt and two steps down from Sideways, but still one of the better movies of the year. Worth catching once it shows up in your market.

Review: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1: The Movie So Crazy It Had to be Split in Half

2011-11-26T09:34:00.001-08:00

Full review of Breaking Dawn Part 1 available at the Herald.

Actually, still deep in other work, so I don't have much time to get into it here. As a whole, the Twilight series continues to be so divisive that anti-Twilight sentiment has pushed some of its former detractors into positions as apologists, arguing (with some rightness) that the series has drawn more hatred and mockery just because it's for girls. Meanwhile, boys' stuff like Transformers--and essentially all other blockbuster movies--pulls disproportionately little ire, because boys' interests are infinitely more acceptable.

To which I would say "Agreed," followed immediately by "But that doesn't change the fact Twilight is crazy and also sucks." Breaking Dawn is the best example of that yet. The first half is a conflict-free drift of Edward and Bella's wedding, Edward and Bella boning on their honeymoon until she passes out and he apparently beats her up(?), which shames him so bad he refuses to bone her again--so long as she's human, anyway.

Which confused this non-fan, as I didn't know whether there were plans to ever make her a vampire (and thus capable of handling the vampire-stick), meaning their married life would be as chaste as their prior life, which.. well, quit fucking whining already, big guy. So you gave her a few bruises. She seems to have liked it, but if that's the sort of thing that will make you decide to never have sex with your wife again, maybe you should have figured that out BEFORE you made a lifelong commitment to her. This just in: Breaking Dawn secretly criticizes waiting until marriage! Abstinence is a farce! It's werecats living with weredogs!

Then, of course, Bella gets pregnant after their single tumble in the hay. Instantly, her life is no longer singlemindedly devoted to Edward, but to the half-vampire fetus that is literally eating her from the inside and which Dr. Vampire confirms will kill her. I don't even want to get into the political subtext of this, but it makes her undying love for Edward suddenly feel very mortal indeed, to the point that it can't help but suggest she was never really in love with him to begin with--just madly, self-negatingly infatuated with him.

Which dovetails nicely with a lot of the criticism of Twilight as a whole: Bella doesn't really have a personality of her own, and she's looking to extinguish whatever bits she does have through her obsessions with other people. I guess that's why the series is so popular: with such a generic protagonist, readers and viewers can instead project as much of themselves as they want onto Bella.

So sure, Twilight isn't really as bad as twenty Hitlers. (It's like two Hitlers, tops.) But for plenty of men, women, boys, and girls, its two lovestruck leads offer nothing of interest. Before I could begin to start caring about the crazy melodrama of Bella's life, she'd need to learn to care a lot more about herself.

Review: J. Edgar Hoovers

2011-11-22T07:24:00.000-08:00

Full review of J. Edgar available, as usual, at the Herald.

Wait, maybe I should rewrite that, because that implies there will be a partial review here, and I'm too busy for that beyond saying that J. Edgar is a mess that tries to cover all aspects of J. Edgar Hoover's life at the expense of finding depth in any of them. Everyone involved is talented--star Leonardo DiCaprio, director Clint Eastwood, writer Dustin Lance Black--but the end product is frustrating and unrewarding. At least it's better than Breaking Dawn!

Now Available on Kindle and Probably the Best Ebook Ever Published in the Lands of Men: Lightless

2011-11-17T13:35:00.001-08:00

Lightless is a fantasy novella, a story of wizardry, monsters, and a world with no concept of days. From its Amazon description, where it's available for Kindle for $0.99:

"When daytime lasts for 16 years, so does the night--and even if you survive what lurks there, stay too long, and you can never come back.

The king's daughter Dalia has gone missing. He fears she's fallen into the Lightless. Tasked with getting her back, Chief Tracker Vickory Carroway recruits roguish wizard Tom Raquepaw, the only man known to have traveled to the Lightless and lived to return. With days to spare until Dalia's lost for good, their investigation leads them into the darkness--a nightmarish world of monstrous creatures and equally monstrous men.

Lightless is a novella of 60 pages / 17,000 words."

Yes, a novella. Too short for book publishers, too long for (almost every) magazine, ebooks have once again rendered novellas a viable format. If you buy it, anyway. If you don't, novella writers around the world will continue starving to the point where their ribs are classified as lethal weapons. What I'm saying is I'll die if you don't buy this. Hope you're okay with that, murderer.

Meanwhile, I continue to be deep in the throes of NaNoWriMo, where I'm currently a few days behind schedule. For now, back to my groundhog hole.

Review: Tower Heist Is a Better Movie Than Brett Ratner Is a Person (Because He's a Jerk)

2011-11-13T10:18:00.000-08:00

My proper review for Tower Heist is here, and I recommend reading that one, because I don't have the time right now to really get into it here.

Anyway, by all indications director Brett Ratner's not a very good guy. He decided/had to quit directing this year's Oscars after a week in which he declared "rehearsing's for fags." He meant it in the jokey way, and in all honesty I think he caught more shit for that than he deserved, but if nothing else come on, guy, you work in Hollywood and should know better.

Oh, and it probably didn't help that this came within days of Ratner saying he "banged" Olivia Munn, but he didn't recognize her in a later meeting because she "wasn't Asian back then." I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be a criticism of Munn deliberately changing and misrepresenting her image (she changed her name, too) to gain Hollywood success, and not, as it appears to be, a bizarre comment about the shape-shifting abilities of the Far East. He may even be telling the truth. But the way he said it is just poorly phrased, making him look like a douche at the very least, and quite possibly a misogynist and a racist.

These are the reasons people don't like Brett Ratner. I mean, besides his movies. He comes off like a thoughtless prick, an arrogant fratboy, and his films aren't nearly good enough to make people overlook the foolish things he says and does. Which I'm going to say is a little unfair--I'm not sure these comments mean all that much besides Ratner isn't self-aware enough to realize he's a public figure who can't blurt to the national media the same things he'd say to his friends, who'd understand it's a joke or at least ask him what the hell he means about that Asian thing.

Meanwhile, Tower Heist is fairly fun, a typical Ratner film in that it doesn't have any particular style to it but is fairly funny and competent in a slick action-movie way. But it doesn't matter, because Brett Ratner can't keep his fool mouth shut. Maybe that's how it should be. Whiffs of bigotry from public entertainers shouldn't be brushed off like you would for your friends. At the same time, how much does it matter? What does it say that we're more entertained by celebrities making asses of themselves than the art and entertainment that made them famous in the first place? Don't we have better things to be doing with our time, energy, and attention? Like making fun of Kim Kardashian?

I've spent too much time on this already, I think. Time to get started on the next review.

A Few Thoughts on Finishing a New Novel, Which I Just Totally Did

2011-11-08T17:16:00.000-08:00

So right, I just finished a new novel. My fifth. By "finished," of course, I mean "finished the first draft." Writing a first draft is like wrapping up a super-cool Halloween party: everyone had a few laughs, a few drinks, and somebody took off the wrong part of their Spider-Man costume when they were dancing on the table. Everyone's happy and ready to go home and sleep it off. But then you wake up and there are beer bottles and chicken bones everywhere and somebody appears to have unsuccessfully scrubbed their vomit from the bathroom with one of the hand towels. In other words: there is a lot of cleanup to be done.

I typically do moderate to heavy revision of my first drafts, taking them through a couple drafts: one to clean up sentences, fix things that don't make sense, etc., then another pass to chop out everything I possibly can. It's easier work, in its way, because I normally don't have to come up with new plots and ideas and all that, but it's hard labor nonetheless. If writing can be backbreaking, which it can't (unless you write something nasty about Christian Bale), revision is that.

Second...I don't really know what the fuck to do with my finished manuscript at this point. In the bygone days of 2007, it used to be you gathered up a hefty list of agents and their addresses, be they physical or electronic, draft up a query letter, redraft that query, redraft the redraft, then send it around in batches to everyone on your list. Then you went into the complicated mating dance of rejections, requests for partial manuscripts, and if you're very lucky/good, requests to see the whole thing, and finally, if you're really, really lucky, an offer of representation, which you take right after the conclusion of your merry jig.

That option's still out there, more or less. But there's also the self-publishing route. Due to the rise of the Kindle, the Nook, and ebook apps around the world, self-publishing hasn't been shameful in nigh-on a year. Some people make hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it. Some do well enough to attract offers from agents who may have rejected them the year before. Some are doing so nicely for themselves they turn down these chances at success in traditional publishing in order to keep on collecting fat royalties for themselves. There's no one way to do it anymore.

I'm leaning toward flogging this one around to agents again. I've self-pubbed some works and made a few bucks, but we're talking enough to pay the water bill, not enough to change my life. I'd like an actual couch one of these days. I'd like an advance. But I suppose I have a month or three of revisions to decide.

Lastly--Christ, it's nice to be finished. Despite being much more straightforward in many ways, this one was a little tougher than my last two books, involving a months-long layoff and a return in which I punted several chapters in favor of a new direction. I am very happy and relieved to be able to set it aside to cool down and move on to something else.

Which means...starting a new novel tomorrow. Yeah. I don't normally do that, but I'm participating in NaNoWriMo for the first time this month. It only took me 14,000 words to finish off this book. That means I owe another 36,000 more words of book before the month is out.

Amazingly, I think it's doable. Just don't expect much else out of me until then.

Review: In Time Thinks the Whole Damn System Is Out of Order! Also, It Isn't All That Good

2011-11-06T11:01:00.000-08:00

Complete review of In Time available at the Herald.

I'd like to say a lot about In Time, but I'm not sure I'm going to, because I'm joining a friend in National Novel Writing Month this...month and completing 50,000 words amidst my other responsibilities (such as reviewing movies) is going to require an extra level of a word I suddenly can't remember. Seriously, I'm blanking. It means "doing what you're supposed to rather than what you want to." Discipline! It will require an extra level of discipline. Meaning I don't have a ton of time or energy to spend blogging about not-very-good movies I've already been paid to write about. Although I should write something about NaNoWriMo, which I think is stupid and valuable in equal measures.

But In Time is interesting because it's seriously angry about wealth inequality in the United States and is also a Hollywood blockbuster starring Justin Timberlake. Attempted blockbuster, anyway. I think it's only going to pull in tens of millions of dollars rather than hundreds. Written and directed by Andrew Niccol, who's done several sci-fi movies including the semi-classic Gattaca, In Time has plenty of potential. Good concept. In on the "the rich may be too rich" zeitgeist. An interesting cast, including Timberlake, who appears to want to be a big-time movie star but isn't yet, Amanda Seyfried, who keeps getting high-profile work despite my never being impressed by her (though she's kinda good as a rebellious rich girl here), and the always-reliable Cillian Murphy as a semi-bad guy police officer.

The problem is In Time's plot is unshaped for a long period of time--Timberlake, pushed into bringing the system crashing down by a mysterious stranger, hatches a revolutionary plan that is indistinguishable from a sexy young dude deciding to spend a weekend in Vegas. Eventually, he and Seyfried go all Bonnie and Clyde all over everyone's asses, but that is a long, long ways into the movie.

The ongoing mess of coincidence, allegory, and clumsy political zeal turns something that could be as important as it is entertaining into a thing that is neither. Too bad, because what In Time is trying to do is exactly what we could use more of. Maybe next time.

Review: Okay, Paranormal Activity 3 Was Pretty Damn Scary

2011-10-28T06:07:00.001-07:00

Full thing at the Herald.

I have a pretty good relationship with the found-footage horror movie. I loved The Blair Witch Project. I loved Cloverfield. I.. actually, I hated the shit out of Apollo 18, but then again I really liked Quarantineand am looking forward to seeing [REC], which I hear is even better.

Yet for whatever reason, I totally disregarded Paranormal Activity when it came at, dismissing it as a no-budget ripoff of earlier stuff I liked. Which, well, it is. But I recently learned it's also pretty great. I'm a Netflix Instant watcher, and my routine is to throw something on the TV as background noise while I'm writing--movie reviews, martial arts articles, stories, novels, whatever. Most of the time, I only pay attention to a scene or three; some movies, the credits are rolling before I've absorbed a single moment. But like The Wild Hunt, a movie I started paying attention to halfway through and then had to go back and watch from the beginning, Paranormal Activity demanded I watch it.

Thus I had some anticipation for Paranormal Activity 3, despite the fact third entries in horror franchises have a worse track record than Lasty from Futurama. And what do you know, Paranormal Activity 3 was much better than I expected, too.

I gush about this in the proper review, but Paranormal Activity 3 ginned up a new found-footage technique that's fucking brilliant. The main character, a wedding photographer/video-guy, has a problem: his downstairs is too big for his camera to see all at once. (Quick plot summary: he needs to record it because he and his wife have been hearing/seeing some spooky things and he's trying to figure out what's going on.) To solve this, he mounts his camera on an oscillating fan, showing him slow, steady, back and forth sweeps of the ground floor.

Good God is that a great idea! And so simple! Each sweep of the camera reveals a new scare--or shows the last one has disappeared, which may be even scarier. Meanwhile, as the camera pans back and forth, you're just waiting and waiting for what it's going to reveal on the other side of the screen. Jesus, is it tense.

The movie's far from perfect. The mythology's somewhat lackluster (though handled well enough), nothing more than the odd line of exposition tossed off here and there, tied up by an unsettling final scene. And three movies in, the general premise can't help but feel a bit threadbare. Still, the cast is pretty enjoyable, particularly the youngest daughter and the dad's friend.

And with a $50 million opening weekend, it looks like the Paranormal Activity franchise is all ready to replace Saw as the yearly Halloween event, which thank god because the Saw series sucks like an automated sucking machine. Paranormal Activity 3 is one I look forward to ignoring on Netflix multiple times.

Review: The New The Thing Should Be Blasted Out of Airlock, Then Nuked from Orbit Because Wait Wrong Sci-Fi Classic

2011-10-21T06:21:00.000-07:00

Full review can be found at the Herald.

Like I say over there, The Thing--the first one, I mean--is not just one of my favorite all-time sci-fi movies, it's one of my plain favorite movies. It has Kurt Russell in a hat as large as the rising moon. Wilford Brimley bellowing and whacking a computer with a fire axe. Not some dude's laptop, either. A 1982 computer that takes up an entire wall *AND PROBABLY SPEAKS LIKE THIS BEEP BOOP BOOP*. Beards for miles. Oh yeah, and a wickedly paranoid plot where anyone could be an alien replicant beyond the moon and the only way to survive is through the execution of makeshift yet relentless logic.

The new The Thing is supposed to be a prequel, the story of the Norwegian camp that first discovered the creature locked up in the ice. Prequel. Not remake. I said prequel.

Yet for at least the first 2/3 of its run, the new The Thing is essentially the old The Thing. Minus Brimley, Russell, David Keith, all those character actors you've never seen elsewhere, and any sense of suspense, paranoia, dread, or goodness of any kind, of course. You've got the large, ensemble cast of bearded men. Dogs in pens. Isolated antarctic base with the same set design. Grizzled helicopter pilots. A scientist discovering the Thing can thing people into new Things, then the crew struggling with how to figure out who's still human and who's been thinged.

There are differences, I suppose. Lead Mary Elizabeth Winstead is pretty obviously a girl. There's no analog in the original for antagonist Ulrich Thomsen, an arrogant man of science-type. The method of deducing who's been thinged is changed, as is most of the third act, which is simultaneously more action-heavy yet way less apocalyptic than the "well let's just blow the whole place up!" finale of first The Thing. The thing about The Thing is it feels exactly like The Thing, except worse in every way, so it's goddamn impossible not to compare the two and find the new one lacking.

I think this is a case of the filmmakers wanting to have their cake and eat it too: to make a prequel that's technically not a remake while paying homage to the original by making this prequel exactly like it. It's all there in the identical title. They took no risks and thus gained nothing. Except a crappy movie. Because The Thing is crappy. The new The Thing, I mean. The old one is great and call it and tell you that you love it. I'm waiting.

The Aether Age: Helios Now Up for Kindle

2011-10-17T07:56:00.001-07:00

And now in fun news, the alternate history/shared world/steampunk/generally awesome anthology The Aether Age: Helios is now avalailable for Kindle, including my two stories "The Inspiration of Philocrates" and "The Arms of the World" (along with 17 other works). $2.99! A bargain by any measure that is a good measure. Snap up your copy before the internet runs out!

Seriously, I'm very happy to see The Aether Age get the ebook treatment. It was an extremely fun project to work on and despite the fact just about all of us authors had no idea what the others were up to, the stories resulted in some great contrasts and overlaps. Stories spanned hundreds of different years and several different cultures, providing a fairly complete (if elliptical) history of the Age.

The result is pretty damn cool: an anthology that's both cohesive, yet literally all over the map. As a writer, I've already revisited the universe; that story appeared in Fantastique Unfettered #2. As a writer, I'm hoping we see the next anthology--the plan is to produce three in total--sooner rather than later.

Lost Season 1, Episode 8: "Confidence Man"

2011-10-12T13:09:00.001-07:00

Coming into "Confidence Man," Sayid has been KO'd by a branch, the transceiver destroyed. Meanwhile, Shannon's inhalers have gone missing and she's having trouble breathing. Sawyer has an alibi for the knockout, but Shannon's brother Boone is convinced he's behind the theft of the medicine.

And he's got good reason. After Kate approaches him, Sawyer shows her a letter from a boy whose father was bilked by Sawyer, then killed himself and the kid's mom. In flashback, we see Sawyer's a confidence man. He beds a fine young lady and deftly manipulates her into pledging her husband's money into a phony oil drilling investment. After a meeting with the husband in which Sawyer tries to walk away, the husband is ready to hand his money over to the man who's seduced his wife. "Seduced" here means "sexed the hell out of."

How do they attempt to wrestle the inhalers out of Sawyer? By siccing Sayid in him. Who, in addition to being a communications officer with the Iraqi Republican Guard, also did some torturing. His methods on Sawyer are blunt and to the point: sharpened bamboo under the fingernails. And then threat of knife to the eye. That's enough for Sawyer. After coercing a kiss from Kate, he confesses he never had the inhalers in the first place. She discovers the letter wasn't to Sawyer, it was from him; in trying to track down the fraud who ruined his family, he wound up becoming him. A disbelieving Sayid stabs him. After Jack saves Sawyer, Sayid, disgraced by his own actions, exiles himself to map the island shores.

Zero movement on the supernatural front in "Confidence Man," then. Instead, we get a look under the hood of fully human bad guy Sawyer, who, as a tall, impossibly muscly, stubbly, long-haired blonde, shattered the glass ceiling for tall, light hunks everywhere and set the stage for True Blood's Eric.

The flashbacks and characterization are once again thorough yet unexpected, giving us a strong understanding of one of the leads while fleshing him out beyond the stereotype, humanizing Sawyer as a rough man driven by a much softer heart. After being stabbed, he wants to die--in fact, I thought it was pretty obvious he didn't have the inhalers and was instead seeking punishment while forcing Dudley Do-Right Jack and others to confront the fact the world's a pretty mean place so you got to be mean, too.

That predictability may be why I was left a little disappointed with "Confidence Man," as if Lost has a pretty good trick when it comes to its characters, but that's the only one it's got. On the other hand, the career of M. Night Shyamalan proves unpredictability and twists can't carry a story on their own; plenty of worn-out plots have made for pretty great stories. Still, Lost has, by its 8th episode, already established a pattern it seems content to repeat without pushing itself, and that can't help but lead to diminishing returns.

On the other hand, it's not afraid to push some serious damn buttons. An Iraqi soldier torturing an American civilian? It's totally removed from the context of war, sure, but even so--that's bold. Doubly so for a colossal mainstream network drama airing its first season just ~18 months after the (new) Iraq War began. Whether the incorporation of elements like that is insightful or exploitive depends entirely on the handling, of course. So far, Lost is somewhere in the middle of that range; Sayid's former enemy soldier isn't so far shedding any light on anything, but he's definitely no mustache-twirling caricature, either. Frankly, he's interesting just by virtue of being there at all.

I feel like "Confidence Man" might be an extremely illuminating episode of Lost as a whole. Strip away the monsters, the strangeness, and the mythology, and what do you have? Decent characters told well with just a little bit of edge to it. In other words, enjoyable enough--but without the Smoke Monster, there's no chance I'd be writing about this show nearly a year and a half after its final episode aired.

Review: Real Steel Made Me Cranky, Kid-Punchy

2011-10-12T10:23:00.000-07:00

My full-length review that may or may not have less swearing at the Herald.

Real Steel provoked the critic in me. Coming on the heels of my reaction to 50/50, it's kind of funny, in a way that's unlikely to make you laugh. With 50/50, I thought "screw my doubts, I loved it, it's great." Yet despite the fact Real Steel had me cheering during the big robot fights--not literally cheering, I'm far too painfully self-conscious to make audible noises to something happening on a screen--it annoyed me too much to give in to the emotional response it provoked in me.

What's annoying about Real Steel? Hugh Jackman's kid, mainly. He's supposed to be 11, but he talks like he's at least 15 and is as self-possessed as a 35-year-old. The Hollywood cliche of the unbelievably precocious kid is one that really sets me off, so if it doesn't really bug you, bump my grade to a C+, and if you get a kick out of kids who don't act their age, seek therapy.

But even if this is a bigger deal for me than most, Real Steel has a lot of flaws. Hugh Jackman and son's motivations swerve wildly. In at least two instances, they completely reverse their stances from one scene to the next. This isn't some high-minded nod to the ambiguity and indecisiveness of real life. It's a cheap, manipulative ploy for laughs and plot advancement. And that's Real Steel as a whole. It isn't awful. It doesn't blow the deceased. In fact, it's pretty easy to get swept up in. But that's because the people who made it are just pushing emotional buttons. The hardware supporting those buttons falls apart as soon as you open the case.

*ROBOT JOKES COMPLETE*

Review: 50/50 Is My Favorite Movie of the First Nine Months of the Year

2011-10-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

Regular newspaper-sized review available at the Herald.

I really, really liked 50/50. When I was driving home, I was mulling over the grade I'd give it, and my critic-brain was all "Yeah, that was quite enjoyable, but how does it stack up to the canon? What does your puny emotional response mean in the face of more than a century of classic films? Let us bestow a B+ upon it and be done."

But then I thought about it some more, and my non-critic brain was all, "Yeah, but this movie really got to me. I thought the emotions felt really human and it was funny and the acting was great and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is like the Brando of my generation. It's not your prototypical classic, but did we enjoy ourselves more at any other movie this year?" And then the critic-brain said, "Huh. No, there's been some good stuff, but nothing awesome. Give it what you want." For a funny, moving, well-written, great-actor film that had a deep understanding of human behavior and feeling? Thus was born my first A of the year.

There's always a little hesitation to declare something great. Much easier to say "This was pretty good, but I'm not so sure about that milkman's motivations!" and ding it a point or two. Nobody can do much complaining when they love something and your response was only mildly loving. And it's not like loving 50/50 is that contrarian a position--its Rotten Tomatoes score is currently 93% (editor's note: holy crap).

Ultimately, my reviews are written of the moment, composed 24-48 hours after a single viewing. It's easy to get swept up in the moment or overly focused on some flaw that seems trivial with more perspective. With 50/50, I might look dumb a year from now. But I know how I felt in the minutes I was watching it.

Earth-Shattering News: My Short Story Collections Are Now Available on Smashwords

2011-10-04T13:36:00.001-07:00

Links ahoy:

The Battle for Moscow, Idaho & Other Stories

When We Were Mutants & Other Stories

The Kemetian Husesen Craze

I just uploaded them to the Smashwords catalogue, so they should be available on iTunes, Sony, and everywhere else within the next few weeks. Smashwords offers sample downloads, if you'd like to check them out. A bunch of these stories are linked in my bibliography (it's down the page) as well.

So I've had these collections on Amazon and B&N for some time now, too, but was procrastinating on Smashwords because I've hardly ever used Word (the only format they accept) and the table of contents looked complicated. It wasn't. It's basically just a dumbed-down HTML with clicking instead of coding, and the Smashwords Style Guide makes it all terribly easy. If you're a small or self-publisher and you're not using Smashwords, do it. Formatting takes a couple hours, tops, and once you have a template in place, you can knock it out in less than thirty minutes.

Now some numbers, because I like them:

All told, there are twenty short stories here. Mutants has eight pieces and is about 50,000 words long. Moscow and Kemetian both have six and are about 24,000 words. The average story is just under 5000 words, then, with the longest ("Steve Kendrick's Disease") at 8400 and the shortest ("The Magic Taco Wagon") at 25. 12 of these stories have been previously published in various magazines and anthologies, meaning 8 were new. To you, anyway. I've seen some of these stories dozens of times.

As long as I was being all businessy, I updated The Zombies of Hobbiton to include links to my other stuff. Been giving that one away for free, so it seemed wise to provide clickables for readers gullible enough to want to read something else with my name (virtually) stamped on it.

Smashwords has nearly twice as many books online since when I posted my first with them at the end of March, so standing out is harder than ever. We'll see if it makes any difference there and elsewhere to have several titles made available at the same time. I doubt it!

I Think I Really Like Writing Novellas

2011-09-29T12:56:00.000-07:00

I've blogged about this before, but novellas are a strange breed. Big paper book publishers don't really sell them because readers don't really buy them. They're only good for an hour or two of entertainment--how much can you really charge for that? Many big fiction magazines will print them, but obviously not more than 1-2 per issue, because they've only got so much space. They're not very widely-published in online mags, either, because they only have so much money to spend per issue and I don't think they're seen as very popular.

But I just finished revising my second-ever novella two days ago. After cuts, it came in right under 17,000 words. It feels great--but it's a fantasy novella, and a quick look at Duotrope shows three pro markets for the length: Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, and the Writers of the Future contest. Expanding that to semipro pay (around 1 cent/word) turns up three more markets.

Not many options.

Let's get specific about terms here, because the precise definition of "novella" varies. For determining awards eligibility and such, SFWA defines short stories as 0-7499 words, novelettes as 7500-14,999, novellas as 15,000-39,999, and novels as 40,000 words and up. Nobody outside the industry really pays attention to or even knows the definition of the word "novelette," though. And the line between novella and novel is definitely wide and blurry--40,000 words is only about 133 pages, which is extremely short for a modern-day novel. Even Harlequin category romances are usually more like 50,000, and except in genres with page counts that are frequently shorter (Young Adult) or longer (epic fantasy), publishers generally won't touch anything from a first-timer below 80,000 or above 120,000. Plenty of exceptions, but that's conventional wisdom these days.

If you asked me to define length by some combination of industry standard and gut feel for reader expectations, I'd break it down like this:

Flash fiction: 1-1000 words; roughly 1-3 pages

Short story: 2000-9000 words; 6-30 pages

Novella: 15,000-36,000 words; 50-120 pages

Novel: 60,000-300,000+ words; 200-1000+ pages

There are some missing word counts here, clearly. I'd shade anything in between toward whatever category it's closest to, but the in-betweeners are kind of bastard lengths. A 1200-word piece is really more flash fiction than short story; 12,000 words should probably be called a novella, I guess, but if you ordered something labeled as a "novella" online and three days later you got a story that's only 40 pages long, you might feel a little cheated. Same deal if you ordered a "novel" that arrived as 150 pages. Technically accurate, just lacking.

It's not a big deal, though. I'm just looking at this stuff for two reasons. One, I like numbers. I spent far too many minutes tweaking that breakdown above, because that is the type of thing my brain considers fun. Second, I think it helps conceptualize what each of these lengths means.

Looking at that, you can see a novella is somewhere between a quarter and a half the length of a shortish novel (and knee-high on a grasshopper compared to the tomes of George R.R. Martin). And it turns out that length is awesome to write.

This may be particular to fantasy and science fiction, because in my still limited experience, 50-120 pages is the perfect length to create a world that feels expansive and lived-in. You don't have the roaming scope of a novel, where you can divert for several pages just to explain the social habits of AI or the breeding cycles of dragons, but compared to a 15-page short story, you can do an immensity of exploration. My recent novella is set in a secondary world where the day cycle is radically different from our own. This changes just about everything about the world. I couldn't do more than hint at how in a short story. With the 60ish pages I wrote, I was able to spend a significant amount of time in both halves of the world.

Why not just write a novel? Um, good question, actually. I may just do that. I like this world and I'd like to see more of it.

But the story I had in mind didn't have to be that long. It was big, but it wasn't novel-big. And that's pretty much why I wrote it this month despite being in the middle of a full-length novel: I'd had this novella idea on the backburner for months, and I got stuck about 3/4s of the way into this novel. It wasn't fun to write anymore and meanwhile I couldn't wait to take a shot at that novella idea I was in love with. I hate to lose momentum in the middle of a book, but eventually I said screw it and just jumped into the novella.

Where I found, yet again, that it's possible to carry the whole story in your head at once. Maybe other people can do this with novels, but I have a hard time visualizing and tracking an entire damn book at the same time. You've got dozens if not a couple hundred different scenes to write. There are subplots and side characters and themes and back stories and worldbuilding flying right and left. With so much to keep track of, it's easy to veer off course, be it starting in the wrong place, hitting a plot-swamp where you don't know how to bridge your middle to the end you've got in mind, or whatever else. Point is, novels are huge and they're messy.

Novellas aren't huge. They're just big. If you have a beginning and an end, it's pretty easy to visualize how to bridge the two. It's a hell of a lot easier for me, anyway, and when I can see where I'm going, I write a whole lot faster. If I had it all planned out and hit a hot streak, I could probably burn through a novella's first draft in 7-10 days. And I'm kinda slow.

Instead, between pre-plotting, drafting, and revising, it took me the better part of the month. And that was a good thing. I got a lot of writing done while getting enough perspective from that bogged-down novel to start thinking I may have taken the last few chapters in the wrong direction. Now that I've had some time away, I don't really have a problem scrapping them and taking a different route to my ending. I could have taken a break for short stories instead, but I was low on ideas and typically am slow to come up with them, and I would have been tempted to come back to that novel-in-progress much sooner. Maybe too soon.

Instead, I have something big to show for the month. The length is a handicap now that I'm sending it out to markets. But I'm no longer reliant on the 3-6 places that'll buy a fantasy story of this length to see any money from it. If they pass, I'll peddle it for a buck or two through the usual online stores and see what happens. I have a feeling novellas look a lot better on ereaders than they do as a thin slice between two covers.

Review: Moneyball Is Money. Ball

2011-09-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

As always, my professional review's available over at the Herald.

My unprofessional review: I'm a big fan of sports, but I'm lukewarm at best towards sports movies. The dramatic arc is about as predictable as it gets. New coach rolls in, finds his team is filled with losers who no one believes in, belief in them ensues, they start winning, beginning an improbable comeback which leads to the championship, which they win, or which they sometimes lose, but you know they'll be even better next year. Someone is hoisted onto someone else's shoulders, credits roll, hooray.

Moneyball kind of follows that pattern but also not. Brad Pitt isn't the Oakland Athletics' coach, he's the general manager. And he's not taking over, he's just facing the offseason loss of this three biggest stars. And if you know your recent baseball history--as a fan of the Seattle Mariners, Oakland's division rivals, I am painfully familiar with this--you'll know the A's didn't win or even go to the World Series in 2002, leaving Moneyball's dramatic climax to focus instead on their history-making 20-game win streak. Some of the old cliches are here, like when Pitt and assistant Jonah Hill rake together an "island of misfit toys" nobody else wanted or valued, but, well, that really happened, so. Anyway, I've got this theory that good stories are a balanced mix of the cliched and the original. Moneyball has both.

Pitt turns in another solid Pitt performance as a guy who failed young and can't stand losing now. Hill's pretty great, too, as a bottled-up geek-type whose ideas about baseball are about to revolutionize the game. Although the history's already written, and it's a sports movie so you know there will be triumph in the end, Pitt's gnawing doubt and worry about whether his crazy new plan will pan out is so effective your stomach will be churning right along with him. Writers Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian paint a lot of extras into the margins; I loved how they nailed Pitt's ex-wife's new man as a soft-spoken, gentle, caring wussbag who's probably the exact opposite of Pitt, the former pro player willing to take a huge gamble with an MLB franchise.

I gave Moneball a B+, and I feel like I might have short-changed (sweet pun, me) it a bit. It's thrilling and competent in the very best way. A few years from now, we could be looking at this one as a classic.

Review: Drive Was So Awesome I Forgot to Say Anything About It

2011-09-25T16:15:00.000-07:00

Except at the place where I get paid to, of course.

Drive is good. You can tell Drive is going to be good from the opening scene, where Ryan Gosling, moonlighting as a getaway driver for a pair of robbers, shuttles them away from the crime scene through a net of cop cars and helicopters. It isn't a car chase, though Gosling flips a couple sweet maneuvers along the way. It's more of a car hide, with Gosling slipping out of view, holing up, and finally blending in with the crowd to escape being caught. It's tense, it's gripping, and it's a hugely welcome break from your typical "vroom vroom VROOM bash *cop car flips over median, explodes*" chase scene.

This movie should be big for director Nicolas Winding Refn. It's incredibly stylish and awash with righteous performances out of Gosling, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, and Oscar Isaac, who I don't think I've seen before but whupped all kinds of dramatic ass as a man released from prison to find Gosling sniffing around Isaac's wife Carey Mulligan. It's a non-action action movie that'll have you questioning whether Gosling is a hero or maybe just a psychopath who's finally found the chance to lash out.

I liked Drive so much it convinced me to finally watch Refn's Valhalla Rising, which had been languishing on my Netflix queue for some time. Unfortunately, the review never appeared online, but I liked that one too. Not for everyone, though--very moody and light on dialogue. Drive is, too, but it should have much wider appeal as--perversely--a sort of indie crime drama romance sandwiched around or possibly by meaty scenes of vicious action.

Review: Contagion Once More Proves One of Life's Greatest Pleasures Is Watching the Rest of Life Get Wiped Out by Deadly Deadly Disease

2011-09-12T05:21:00.001-07:00

Full review available at the Herald.

Yeah, that headline isn't a joke. I really do love "lethal virus threatens society as we know it" movies. It's a serious contender for my favorite subgenre, right up there with "alien fleet threatens society as we know it" and "natural disaster threatens society as we know it." I might have some hostility issues? Well, what can you do.

Besides watch Hollywood's Contagion! That's good transition. While many breakdown-of-society stories like 28 Days Later keep the focus on a single character of family's efforts to survive the chaos, Contagion, much like 2012, takes a broader view. Family man Matt Damon is the stand-in for the guy on the street; wife Gwyneth Paltrow dies within the first minutes, evoking cheers across the internet and leaving Damon to try to protect his surviving daughter from disease. Most of the movie is about the CDC and WHO's efforts to track down the virus' source, identify its characteristics, and create a vaccine.

The result is a race against two things: the clock, and a force of nature that could mutant at any time. Even more horrifying, however, is Steven Soderbergh's relentless illustration that we're all totally boned against infection and the only chance of staying healthy is to seal yourself in a bubble. A bubble with a lot of machine guns strapped to its sides. Stop touching things, people! You're going to kill us all!

Contagion doesn't just have an ensemble cast (you got Bryan Cranston, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, John Hawkes, and Marion Cotillard--oh, and the always-awesome Enrico Colantoni), it's got an ensemble plot. Some of its threads are stronger than others, but they work great as a whole, building to a disturbingly plausible and pleasingly comprehensive look at how something we can't see could threaten everything we've built together.

New Review of The White Tree Declares It Will Probably Outsell the Bible

2011-09-07T07:09:00.000-07:00

Well, not quite. But the fine man over at Free Book Reviews did give The White Tree a very, very nice writeup. Seriously, the first sentence of the review proper includes the word "masterpiece" and that's not preceded by the words "not a," anti-", or "what in Bizarro World would be considered a." Give it a read.

It's been a while now since I finished or reread The White Tree and it's been very cool to see the odd review roll in and remind me of what's between the covers. Like that main characters Dante and Blays get into and perform an awful lot of trouble. The review puts it better than I could when it says, in reference to the two, "not all heroes have to always do the right thing to do the right thing."

One of the main things I wanted to do with that book was write an epic fantasy where the heroes are very rarely faced with obvious choices between good and evil, leaving them to make a lot of decisions that are questionable, amoral, or outright wrong--but without making them antiheroes, exactly. I'm hardly the first one to do that, but it's still gratifying to read about someone else getting the same kick out of that as I did.

Incidentally, The White Tree's still available at Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble.

Review: Apollo 18 So Bad I Really Don't See How It Had Those 17 Prequels

2011-09-06T04:47:00.000-07:00

Full review available at the Herald.

I was looking forward to Apollo 18. I've been looking forward to it for a while now--its original release date was something like April 22, I think, and somewhere around that time, I saw a trailer for a movie where a secret moon mission was investigating something strange we'd found there. Oh man! I thought. That concept is exactly the kind of thing I would love! I can't wait to see this. Then, a few seconds later, a logo appeared and I realized it was fucking Transformers: Bark at the Moon.

Then something bizarre happened. A couple weeks after that, I saw a trailer for another movie revolving around a secret moon mission. It was as if the universe had yanked my secret-moon-mission football away from me only to say "Just kidding, here it is after all. Have fun!" Amazing! When does something like that happen to you? Never, that's when.

Then I went to see Apollo 18. In the ultimate Lucy-football move, it was worse than Dark of the Moon.

It isn't immediately obvious that Apollo 18 will be shitty. Not to me, anyway. I find this is true of a lot of bad movies (the big ones, anyway). Generally, as I'm watching something that turns out to be terrible, I'm thinking "Well, this hasn't really grabbed me, but maybe the second half will do something with the kinda boring stuff that's happened so far." Then everything shoots off the rails and the movie's total badness becomes clearer than the void of space, which is as clear as you can get because it is a vacuum. Space.

In this case, signs of Apollo 18's suck didn't appear to me until they reached the moon. That's when director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallago decided that scenes are not something that should be coherent. I get that it's found footage from the '70s that was recovered from the inky void of space/the dusty, windless surface of the moon, but I also get that I am a human being whose eyes have a hard time making sense of grainy, distorted, jumpy, cut-happy sequencing.

Of course, it doesn't matter so much, because it turns out there just isn't that much to see. SPOILERS to follow.

What's on the moon? Rock-monsters. Small stones that are actually crab-bug things that burrow inside one of the astronauts, give him a plague, and make him insane. A lot of people have ragged on this concept, which okay, but it really is no less silly than giant fucking truck-people from beyond the stars showing up to stage a war on planet Earth. On the sci-fi silliness scale, I give rock-monsters on the moon about a 6.5. Maybe a 7. Faintly ridiculous, sure, but not irredeemably so. I mean, they're not actually rocks. They just have space-camouflage.

But we learn essentially zero about them. Where did they come from? Have they always been there? Do they hibernate when food sources don't come along? Because in the 4-billion-odd-year history of the moon, there have only been what, like a couple of guys who actually walked around on it. There may also have been a monkey at some point. Unless these things eat gray, potential prey sources are a little scarce. As for the particulars of the space madness they introduce to one of the crew, or who the crewmembers are themselves, all of that is pretty much left up to the imagination. It's like the creators came up with the whole crab-rocks on the moon idea, looked at each other, and said "Well, that's it then. Let's roll!"

Thing is, you don't even need much if any exposition. Cloverfield hardly begins to answer anything about its Manhattan-stomping monster. But we know plenty about the characters. And the pacing and story beats of the script are impeccable (whatever you think of the movie itself).

Apollo 18 has neither material nor execution. It's just there. If "there" is ever "on your TV," you should probably turn it off.

Review: Don't Be Afraid of the Dark Is Like a Guillermo Del Toro Hand-Me-Down (Which Is to Say Cultured But a Little Stretched-Out)

2011-08-30T07:21:00.000-07:00

Full review, as usual, available over at ye Herald.

Why do I say Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is a Guillermo Del Toro hand-me-down? Because it is. The inspiration for it has got to be that scene in Hellboy 2 with the pixie-sized monsters who also eat teeth. Grafting that idea onto the concept from Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (an unusually effective TV movie from 1973) is a good fit, and raiding/expanding your own ideas is hardly a high crime, but it makes the whole thing feel a little tossed-off.

Especially because the story is just all wrong. I don't know if it's Troy Nixey's direction or Del Toro's cowritten script--wait, yes I do, it's both--but it seems like the same goddamn scene repeats itself fifty goddamn times: Bailee Madison, the little girl, is attacked by tiny monsters, does nothing, then gets rescued by a grownup in the nick of time. Why is this repeated over and over and over? Well, you can't just have her get eaten 30 minutes in, dummy. That's why. That would be a TV episode and not a movie.

Still, in practice, it's a boring story structure that slowly disengages you from the material until you don't really give a shit about what's happening in this kooky old house. What was the deal with Guy Pearce, too? His acting was all stiff--he's normally great--and his character's motivations seemed to be "whatever is dramatically convenient to the current scene" rather than anything consistent. There were just way too many seams visible in Don't Be Afraid of the Dark to lose yourself in it. There was nothing terrible about it. Just nothing all that fresh, either.

They kind of got hosed on the R-rating, incidentally. I read it was for something like "heavy and persistent fear," which is a BS rating. There's certainly not any language, violence, nudity, drug use, thematic content, or any of the other usual suspects at play here. I think they got tagged with the R-rating (which reduces profits on just about any horror movie) because they opened the movie with a fairly grisly (but not that graphic) scene of dental trauma. That shit will make anyone squirm.

Review: Conan the Barbarian Disgraces Its Father (And Any Other Nearby Male Relatives)

2011-08-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

(Full review available at the Herald.)

Despite liking a lot of his other movies, I didn't see the Arnold Schwartzenegger Conan the Barbarian until just three or four years ago. I was shocked, then, to discover it wasn't just the cheesy pile of oily pectorals, chicks in chainmail, and spilled flagons of mead I'd expected. Instead, it was.. good? Yes. It was good. A good time. Conan was an unstoppable force, a man of simple pleasures who did what he wanted when it felt right to do so. Zen-like, in his way. Except for all the murder. And the sex with Sandahl Bergman. I don't remember any koans about that stuff, that's for sure. Meanwhile, James Earl Jones' Thulsa Doom (a sure contender for the Oscar's Most Awesome Name category) was creepy, charismatic, and commanding. The support cast was fun, the world wild and wide-open.

The first Conan the Barbarian made Schwartzenegger a star. I'm thinking the remake was meant to do the same for Jason Momoa, he of "Khal Drago from Game of Thrones" status and little else. I'm afraid the big man is going to have to try again with something else.

Because the new Conan the Barbarian is that bland kind of lifeless that's perhaps most depressing in all the land of Moviedonia. It isn't especially terrible or ridiculous or over-the-top. Like I said in my proper review, I enjoyed the efforts to capture the Egypt-but-not-Egypt, Europe-but-not-Europe vibe of Robert E. Howard's original stories, as well as the reintroduction of Conan's animal cunning. They were remaking Howard's work as much as Arnold's.

It's just that there's no depth to it. No true worldbuilding. Just a shitload of exposition about a magic mask which, despite a full Lord of the Rings-style prologue by universal voice of authority Morgan Freeman, is never really all that clear. The result is one part Conan, one part LOTR, and about four parts generic costume action dullery like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

Conan the Barbarian isn't the kind of movie you watch to amp yourself up before riding out to meet your enemy. Instead, it's the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday morning, quietly hungover on the couch, when it's not important what's on the TV so long as it's tuned to something.

Review: 30 Minutes or Less Deserves Far Less of Your Time

2011-08-24T11:18:00.001-07:00

(Full review available here.)

I didn't like Zombieland. Except for you-know-who's cameo, I thought it was derivative and unfunny, an uninspired recycling of other, better zombie movies. Plus a lot of it didn't even make any fucking sense! Who's that British guy doing the Hitchhiker's Guide-style narrative intrusions? Who's keeping score of the "kill of the week" in this post-apocalyptic wasteland? Nobody, that's who! I call bullshit!

I have heard from others who feel similarly about Zombieland, yet it felt like everyone else liked it, which is why I periodically burst into righteous hate-flames like above when the topic comes up. Well, our side just got some pretty strong supporting evidence: the sucky failure that is 30 Minutes or Less.

Different writers, same deal: uninspired, unwitty, and un-capable of making me want to watch it ever again. Jesse Eisenberg and Aziz Ansari are funny together, yeah. But although director Ruben Fleischer showed a bit of style with Zombieland, 30 Minutes or Less is about as bland as it gets in visuals, framing, and pacing. It's like if Judd Apatow made a movie except it wasn't funny and it felt much longer than it was and all right, you can stop making jokes about Funny People already.

In my book, Fleischer is now 0-2. That's a baseball metaphor meaning he blows. Well, not really. Any baseball player who goes 1-2 or better every day is the greatest baseball player of all time. But if he doesn't improve soon, or attach himself to better writers next time, we could be looking at the M. Night Shyamalan of comedy directors--a successful debut leading to a long and crummy career.

Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the Film That Restores Legitimacy to Monkey-centric Theater

2011-08-10T18:44:00.000-07:00

Full review available at the Herald.

So. Rise of the Planet of the Apes should not have been good. Did you see the last one? Thank heavens, then. Get to a secure location where the infection can't reach you. According to both minutes of my research, the 2001 Planet of the Apes marks the exact moment Tim Burton became Crappy Tim Burton. Possibly this actually happened during Sleepy Hollow, but since I am not a Burtonoligist and this post is not about Tim Burton, it is now time to move on.

To Planet of the Apes remakes that don't suck! By all rights, this category should consist of no movies. It certainly should not include prequels/reboots of movies about talking, Earth-ruling monkeys. Yet here we are! Life: it contains surprises.

Turns out Rise of the Planet of the Apes is well-placed, well-plotted, and tightly written. It smartly establishes just how this crazy ol' place got started while answering the big questions about the original movie. Also, it doesn't give a shit about the humans. This story is the story of Caesar, the first and leader of the new apes. His "father" James Franco gets a decent chunk of screen time, but when it comes to emotional content, it's all about Caesar and his evolving perspective on the human race.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes isn't perfect--the "bad guys" are all one-dimensional, and the CG and its physics are just a little off (though you get used to them after a while)--but it's much, much better than I anticipated. I'm actually looking forward to the next installment.

Lost Season 1, Episode 2: "Pilot Part 2"

2011-08-06T22:58:00.000-07:00

"Pilot Part 2." Yes. Ten times yes. If all episodes of everything were as good as "Pilot Part 2," there would be no more episodes of anything, as we would have all merged with our couches and been eaten by our starving pets. But until our undignified end as the smell on a puppy's breath, it would be glorious.

Two episodes in, Lost is firing on all cylinders plotwise. After scuffling with Sayid over the transceiver they need to contact help (and the interesting revelation Sayid was a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard), Sawyer leads an expedition inland for high ground and better reception--and winds up shooting a charging polar bear. In the middle of the damn jungle. Sure, grolar bears can live in less-frigid climes, but I have this funny feeling that's not what's going on here. Also I've watched enough nature documentaries to know polar bears can swim like hell, but I'm guessing the Island, wherever it may be, isn't quite in spitting distance of Alaska.

Oh, and when the makeshift team gets to high ground? They discover their signal's being blocked by another. It's in French. It says she's alone and the others have all been killed. And it's been repeating for over a decade.

To sum up--the plane crash survivors aren't the first on the island. They have no way to contact help. And whatever killed the French woman and her people, you can bet it'll be coming for Jack, Kate, Charlie, Sawyer, and all the rest right quick.

Oh, and Charlie is a heroin addict and Kate was the criminal in cuffs being transported by the U.S. marshal.

Holy shit. It's no surprise Lost is rocking on the plot. This is a high-concept show driven by mysterious supernatural forces in the confines of an unknown island. What's really impressive here is how the show isn't at all coy with its characters' histories. This seems like it should be elementary. To get really involved in a show, you have to be able to know the people it's following. But you contrast this with a show like Jericho, a show inspired by Lost which got off to a strong start but was canceled midway through its second season, and it's night and day. Jericho tried to milk all the suspense and hooks it could from the oh-so-mysterious pasts of its two leads (played by Skeet Ulrich and Lennie James). It hardly told us a damn thing about them until halfway into the first season. Who are these two guys? Why do they know so much? Where did they learn to kick all this ass? Fun questions for a few episodes. By the time you're eight-ten deep, those questions dwindle to a single one: Ah, who gives a shit?

That's not what Lost is doing. Lost could have played up the mystery of the missing prisoner for several episodes. It could have stretched out that one thing over an entire season if it wanted. Instead, it's (almost completely) answered over the span of "Pilot Part 2."

It's Kate. She fled to Australia to escape prosecution in the U.S., then got turned in by a kindly farmer who couldn't resist the reward. The episode does a nice job playing on our expectations here; at one scene, Kate's going through some money stashed away, and I'm pretty sure we're supposed to think she's stealing from the nice older man who gave her a room and a job. Instead, it's the money she earned. The show can't help itself from holding back the question of whether she's guilty of the crime she's wanted for, which kind of irks me. When you're juggling so many other unknowns, you have to reveal some things or we'll start to resent the show for being one big tease. But it's kind of true that, as Jack decides, it doesn't matter. What matters is they're trapped on the island and they need to trust each other to survive. On the other hand, he clearly wants to jump all over Kate, and learning for a fact that she's a murderer or what have you could definitely be a boner-wilter.

So is Jack doing right, prioritizing the here and now rather than the past? Or is he letting his thing for Kate cloud his judgment? At this point, either would fit his character. Could be both. Can't say. But I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of this decision and its consequences down the road.

And I can say why Lost was such a smash. Right off the bat, we have people struggling with compelling, unknown, dangerous circumstances--and we have reasons to care about how they do.

That's an incredibly basic formula, which makes it a constant surprise that other shows, movies, and books don't even seem to be trying. Then again, maybe they are trying, and it's just a whole lot harder than it looks. Maybe that's why the ones that get it right connect so hard.

Review: Cowboys & Aliens: Only 30% as Exciting as That Sounds

2011-08-01T22:11:00.000-07:00

Full review available at the Herald.

A movie called Cowboys & Aliens is a movie I should like. A movie directed by Jon Favreau is a movie I should like. Jon Favreau directed Cowboys & Aliens. I didn't like Cowboys & Aliens.

I cover this pretty thoroughly in the review, but I felt like this one is a case of Too Many Writers Syndrome. Typically, if you see a movie with a shitload of writers attached, that movie will be either a) an incomprehensible, wild disaster or b) a big bland dull-fest where nothing really pays off the way it should. Cowboys & Aliens is the latter.

There's nothing particularly wrong with it. But I have a hard time understanding how on Earth a movie with this name feels like something I've seen a hundred times before. Daniel Craig is a man of few words and many ass-kickings. Olivia Wilde is a semi-mysterious love interest with an idiotic secret. (The secret isn't idiotic because it's nonsense--it's logical enough--it's idiotic that it gets like one sentence of explanation before never being discussed again. It's like the whole Armand Tanzanian thing in sci-fi western action movie form.)

I was entertained, I guess!, but I was also pretty let down. I didn't anticipate Cowboys & Aliens would be a sure-fire slam dunk. I was impressed enough by the cast, the director, and the concept to think it could have been a big success. I don't think that will be the case.

Lost Season 1, Episode 6: "House of the Rising Sun"

2011-07-27T20:10:00.000-07:00

Somehow I watched "House of the Rising Sun" without taking down any notes. Or possibly I accidentally deleted them all, having thought I'd already written about it. This means either a) it was so great I had to watch the next episode immediately or b) so disposable I forgot that I hadn't even said anything about it yet because there was nothing to say in the first place.

This episode takes a look at the isolationist Korean couple, kicking off with an apparently unprovoked and brutal attack of Michael by Jin-Soo Kwon. Neither he nor his wife Sun-Hwa can explain--neither speaks English.

Jin, to this point, has been a fairly large asshole. Not large enough to drop a bowling ball through, but he could handle a coffee cup with no problem. He spends most of his time bossing his wife around, correcting her modesty, and then reminding her he loves her. (In fairness, there was that one cool sequence a few episodes back where he harvested urchins and brought their meat to the others.)

Once upon a time, though, Jin was a humble waiter. In flashbacks, we see how he wound up married to Sun, the daughter of a very rich (and, it's implied, fairly dangerous) businessman. Jin's not intimidated. He speaks to her father, gets permission to marry her. Gets taken into the family business. He does well at whatever it is he does--sometimes coming home covered in blood--and along the way, transforms from a charming, down and out young man to a callous, rich, wife-stomping (metaphorically) prick. In fact, at the airport where they wound up boarding the doomed flight, Sun was about to run away from him forever. She changes her mind, however, when he flashes a remnant of his old ways; instead of sneaking off, she boards the flight with him.

On the island, it turns out Sun speaks English. And that Jin is outraged that Michael has her father's watch, which he'd found in the wreckage. Michael approaches Jin, who's been handcuffed to part of the wreck, and angrily returns the watch.

Meanwhile! The others have been exploring the caves, finding food and water. Oh, and two corpses who have been in their current corpsey state for decades. Locke and Charlie have begun to bond when Locke reveals he knows Charlie's in heroin withdrawals--but if he gives up his stash, the island will bring him his lost guitar, which Charlie claims to miss even more than the drugs. Charlie hands over his ball of dope. Locke points up, where the guitar's hanging from a tree.

Yet all is not so sunny in Lost-land. Jack thinks they should move into the caves rather than constantly shlepping water to the beach, but others, Kate among them, thinks they need to remain on the beach on the lookout for rescue. The survivors split roughly in half, some going to the cage, the others remaining on the shore.

Good episode. Not much in the way of island-development other than the bodies and the stones on them, though. One rock's black, the other's white. Parallels to Locke's little backgammon scene in the first episode. I'm getting the idea the island has something to do with good versus evil, or at least two opposition forces struggling for control. Over what, I don't know--the survivors, their souls, the last unopened bag of Ruffles. Maybe I'll know more in a season or five.

The flashbacks continue to be highly effective. If there's one thing the writers of Lost are showing right off the bat, it's that they can tell vast character arcs over the span of a single episode that's also got drama and infighting and tree-mangling monsters. Six episodes in, we already know the fairly complete backgrounds of what, five characters? Jack, Kate, Locke, now the Kwons. Over the 20-odd-episode run of the first season, they should be able to flesh out the entire main cast with ease. To a degree, these characters are still coming off as types (the reluctant leader, the woman on the run from the troubled past, the propriety-obsessed Asian man, the junkie has-been rocker), but still--we're only six episodes in. An awfully long time remains for us to be introduced to the deeper wrinkles, faults, and quirks of the marooned passengers.

A group we're finally starting to see some serious divisions within. Sure, we've seen Locke and Sayid and other individuals go after each other, but in "House of the Rising Sun," not everyone's blindly willing to do whatever Jack says. Any society, no matter how small, is going to be composed of a number of different actors and interests. I'm glad to see the ad hoc island society is no exception.

"Good vs. evil will be a running theme" is my only speculation ginned up for "House of the Rising Sun." That, and it seems like people wash up to the island on a regular basis, at least once a generation or so. As for whether they're brought to the island by accident or some devious island-mind intent? That, I once more have no idea.

Lost Season 1, Episode 7: "The Moth"

2011-07-27T02:22:00.000-07:00

So. Mr. Charlie isn't doing too hot with his heroin addiction these days. I sympathize: I'm trying to quit smoking literally as we speak, and it isn't easy. In one way, it's terribly easy: just don't buy more. If you don't have anything to smoke (or, in Charlie's case, rub on your gums/shoot up/snort), you have nothing to continue feeding your addiction with. Once the substance is gone, it's just a matter of getting through the detox stage. For most chemicals, that's just a matter of a few days (nicotine has a half-life of just two hours; it's out of your body completely in three days). After that, the physical addiction is flushed from your system. Then it's purely mental.

But your brain is tricksy. Your brain is a lowdown rat bastard. Due to the power of rationalization, your brain can make you think just about anything, especially when it's trying to trick you into supplying it with more delicious chemicals. Every time you've acted against your better nature, that's you rationalizing and letting the addiction win. I know. Two days ago, I smoked my "last" cigarette. I was going on the patch. But the patch made my sick (honestly, it did), so now I'm trying to wean myself down by smoking fewer cigarettes per day. Then I'll go on a lower-dose patch. Then I'll quit completely. That's what I want and intend to do.

We'll see.

For Charlie, Locke takes his drugs away and tells him if he really wants them back, all he has to do is ask three times. Here's some more reinforcement of Locke as a mystical figure who guides you to enlightenment. For Charlie, though, as we see in flashbacks, he never wanted to wind up a druggy; he just wanted to play the music, and his no-account brother kept sucking him back in, first using him to get fame and glory, then sticking him right back in his place when he tries to get out.

Meanwhile, Locke tells Charlie that silk moths are the strongest of all, because they have to struggle so hard to break from their cocoons. For all of us who've ever been locked into an addictive behavior--whether that's smoking, World of Warcraft, or lifting weights--let's hope he's right.

On the other end of things, Jack tries to talk Kate into coming to their home in the caves, but she wants to help Sayid with the transceiver. Which is out of batteries. The only one who has batteries is Sawyer. Back at the caves, Jack gets trapped by a landslide; former construction worker Michael tries to dig him out while the others, unaware of Jack's predicament, try to figure out where the mysterious radio signal's coming from. As Charlie digs Jack out, motivated by feelings of helplessness and failure with his band, the others work to track down the signal--until Sayid is clubbed down by a mysterious person.

Jack escapes. Charlie's vindicated. Kate, who rushed in to help once she heard, is brought back to Jack. Charlie goes to Locke and asks for his heroin for a third time. A disappointed Locke hands it over--but Charlie throws it into the fire.

I should probably give "The Moth" another watch now that I'm going through a similar event, if far less serious and life-threatening, than Charlie. At the time, I felt like this episode was effective, but a little.. lacking. A little pat. The writers of Lost are doing an excellent job of giving us the broad strokes of their ensemble cast, but sometimes it feels a little too broad. I liked Charlie's story, but I felt like I'd seen it before. Rock star. Drugs. Downward spiral. Redemption. I did buy him burning the last of his drugs, though. He realized they were never what he wanted, and even in the deepest throes of addiction, you can make a gesture toward quitting, understanding you don't really have to, that you can just go buy more tomorrow. Charlie, though, he doesn't have that option unless he starts farming poppies and constructing a steam-powered drug factory. Maybe I need to go get stranded on an island.

Meanwhile, there's little to no advancement of the secrets of the island. Sayid tells Kate there's now way they could have survived if the plane's tail came off like it did, which may or may not be deep foreshadowing. I can't say.

I also have no fucking clue who KO'd Sayid. In the "Lost repeatedly defies our expectations department," Shannon is clearly supposed to fail at helping the others triangulate the French woman's signal, yet does her part in the end. Good for her. Her character is still terrible.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hurley needs a Hurley-centric episode post-haste. That means "now."

On the macrocosmic end of the spectrum, I'm enjoying Lost's use of flashbacks. I feel like they're going to get a lot of mileage out of these, potentially developing the hell out of their characters. Considering how big their cast is, that's good. That's a good thing. Also: the writing is ambitious. Locke's moth monologues are potentially embarrassing and pretentious, but they work well with the plot of "The Moth," spelling shit out for us without being too obnoxious. (I credit the actor for that one. But not enough to click over to the other tab for his actual name.)

Still, this episode left me a little wanting. I like Charlie a lot, and I feel like if I watched "The Moth" after rewatching the entire series, I might appreciate it more. But this one did very little besides humanize Charlie. It feels like the heart-wrenching momentum of the first few episodes is flagging.

Is that enough to make me question whether I should keep watching? No. Not at all. It's just a moment of early skepticism about Lost's enduring greatness. I still look forward to being proven wrong.

And to quitting these goddamn cigarettes.

Review: Captain America Continues Unlikely String of Superhero Success

2011-07-26T02:56:00.001-07:00

Full review available at the Herald.

I have but a moment for this one, but Captain America is almost annoying in that we're not supposed to have this many good-to-great superhero movies. Green Lantern sucked, sure, but we're looking at a year that's already had Thor and X-Men: First Class, which I was unexpectedly blown away by. Captain America is stocked with a bunch of middling talent (for the most part--Tommy Lee Jones is great, and Chris Evans continues to make me think he's always better than I'm expecting), yet they really came together for a solidly entertaining couple of hours of a dude with a stars and stripes shield punching the fuck out of Nazi-demons.

I came in with low expectations, which always clouds things, but it's possible I'm even underrating it a tad. Want superheroes, World War II, and stuff blowing to hell? Captain America is a good buy.

Review: Larry Crowne, Which Was Pretty Terrible

2011-07-20T13:36:00.000-07:00

Full review available here.

So, Larry Crowne. Not just starring Tom Hanks, but directed and cowritten by Tom Hanks. And I pretty well hated it! How do you hate a Tom Hanks movie? I found a way.

It mostly comes down to two things: Larry Crowne is a mess, and its sensibility is very, very stupid, filled with quirky, fun! people and Manic Pixie Dream Girls ordered straight off the MPDG rack. I'm gonna go ahead and blame a lot of that on cowriter Nia Vardalos. Why? Because I can. It seems like her style. You can't prove it's not her fault!

But back to the mess. Is this the story of a man going through a mid-life crisis? An inspiring school drama? Or a romantic dramedy whose greatness is on full display when Julia Roberts' porn-obsessed sketch of a husband bellows about "huge knockers"?

Larry Crowne is all of these things. Larry Crowne is none of these things. This might sum it up best: Tom Hanks' titular character says "Speck-tack-ah-lur!" on several occasions. Why? What is this supposed to say about Larry Crowne? Is it supposed to say anything at all? Is it supposed to be funny?

I have no damn clue. Somewhere in there is a much better movie. But you'd have to strip out the drapes, the carpet, and most of the furniture to get there--they're tacky, confused, and awfully hard to look at.

Lost, Season 1, Episode 1: "Pilot (Part 1)"

2011-07-20T01:10:00.000-07:00

Now that's what I call a pilot.

Jack wakes in a jungle. He stumbles onto a beach, where he discovers a plane crash--the same crash he was on. With no ado, he begins treating the survivors--setting a tourniquet around a man's gushing leg, ensuring a pregnant woman's going to be okay before sending him away, restarting the heart of the woman who sat next to him on the plane, despite the worst efforts of a lifeguard boy to cut her throat open needlessly. Jack is, quite clearly, participating in triage, the battlefield art of treating those who most need help when they need it. He's machinelike, the perfect man for this tragic circumstance.

It's a wonderful introduction to the man who I can only assume will be the main character throughout the 120 episodes of Lost. He's strong. He's capable. He's just about fearless. And the acting, from Matthew Fox, is top-notch. We've seen this Jack before: confident, handsome, competent, take-charge. We've seen this Jack a thousand times before.

But this Jack is something different. It's the writing, the directing, and the acting. He doesn't discuss, to others or himself, why he's treating the people he's treating. He does so instinctually. With humor, even, sending the lifeguard away to fetch a senseless pen while he brings a woman back from death. He saves multiple lives on that beach, and even then, among the cinematic explositions, blood loss, and death, does he retreat to the woods, where he treats his own wound--perhaps first realizing it's there, perhaps understanding it's of far lower priority than the events on the beach--enlisting Kate, the clear love interest, even this early, to help sew up his own wounds, with an aplomb that's far too encouraging for her to resist. It's a defining moment not only for him, but for her, defining two characters while reacting to epic disaster. Jack's monologue about operating on the spine of a young woman is disgusting and brave and revealing.

Now that's a hell of an introduction.

The immediacy and confidence of Lost is clear from the start. The crash itself, on a remote island, is gripping enough to demand viewers tune in for the next episode. Then they kick it up another notch: there's something in the jungle, a creature enough to stir the palms from trunk to crown. We're watching a high concept on top of a high concept.

Meanwhile, there are moments from others--the federal marshal, the Korean couple, the young lifeguard and his entitled sister, and Hurley, the designated comic relief. Moment after character moment pile up in a span of minutes. In no time at all, we have a window onto a half dozen characters who'll play an imporant part of everything to come. Or so I believe. I understand there are monsters. Monsters tend to eat people. The one here is excellent, unseen but heard, a metallic, trumpeting call that's so unearthly we're immediately clued in that not all is right in this place.

Meanwhile meanwhile, there are flashbacks. Jack seems pretty intent on his drink, for reasons which become more evident a few episodes on (I have, at this point, watched the first six). He and the woman in the seat on the plane next to him are developed at the same time as we see the run-up to the crash.

We also get a good look at Charlie, from the always-great Dominic Monaghan, as a girl-chasing, heroin-addicted rocker. Again, not the most original of characters, but there's something about him. He's funny, for one, which absolves just about every crime. (Except the felonious kind. Trust me on that, violence-doers and drug-dealers.) Already, this seems to be a common thread for Lost: taking a familiar, archetypal character, and showing us something about them we haven't necessarily seen before.

Also: the moment where Kate is looting better shoes to go for a hike, and Locke watches her, with apparent disapproval, only to make a clown-face with the orange peel in his mouth, complete with the clown-like scar running down his right eye. It's an absurd, funny, troubling moment that gives a good indication of how many cylinders this show is already running on.

The morning after the crash, Jack goes after the plane's transceiver. Charlie goes with, where we get his background, along with Kate. The island breaks into sudden and intense rain. Jack, Kate, and Charlie find the cockpit, along with the pilot, who's injured but alive--but not for long. He reveals a radio problem forced them to divert the plane a thousand miles off course. As the howling monster rolls in, the pilot leans out the window--fatally, as it's made abundantly, inevitably clear by the shot of him leaving the transceiver behind on the seat--and gets hauled away.

Before that, the others flee into a chaotic race through the dark jungle. Charlie falls, only to be rescued by Jack, who gets lost himself, leaving Kate to track him down. They regroup. The rain stops. They find the gruesomely mutilated body of the pilot. What caused it? How could anything be that disgustingly brutal?

I never watched an episode of Lost previous to this one, but I'd heard plenty about it. I know the monster is the Smoke Monster, an ill-defined presence that haunts them all from start to (I think) finish. I'm not aware of its significance. I know, as a first-time viewer, it's creepy and unsettling, a clear indication that what's to come can't be judged or predicted by what we know is true in our own day-to-day lives.

Two big concepts, nearly a dozen characters, many of whom are already well-defined, and a distinct shooting style. It's no wonder the pilot got picked up for a season--nor that it caught on for a six-season run of 120 episodes. From its first episode, Lost knew how to entertain like few shows do.

Lost Season 1, Episode 5: "White Rabbit"

2011-07-17T18:28:00.000-07:00

So how did I do on my last (and first) set of predictions? The one where I guessed that, now that the survivors have their food and water situation under control, they'd move on to shelter?

Pretty terrible! In "White Rabbit," it turns out they don't have so much water after all. In fact, they're down to 17-odd bottles of water. And they've eaten most of the boar Locke caught, too.

Faced with the water-based version of starvation, the group turns to Jack for leadership. He wants nothing of it. He's haunted by memories of his father, who told him he couldn't handle the pressure of being a hero--unlike himself, a mighty surgeon who saves and fails to save lives every day--a point hammered home to Jack after the events of the morning, when a woman's drowning out to sea. He tried to save her, but could only bring in the lifeguard kid who'd gone out first, who denies that he was drowning and blames Jack for the loss of the woman. Not a terribly fair accusation, that. Psychologically sound, though--the kid no doubt feels guilt about his own failure to save her. That and he's a teenager, and teenagers aren't good at much except getting mad at people who are older than them.

Between this and the possibly hallucinatory visions Jack's been having of a man in a suit, he's got no interest in leading. Instead, he goes off to find about the man.

The others, meanwhile, discover the water's been stolen. Hurley and Charlie, the ones who were supposed to keep watch on it, naturally suspect Sawyer. They bring Kate into the fold, who discovers Sawyer's stash of black market goods. (His little market was established nicely earlier in the episode, when the lifeguard's sister (I'll learn all their names eventually!) tries to buy some bug spray from her and learns that unlike Charlie, Sawyer's too canny to fall victim to her good looks.) But Sawyer's not behind it: water, he points out, is worthless. It just falls right out of the sky.

Jack continues to search for the man in the suit. In flashbacks, we learn that his dad succumbed to the pressure on a regular basis, disappearing for days on end to go on drunken benders. When he disappeared again, Jack's mom browbeat a reluctant Jack into tracking him down in Australia. There, Jack found he'd died of an alcohol-related heart attack. Jack was bringing his body back to the States when the plane crashed.

And the man in the suit in the jungle, it turns out, is his father. Or a vision of him. In chasing him down, Jack falls off a cliff, catching hold of the vines . Locke hauls him up to safety. After learning what's going on, Locke convinces him the island is somehow magical (he infers he saw the Monster), and that Jack needs to continue his search.

Continuing on, Jack finds his father's coffin. It's empty. But he finds fresh water, too. When he returns to the camp (where it's been discovered the lifeguard boy stole the water), Jack takes on the mantle of leadership. They might be stuck on this island for a long time. If they don't start working together, people are going to continue to die.

Jack's dad was wrong. About himself and about Jack. He was the one who couldn't handle the demands of being a hero. Jack might well be what he never could.

I was surprised the group hadn't already secured a source of water, or started collecting rain or whatever. Water, after all, is the kind of thing you need. Like, lots of, every day. Could be they're still in denial over the crash, which is reasonable enough, or they just lack the leadership to organize them, which is, well, the whole point of "White Rabbit," I suppose. Still, it seems crazy, especially that none of the 47 people alive at episode's start had done anything about it for six whole days. Does this seem insane because I'm the kind of person who would go mad if I didn't immediately start trying to solve the problems in front of me? Or am I coming at this from a skewed perspective, aware they're gonna be out there for 120 episodes, so get your dumb asses in gear already? Or is it more because I'm forgetting about how they might be sticking to the beach because of the crazy tree-thrashing, people-eating monster that lives out in the jungle?

Some of all, I'd wager! Still, Lost is sticking to its dozen-odd main characters pretty tight so far, leaving the others to be Red Shirts who don't do much besides whatever the important characters tell them and also die every few episodes. Dramatically, it makes sense to keep the focus on your main characters--and Lost has a ton of them already, leaving precious little screen time to go around--but it would be nice for a previously unseen character to do something important soon, just to show that they can.

Now: onto the island and its unfolding mysteries. Jack's seeing his dad, who's dead, and whose body is missing. What does this mean? Does this mean the survivors actually de-survived the crash, and they're also dead in the afterlife? Stuck in a purgatory of sorts, or some strange heaven or hell? Maybe it's none of the above, and the island is just toying with them the same way an insane, supernaturally-powered cat plays with a group of 48 (now 46) shipwrecked mice. Or was Jack just hallucinating from stress, trauma, and lack of sleep? Which explanation best fits the evidence?

You know what? I can't say. The fact is, you can cherry-pick all the evidence you want, but at this point in the show--and given its length, probably much, much deeper into the series--we have no idea where this is going. All we know is the writers have a plan, and they're cluing us into it tidbit by tidbit. Or they have a plan, and they're deliberately misleading us, planting red herrings and puzzles and contradictions while sliding in the truth too stealthily for us to notice. Or they don't have a plan, not a real one, anyway, maybe just an idea of the starting conditions on the island, and they're feeling it out as they go along, knowing they can cobble together something that explains it all (more or less) over the course of time.

Jack could be seeing his dead dad. Jack could be hallucinating. The island could be forcing Jack to hallucinate his dead dad because the island is a big green jerk. With the rules of normality clearly suspended, there's no real way for us to know anything right now. It all depends on who's telling the story, how good they are at it and what they're trying to achieve at this moment in time. I'm currently enjoying the ambiguity of these supernatural elements, but if some hard, fast rules aren't laid down now and then, I wonder how I'll be feeling about it in a season or two.

On the storytelling side of things, it looks like Lost is likely to continue to be heavy on the flashbacks. I like that. As they've done already, it'll help parcel out the characters' back story and help to contrast who they were with what they're becoming. It's good to get off the island once in a while, too. It's claustrophobic. The claustrophobia is part of the point, but still. 80+ hours of jungle, beach, and waves would probably get kinda boring after a while.

Despite my screed about how it's impossible for us to know what's going on right now, I'm going to go on making predictions, if for no other reason than to maintain a record of what I was thinking and what the show seemed to be wanting me to think. So: clearly Jack's going to try to get things organized, which means he's going to face hardships and resistance. Sawyer's likely to be involved in that. The island's paranormal what-have-yous will definitely be involved in making things harder for the tribe to weave their huts and such.

As for the particulars of that paranormal activity.. if I had to forward a theory right now, it's that they died in the crash and are in the afterlife. It's just the most logical explanation. And the inherent hilarity of that last sentence is exactly why such speculation is so pointless--and so much fun.

Lost, Season 1, Episode 4: "Walkabout"

2011-07-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

(Note: I haven't had time to write up the first three episodes yet, but I couldn't resist watching the next one anyway. I should have the earlier ones up within a week or two)

Well, I guess Locke isn't thousands of years old after all.

That was my fiancee's theory after the first couple episodes. The main clue was his declarative statement that backgammon is older than Jesus Christ. But Locke had a kind of gravity to him, mysterious authority. He seemed serene and wise. Really, given Lost's atmosphere and reputation, it seemed more than possible he'd turn out to be some weird immortal, and the backgammon line would be the first of many sly hints.

Nope. Turns out before the crash, Locke was a factory-working loser, tormented by his much younger boss and delusionally in love with a woman on some kind of customer service line (or possibly a phone sex worker, but I think they charge more than the woman quoted here). And that before the crash, Locke was--

Wait, let's rewind. Cover the plot first. On the island, we have two main threads, both of which have to do with dead bodies: 1) what to do with the ones in the fuselage, and 2) how not to become them, because they just ran out of food.

For 1), Jack insists on burning the bodies, a course of action that mildly horrifies some of the others. They don't have a choice, though, because Jack is too convincing, too pragmatic, but in a humanistic way that makes it hard to argue. It's interesting just how pragmatic he is to this point--that also seems to be one of the defining traits of Sawyer, but coming in from the opposite direction of Sawyer's Darwinian, dog-eat-dog philosophy. I'm guessing that'll be a continued point of conflict over the series, and one I'm looking forward to.

Then Jack gets cooler yet: when Claire asks Jack, quite naturally, to head the funeral proceedings, he flat-out refuses. He's not the ultimate do-gooder, which is nice, because when a dude just wants to do good all the time, you just want to trip him when he walks by or shoot spitballs at him when his back is turned. Instead, Jack goes off to comfort the woman whose husband was lost in the crash, drawing her out of her grief and back into the group.

For 2), an invasion of wild hogs inspires Locke to organize a hunting party. Disturbingly, his luggage is full of extremely large knives, and a flashback in which he's referred to as "colonel" had me thinking his factory job was a cover for his real job of jaunting around the world assassinating any fool who dares cross him.

I was wrong. Wronger than six wrongs in a wrongboat. Though Locke seems wildly competent, facing down the Monster and dragging back a big ol' pig to camp, it turns out he really was a desperate old man. A desperate old man who, it's revealed, used to be paralyzed, until the plane crash healed him.

Now that's a reversal. That's a reveal. Already, Lost is anticipating its audience's reactions and expectations and subverting them almost immediately. That "almost immediately" thing is huge: a short time before this, I'd been watching Jericho, a show Netflix promised I'd like but instead turned out to be an endless string of episodes about mysterious badasses whose mysterious pasts still weren't well-revealed a good 15 episodes into the mysterious, mysterious show. Showrunners: that isn't enticing. It's annoying. It makes people want to boo loudly, then change the channel, maybe to something with some of those cops who solve the crimes.

So far, Lost has a firm handle on its exposition. There are several overarching mysteries--the Monster, the island, what caused the crash, and who those guys in suits are near the end of "Walkabout"--but it's not playing games with its characters. If a question arises about them, that question is answered in the same episode, often the very next scene. That's how you keep a show moving. That's how you keep us demanding to see the next episode. The last two episodes have hardly been disappointments, but "Walkabout" lived right up to the pilot's potential.

Where do I think it will go from here? No idea, really. I expect there'll be a Sawyer-centric episode soon, maybe even the very next episode, because right now they seem to be exploring one character per ep and you need the ongoing source of internal group tension Sawyer provides. Now that they've got a source of food and water, the logical next step is to build permanent shelter. Locating the French woman's signal seems like it's going to be a big deal, too. I think they'll resolve that over the next few episodes, but right now I have no damn clue how the details of that will play out.

But I'm sure looking forward to finding out.

So I Finally Got Around to Watching Lost, and I Think That I Might Love It

2011-07-14T11:57:00.001-07:00

For years, the only way I watched Lost was from a distance. I heard it had several things relevant to my interests--monsters, survivors trapped on an island, a good critical reputation--but two things stopped me from diving in. First, with television if nothing else in my life, I'm a completionist; I like to start with the first episode and finish with the last, and I'd missed half a season or more before getting clued in that it might be watching. Second, as the series rolled on and people started to grumble about wheel-spinning, I began to worry its creators might not actually have any idea where they were going with it, and that it might end up canceled, or continuing into self-parody, or getting wrapped up with an idiotic conclusion--maybe it was all just a dream!

Then it ended. Opinion about how it ended ranged all over the map. I read a summary of the ending, which struck me as less than perfect, but at the very least ambitious, and, depending on how all that mythology played out over its run, possibly highly satisfying.

So I started watching two nights ago. I'm only three episodes in. The show is over 100 episodes long, and I hear a lot of those in the middle involve more running in place than a jailed marathoner. But I loved the pilot--that opening scene, smart dialogue, some fine actors with intriguing characters--and thought the next two were pretty sharp as well.

I'm a latecomer. I won't be able to get caught up in the same heights of speculation and theory-making as the first-run fans. But being removed a ways means that maybe I won't be so anxious about its outcome, either. I know going in that it has an ending, and while it may not be the glorious capper such a beloved show deserved, it doesn't sound like anything I've ever seen before, either.

I'm going to see about writing about Lost episode by episode, then, with an attempt, from here on out, to cover each one I watch before moving on to the next. I don't know if I'll make it. It's a big commitment, and I've got a lot of other projects to keep up with (some of which even pay!).

But I think there's a chance I'll love Lost. If so, all that work will be worth it.

Oh Right, Also I Reviewed Transformers: Dark of the Moon

2011-07-06T13:09:00.000-07:00

Full review here.

Okay, and it's the craziest thing, but.. Dark of the Moon didn't suck.

I mean, there were parts about it that still sucked as hard as first Transformers and Revenge of the Fallen. There is still a manic disconnect between the slapsticky, broad, exaggerated humor of the first two acts with the ostensibly tragic, bone-charring deaths of hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans in the third act. Michael Bay is kind of weird.

Overall, it's pretty coherent, but it stands up to scrutiny less well than a Steroids Era-slugger. Or the accounting practices of Enron. Or, and you may have gotten the jist by now, something that doesn't have a leg to stand on, such as a frostbitten penguin. Decepticons pop off of the walls sometimes to ambush plucky little Shia LaBeouf, which is cool until you think "Wait, how long has that guy just been hanging around there? Did he decide to spend his vacation time being a stereo? Is that how these guys relax?" Then you have literally a dozen or more situations where a character is on the verge of being killed only to be rescued at the last possible second. After a while, all those fictional close shaves started to lose all meaning!

Yet for all its clownish buffoonery and dramatic manipulation, I couldn't bring myself to hate it. And I hated the first two. I hated them so much I wanted to revive Unicron on the condition he hover over Michael Bay's mansion and suck him up like the world's hackiest jello shot.

Instead, with Dark of the Moon, well, it was kinda fun. That Chicago battle sequence may have lasted as long as a Lord of the Rings movie, but it looked great and had reversal after comeback after reversal. Was Dark of the Moon good? I wouldn't go quite that far. But it's far and away the closest the Transformers series has ever come to good.

Review: Bad Teacher

2011-07-04T18:16:00.000-07:00

Full thing available here.

Jake Kasdan movie. I like Jake Kasdan movies. In the past, I have enjoyed such Jake Kasdan movies as The Zero Effect, The TV Set, and Walk Hard (not to mention his work on Freaks and Geeks). All that may have something to with the fact Bad Teacher underwhelmed me.

But not all of it, I don't think. There's a lot of vulgarity, crassness, and rudeness to Bad Teacher that doesn't go any further than the initial shock of Cameron Diaz calling a student a fucking idiot. I did laugh on not one, not two, but multiple occasions, but I always had that nagging feeling that I wanted to enjoy the movie more than I actually was.

On the other hand, I've generally found I've liked Kasdan's movies more the second or third time I watch them, so I suppose it's possible I'll warm up to Bad Teacher sometime in the future. I mean, we put a goddamn man on the moon. Anything's possible.

New Review of The White Tree

2011-07-03T13:08:00.000-07:00

Sapphire Book Reviews has posted their review of The White Tree. Spoiler alert: it is a very nice review. Giving it 4.5 stars, she calls The White Tree "an instant page turner" that "has everything you could ask for in an adventure story."

I'm sure I'll wind up with a nasty review one of these days, and I'm sure it'll sting, but it's been pretty nice to keep reading these positive ones in the meantime.

The reviewer does some nice analysis of the religion in the book, too. It's pretty interesting as an author to see what readers and reviewers hone in on--religious strife drives most of the action of the book, but when I was writing it, religion as an entity wasn't one of my main concerns. I mean, I wasn't particularly trying to say anything about it beyond how history, legend, and meaning can be distorted, misinterpreted, and mistranslated by those in power, resulting in profound changes to the original beliefs. That and how these beliefs can divide us.

But it sounds like if the book had been more spiritually-oriented, or obviously trying to make points about specific real-world religions, positive or negative, the reviewer would have been turned off. Which I completely understand--it would take a pretty special book to get me to want to read Christian or inspirational fiction. That's just not my thing. But it just didn't occur to me that what I was writing was that concerned with religion, that close to being a potential social landmine. I was just writing medieval-era epic fantasy. In the medieval ages, religion drove an awful lot of politics, economics, and various social forces. Plus I'd been fascinated by how much of the embedded meaning of ancient parables and stories is lost as, over the course of centuries, a culture moves further and further from the one that created that story in the first place.

Which makes it sound like the religious angle was the driving motivation to write The White Tree. Really, I wanted to tell a story of a kid who discovers a life-long passion while trying to keep himself together in the midst of a harsh and violent world. The rest was just additional color.

The White Tree's available, FYI, in electronic formats at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

I Once Went to the Show: The False Impression of the Infinite Internet

2011-06-29T10:28:00.000-07:00

I used to go to shows. Not in the theater sense, but the musical sense. Not concerts--these were too small and too cool for that--concerts, what are those, Beethoven? The bands your mom listens to?--but "shows."

This would be when I was in high school, the three or four years previous to and including the year 2000. I'm a little older than I used to be. Your average show had anywhere from three to six bands, most of them local, nearly all the rest from the I-5 Corridor across the state, meaning Seattle/Portland/Bellingham/Olympia, and would be attended by anywhere from 20 to 300 people, almost exclusively of the 15-29-year-old age bracket.

Shows didn't cost much. $5, maybe as high as $10 if they'd roped in one of those Seattle bands like 764-Hero or GreenAppleQuickStep that everyone was certain would make it big in a year or three. $5-10 bought you 3-4 hours of a dark, sweaty, ear-stomping dancing, moshing, head-bobbing night out with your friends, normally capped off by an extra couple hours at Denny's drinking coffee, rehydrating, and recapping whatever you'd just seen.

For those of us who hadn't yet become cool enough to drink beer and bang each other, it was about as great as high school got. It was for me, anyway. I was something of a nerd. Not in a bullied, social pariah way--I had a good group of friends and a nice social life. But we didn't have many outlets besides going to Denny's and watching movies and playing GoldenEye and Mario Kart in my parents' basement. It was that kind of town. We were that kind of kids. For me, each show was something to look forward to, a place to get outside myself and jump around, to leave sweating and dazed into the cool desert night.

The main and best place for shows was a place called the Hoedown. The Hoedown was, as the name implies, an old barn that had long ago been converted into a semi-commercial venue, meaning it had a small stage, a back room for the bands, and a floor maybe 30 x 50 feet. The perfect size to pen in a couple hundred kids without feeling too open or too cramped. No concessions or anything like that--the bands set up card tables by the front door to sell their CDs. Other than that, it was rafters, spiderwebs, and dust.

I don't think the Hoedown exists anymore. Not as a showgoing venue, anyway. Even when I was in high school, the place had a checkered past, constantly being bought out, shut down, and reopened, plagued by noise complaints, older kids smoking and drinking in the parking lot, and (I can only guess) spotty revenues. The Tri-City music scene moved on to other places. An old club above a bar in Richland. An agricultural warehouse at the fairgrounds in Kennewick. An upscale motel in Pasco. Kids aged out of the scene while others hung on, becoming minor local fixtures or "Hey, is that weird old guy hitting on your girlfriend?" Bands disbanded, reunited, switched members, changed names, moved away, moved on.

I still see signs for shows when I'm back in town, hear ads for them on the high school radio station where I DJed my senior year. I more or less ended my showgoing days once I headed to college. I've been to a handful since, mostly to watch Gosling aka Loudermilk, the local heroes who actually did move to Los Angeles and get a record contract. And a song on a soundtrack. A tour with Motley Crue and Megadeath. A proper album, The Red Record, which I bought in the Circuit City in Union Square in New York. (Their second album, it should be noted. I'd long ago bought their first, Man With Gun Kills Three!, at its 1998 release at the Hoedown.) According to Wikipedia, they broke up in 2006. I guess it's been a while since I've gone to a show.

I'm remembering all this because a couple nights ago I dragged out my Birdsaw album Fainting Room. Birdsaw was a somewhat unusual Hoedown player, given that they came all the way from San Francisco, which is the furthest I can remember any band traveling from. Sadly, they didn't get much of an audience for their trouble. 40-odd people, maybe, just enough to form a couple lines in front of the stage with a few people milling around near the doors.

They deserved better. Their lead singer, Robin Coomer, was a tiny redhead who looked like you could fold her into a briefcase, but her voice was massive, a soaring, haunting, belting force so loud it should have shattered her ribcage. I was entranced. The band was great, too, a sort of dark, glittering, energetic guitar-rock almost as creepy-pretty-spacey as the vocals. Forgive me if I'm not getting this across. I'm not a music writer.

They did a giveaway of a copy of Haunted by One Question, promising to hand it over to whoever danced the hardest. I was the runner-up. I'm reasonably certain the winner was a plant. The other 38 people mostly stood there, a few of them bobbing their heads.

Birdsaw was my favorite band I ever saw at the Hoedown, so much so that I not only bought the album they'd brought with them, Haunted by One Question, but I emailed them to find out when they'd be back in town next. Sometime, they promised. There may have even been a date attached. They never made it back. Not that I saw. If they did, I'd already moved away.

I burned a copy of that album, gave the original away to a friend. I just about wore the CD out on my Discman on 10-hour trips to Montana. In 2000, I bought their followup online, Fainting Room. I graduated college, moved back to the Tri-Cities, moved to Idaho, moved back to the Tri-Cities again, moved to Los Angeles, where I am now. I still have Fainting Room. I listened to it just a couple nights ago. It made my hair stand on end.

I don't know what happened to that burned copy of Haunted by One Question. It wasn't in my CDs. It's somewhere in my old bedroom at my parents' house, I think. I hope.

Because it isn't online. It isn't on Amazon. It isn't on iTunes or Pirate Bay. Googling "birdsaw 'haunted by one question'" turns up 37 hits. I imagine there are a few hundred copies of it out there, bought at shows in places like Richland and Boise and Eugene, but 13 years after its release, it may as well not exist beyond a couple hundred CD collections across the country, most of which, given the new age, have likely been relegated to a couple hundred dusty garages, basements, and closets.

There are times it feels like the internet has everything. Everything of substance, anyways. Everything that was ever made public. The crowdsourced encyclopedia is virtually a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Amazon and iTunes and Myspace collect all the music that's ever been recorded. Failing legit means of distribution, some pirate somewhere will have the seed you need. The internet's become a collective memory of everything we have now and ever will have in the future.

But things still go missing. Things fade out and fall away and disappear. Good things get lost. If that burned CD isn't somewhere in the closet of my old bedroom, I may never hear it again.

Review: Green Lantern

2011-06-20T23:55:00.000-07:00

Available over at the Herald.

Green Lantern. This movie. There is almost nothing to say about it. Ryan Reynolds, who I'm pretty ambivalent about, is okay in a character who is extremely boring, the embodiment of every test pilot ever. He's got to fight this fog-monster with a fivehead who's apparently destroying entire worlds, but they're too dull to actually show him/it doing so. Trust us--Parallax is killing everybody. He's a bad dude. And he can't be stopped.

Green Lantern is one of those movies where I just never really have a grasp on how all this shit works. I get that green represents will and yellow represents fear, but where does the relevant strength of each come from? If Parallax is powered by absorbing fear, wouldn't he get even more powerful when he's actually threatened and thus terrified of being destroyed? What's up with that, logic? What's up with that?

But you really only see that kind of serious nitpicking when the rest of the movie isn't succeeding. If you're laughing or you're scared or you're really rooting for somebody to overcome the odds arrayed against them, you don't spend a lot of time poring over these logical flaws. That, to me, is an almost sure sign you're watching something that isn't that great. It's certainly a warning sign. Look out for it.

Review: Super 8

2011-06-19T10:44:00.000-07:00

Over at the Herald.

In short, Super 8 is pretty great, and the main reason for this is simply that J.J. Abrams is an excellent storyteller. Well, also an excellent director, a guy who gets equally superb performances out of his cast and his action scenes. Oh, and his lens flares. Can't forget the nonstop march of lens flares.

Even though I couldn't quite buy Super 8's emotional payoff, I was affected by it anyway. I left the theater feeling so, so good. I think a movie deserves extra credit for that. I'll be waiting for Abrams' next one.

Review: X-Men: First Class

2011-06-07T23:35:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot of time right now, but the short and the long is I loved it.

I'm getting the impression I really like director Matthew Vaughn. I thought Layer Cake was pretty kick-ass and I thought Kick-Ass was pretty layer-cake. I mean, great. Anyway, summer blockbusters don't get a whole lot better than First Class. It's no Dark Knight, but it is definitely a Batman Begins-plus. So there you go.

New Story: "Founding Fathers" at AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review

2011-05-30T21:54:00.000-07:00

Yup. Available here.

This is particularly nice for me because it marks my first sale to a prozine (by the SFWA, a magazine that pays at least 5 cents/word), a designator that probably means exactly zero. To me as a writer, though--if the hypothetical day comes when I've "made it," and I'm looking back on all the steps it took to get there, this sale would be one of those steps. Not the biggest of them, I'd imagine. Individual short stories rarely prove that critical to the outcome of a career; it's mostly about books. But it would mean something to me, at least, a moment when I could know I'm not just flailing around over here.

Given these circumstances, it's a coincidence that "Founding Fathers" is a semi-sequel to the first story I ever sold, "All Man's Children" at Reflection's Edge. I mean, it's not a total coincidence. I like writing in this universe. I've set an entire book there. I've written other short stories in it that may or not show up in other magazines one day. On that hypothetical day when some editor is sorting the stories belonging to this as-yet-unnamed universe, she is going to find plenty of material to work with.

Still, it feels like something of a bookend, the opening and closing sentences of a story in my life. I'm just hoping that story is the chapter of a much longer book rather than a complete work in itself.

Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

2011-05-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

Available here.

I'd call myself a solid fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I liked Dead Man's Chest and At World's End more than most critics, especially the latter, which I found weird and over the top in good ways. So I went in to On Stranger Tides without feeling like the franchise was incapable of putting out entertaining entries.

The bad news: it wasn't very good. The worse news: they are plans for up to three more.

I covered this in the review, but I can't get over the decision to jettison Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley only to replace their love story with some lame romance between a church-guy and a mermaid. That simple description sounds much more entertaining than the actual results. Church-guy (he seemed too minor a character to note down his name) is introduced strapped to the mast of Blackbeard's ship. Johnny Depp asks about him for some reason. During the following mutiny, Depp and his cohorts break off in the middle of a pitched battle just to release him.

Why? There's no reason for any of these actions besides "If we don't get a sexy dude to kiss a pretty lady at some point here, the young girls will just go watch Twilight again instead." It's a gross botchery of storytelling. Rather than finding an organic way to build this character into the plot, they just throw him into the mix and force the surrounding characters to be interested in him.

It's a waste of celluloid. On Stranger Tides isn't a terrible movie, but it's not half as rollicking as it should have been.

Review: Priest

2011-05-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

Priest (reviewed here) is one of those movies that is objectively a junk pile yet that I would happily watch again if it showed up on my TV next month. That's probably because of its total shallowness: it's the kind of movie that makes zero demands on your attention. Its world is just sort of there, a mix of stuff we've already seen and stuff that feels like we've already seen it. Same deal with the characters. Paul Bettany (who I like) kicks ass and has a tragic past. Karl Urban (who I also like) just wants to ruin everything. And chew the occasional piece of dust-colored scenery. I think some other people showed up at some point, but who can be sure.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about all this, I don't really want to see Priest again.

It's National Short Story Month!

2011-05-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

And in celebration, I've now got both my collections available for Nook: When We Were Mutants & Other Stories and The Battle for Moscow, Idaho & Other Stories. They include previously unpublished pieces along with work that ran in M-Brane SF, The Future Fire, Reflection's Edge, and elsewhere.

Huh. That really wasn't much of a celebration. I have mislead you.

Review: Thor

2011-05-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

I was expecting mild crumminess from Thor. Instead, I got two surprises: a movie that was a) pretty damn entertaining and b) directed by Kenneth Branagh.

I gave it a B, and that might be underrating it a bit. Thor is a highly entertaining movie that's maybe just a touch too familiar in all its throne-maneuvering and interfamily royal strife. I'd put it a notch below Iron Man--but given how great Iron Man is, that's still a pretty strong notch.

Now Available: Fantastique Unfettered #2

2011-05-05T19:59:00.000-07:00

Fantastique Unfettered #2, including my new Aether Age story "The Kemetian Husesen Craze," is now available through Barnes & Noble. Go! Buy! Buy buy buy! Buy once, anyway. It contains good things.

Neil Gaiman Called Names, Picked Last for Recess Dodgeball

2011-05-04T15:47:00.000-07:00

A lot of people will tell you writers should keep their political beliefs out of their books, but the collision of art and politics can lead to sublime works. 1984. The Prince. And Minnesota lawmaker Matt Dean calling Neil Gaiman a "pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota."

First, a digression. I've never like the phrase "pencil-necked." I didn't even know what it meant the first few times I heard it. His neck is yellow? It can be used to complete Scantron forms? That's just confusing.

Anyway, Gaiman responds at length here, setting the facts straight (he was paid $33,600, not $45,000--and he donated this fee to charity) and raising the point that a Republican is complaining about a professional being paid a market rate for his skills and expertise. Good times. Excellent times. Yet another reason it's a bad idea to pick a fight with a writer: as it turns out, they're usually pretty good at convincing the world that it is in fact you who is the idiot.

Soon thereafter, Dean apologized. Because his mother made him.

A writer could not have written an outcome so grand. Well, okay, he could have. But his readers would call it unbelievable because grown men don't call other grown men names and then say they're sorry after their mom gets mad at them. That's just too good to be true.

Free Short Story: "Steve Kendrick's Disease"

2011-05-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

Note: the following story first appeared in M-Brane SF #5 in 2009. Later, it made Tangent Online's 2009 Recommended Reading List. It's also available for Kindle in my collection When We Were Mutants & Other Stories.

Steve Kendrick's Disease

We went to Greenvale for the same reason anyone goes anywhere: to steal all the good stuff while everyone was offplanet. When Petey objected on the grounds a place everyone was being evacuated from was the last place we should be going, Captain Briggs reminded him the ship wasn’t just a clever name, and that shut Petey up and the rest of us too. Besides, the captain said, if we waited around for the official explanation why before we headed in, other crews would pick the settlement clean long before we got there. We were too close to pass up the chance to be there first.

So Smalley punched up our course and ten days later the Help Wanted hit Greenvale atmo. Clouds webbed it up pretty good, but I could still see a lot of ice around the poles; on the trip I’d read everything I could find about Greenvale, knew they’d spent a century tweaking the atmosphere to warm it up enough to live on but it had a ways to go. So far it had just the one settlement, a town of a couple thousand people called Brighton, and according to the captain and his sources, they’d all been carted off by the feds a few weeks back, reasons unknown. Smalley dipped us into the clouds and for a long time I just saw water streaming against the glass. Like that we dropped out of it and the land opened up into long hills coated in shaggy green forests.

“What do you think?” the captain said once we were circling Brighton close enough to pick out the houses and the streets from the surrounding woods.

“Cars aren’t moving,” Janssen said, crouching over the glass in the floor of the observation deck like it didn’t scare her at all. She pointed to a hole through the forest canopy a few miles out from the town. “Crash site down there.”

“Huh.” The captain looked up at me. “Laurey?”

“Well, I guess it wasn’t nuked,” I said. Janssen shook her head at the glass.

“He’s right,” the captain said, smiling at me before he looked back down. “Looks intact. Eminently lootable.”

Janssen grunted. “We’re bringing guns, right?”

“Oh, you know it.”

I went to wake up Steve and he swore at me for letting him miss the descent and then apologized for swearing.

“It was just a lot of clouds,” I said, looking away. “You can see it on the way back up.”

“Guess I can,” Steve said. He rolled out of his bunkhole and blinked dully, doing a little dance on the cold metal floor. “Any transmissions?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, I hope they’re not all dead. I heard this place was supposed to be beautiful.”

“They’re gone, not dead. Captain wants the gear together before we touch down.”

Janssen pitched in when it was clear we were lagging. She wore tight pants and a sleeveless shirt and as she carried boxes down to the bay her muscles somehow looked hard and soft at once. Her face just looked hard.

“Smalley, Petey, you two are onboard while we head out,” the captain said once we were set. They both nodded. “Looks empty out there, but I want these doors spacetight until we get back.”

“Should we vacuum or something?” Smalley said. “I’d just hate to feel useless.”

“Yet you do it anyway,” Janssen said, shrugging her rifle up her shoulder.

He smiled at her. “Oh, I’ll do lots of things I hate.”

“We’ll bring the first load in a couple hours,” the captain said. “Let me know if you see or hear anything that isn’t us.”

Petey drifted back into the guts of the ship while Smalley watched us roll the cart down the ramp and into the ragged grass of the landing field. A handful of birds chirped from the thick-clustered canopy. Both trees and birds were introduced species, I’d read; Greenvale had been too cold to put together any natives more complex than algae and lichens and bacteria. The cart whirred and our gear rattled and clanked: Janssen’s ammo belts, my kit bag, Steve’s hammers and prybars, the captain’s radio and translator and metal detector. The birds made the ride from strip to town seem all the quieter.

We turned a bend and Brighton sprawled in front of us. About half the houses were blocky module units, the other half built of wood hacked out of the forest. Few stood taller than two stories. The roads were wide and badly paved. Captain killed the cart and watched the stillness.

“Yeah,” he said, quiet. “We’ll take the first couple houses together, then if we still haven’t seen anyone, we split up.”

Janssen nodded. “Want me on the door?”

“Yeah. You two, make two piles of whatever you find: one of what you know is worth its weight and one of what we might take if we have the room.”

“I think I know how to rob people,” I said.

“Shout out first sign of anything.” He wheeled us up to the side of the nearest house. Steve got out his lockbusting stuff, but when Janssen tried the door it swung right open. She crept into the dim house, lit by the overcast sunlight. We checked closets and bathrooms and the garage. No one was home.

Their stuff was. I found no real treasures, but Greenvale was a backwoods moon in a backwoods system. I found small items that would make the captain smile: bits of jewelry, earrings and silver rings and firestones. I found a couple palm drives and a GameStation and a fist-sized set of decent speakers. We piled it all up near the front door, where Janssen stared through the curtains, rifle in the crook of her elbow.

“Think this place is tapped,” the captain said, watching us haul the first pile outside.

“Something up?” Steve said, panting. Though my watch said it was 42 degrees, he was sweating.

“Wouldn’t think they’d leave the jewelry behind,” the captain said.

“Even freighters got weight limits, don’t they?”

“Even so.” He shook his head and led us to the next house. Sprinklers chugged in the yard, throwing water over knee-high grass. I caught that dewy scent that reminded me of the hour before sunrise when the whole world slept but me. Inside, I hit a dry spell, didn’t find much but a few storage chips and a bunch of paper books until I swiped off a whole shelf and found a box of hard cash behind it. I took it up front, grinning. Even Janssen raised her eyebrows when I showed her. The captain emerged from the back rooms, his brown face misted with sweat.

“What are you so happy about?” he said, and I opened my mouth and from upstairs Steve screamed so loud I dropped the box against the floor. Plastic cards skidded over the hardwood.

“You find a rat?” the captain called up to him. For a long moment we heard nothing. Captain stared up the staircase, then glanced at Janssen. “Huh.”

Janssen took the lead, gun ready, me and the captain on her heels. We found Steve sitting in a bedroom with his back against the wall and his shirt over his mouth, eyes locked on the bed. A weird smell hit my nose, bad but too faint to place.

The captain cocked his head. “What the hell?”

“I touched it,” Steve said.

“Touched what?”

Steve nodded at the bed. The captain gave him another look, then sidled up to it, crouching down and lifting the bedspread where it touched the floor. He jerked back, gagging.

“Good God.” He turned to Steve, face hard. “You touched it?”

Steve nodded again. Goosebumps burst over my thighs and the backs of my arms. The captain swung his head at me, mouth open. I pressed my hand over my mouth and pulled back the bedspread.

Three bodies lay in the darkness under the bed, skin tight over their bones, spotty and black. Weeks old. What was left of their flesh was dimpled with big round sores, purple and gray-green in the faint light. The smell hit me then, a blunt fist of dead stink.

“Uh,” I said. “Oh man.”

“Well?” the captain said, a blankness on his face I’d never seen before.

“I strongly suggest we blast the Christ off,” I said. Steve moaned, twitching one hand. His fingers gleamed a dull brown. I fumbled in my kit bag for my disinfectant, poured a stiff dose onto a rag, and tossed it in his lap. He just stared.

The captain took a step back. “Tell me that’s not contagious.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Without lying.”

“Everyone here’s dead or something, right?” I threw the rag aside and stood, knees popping. “Which means it’s probably got an airborne vector.”

“Oh God,” Steve said.

“Get your ass up,” Janssen said, but she didn’t offer him a hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

Steve got to his feet and we headed for the cart. Birds chirped in the overcast morning. The streets were silent.

“Place had what, two thousand people?” I said. My voice sounded way too loud. “Three? There should be survivors. No disease kills everyone.”

“Don’t even think about it,” the captain said, just staring at me. He raised his radio to his mouth. “Smalley?”

“How’s the haul?” Smalley’s voice came back.

“Steve found bodies. Whole city’s a graveyard. Plague or something, wasn’t any evacuation. We’re on our way back.”

“Okay,” Smalley said, stretching out the word. “A plague?”

“We’ll be back in twenty.” Captain had me throw all the loot off the cart, then scrub it down. Once it was cleaned we climbed up and the captain peeled out, jouncing us over the weather-worn pavement. From the weeds by the road, I saw a pale hand curled in the dirt. Nobody said a word on our way through the tunnel of trees back to the landing strip. We broke free into the open field. The doors to the Help Wanted were closed.

The captain killed the cart and walked up to the ship. He raised the radio. “We’re here.”

“Okay,” Smalley said back. A breeze ruffled the grass. Janssen shrugged her rifle up her shoulder. Steve shivered. I caught myself staring at his hand. The captain swore, punched his code into the pad beside the door. The door didn’t budge. He banged his fist against the ship.

“What’s the hold up?”

“Well. Me and Petey were talking.”

“Put the tea party on hold and open the doors. I don’t want to spend another second on this rock.”

“Okay,” Smalley said. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, well what if you’ve got it?”

Janssen’s chin swung toward the captain. The captain closed his eyes. “Smalley. I’m going to skin you and run you out as the flag.”

“Hello, Briggs,” Petey’s voice cut in. “I want you to take a deep breath and think about this for a second.”

“I’m thinking about how I’m going to keelhaul you when the ship doesn’t have a keel.”

“If you’re infected and you come on board, then we’re dead too. If you’re quarantined a few days and it turns out you’re fine, then the worst that happens is you fire us. That’s your decision. It’s a chance Smalley and I are willing to take.”

The captain pulled his lips back from his teeth. “They’ve been dead for weeks. Laurey doesn’t think they’re infectious.”

“Laurey failed med school.”

“I dropped out,” I said.

“I can’t let you onboard, captain,” Petey said. “Not until we’re sure you won’t kill us.”

“I’m going to do that either way. How long you intend to keep us out here? A week? A month?”

“I don’t know that yet, captain.”

“Symptoms should manifest within a week,” I said, turning away from Steve and toward the trees surrounding the field. “Something this virulent, probably less.”

Wordlessly, Janssen punched me in the stomach. I fell to a knee, wheezing, tears blurring my eyes.

“Janssen,” the captain said, soft. He raised the radio. “Petey, we’re going to freeze out here. We’re going to starve. You think you’re saving yourselves? You’re going to kill us.”

“There’s an emergency pack in the cart,” Petey said.

“Open the door right now.”

“There’s nothing more to say, captain. No symptoms and I’ll open the door in three days. Don’t bother asking for more than that.”

“Hey, Petey, at least tell me you’re sorry. Tell me you’re sorry it has to be this way, Petey.” The captain blinked up at the ship’s windows. “Petey? Smalley?”

“Am I going to die?” Steve said, hands clasped in front of him.

“Everyone out there’s long dead,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “The ones that kill you before you have a chance to spread them just kind of flame out. They’re dumb. That’s why they get replaced by stuff that doesn’t kill you as bad.”

“Really?” Steve smiled a moment. “Is that true, captain?”

But no one touched him the rest of the day, and when darkness fell and we sheltered up under the ship’s wings, no one slept beside each other. I shivered under my covers; there had been two blankets in the emergency duffel, and Janssen had given one to the captain, one to Steve, then emptied the duffel and given it to me. I pressed a hand to my forehead, but I felt fine. A mile through the woods, Brighton lay under the same clouds we did, an empty city on an empty moon.

* * *

“All right, Laurey, lay it out for me,” the captain said, a whisper I could barely hear.

“They look like hives. Could be allergies.” I glanced through the woods to the field where Steve and Janssen still lay under the ship’s wings. “This is all just guesswork.”

“Cut the humble BS. I need to know what you think so I’ll know what we can do about it.”

I wiped my nose with my sleeve. “Janssen’s got them, too. She didn’t touch Steve or get near the bodies.”

“What about us?”

“Considering all the stuff we touched? We were breathing the same air they were.”

“Christ.”

I glanced between his eyes. “How do you feel?”

“Stiff. Sore.” He frowned, drew back. “How do you feel?”

“Fine. For now.”

“All right. Then for now, we don’t go near them.” He pressed his fists against his eyes, suddenly old. “How did this happen, Laurey? Are we bad people?”

“Uh,” I said. “Janssen might be.”

“All I wanted was to make enough cash we didn’t have to scrounge so hard for a while.” He stared at the ship, then shook his head. “Come on. Let’s go let them know they’re going to die.”

I frowned. “Maybe you should let me tell them.”

It didn’t help. Steve sat with his head between his knees, shoulders shaking. Janssen stared off at the clouds like she hadn’t heard. She touched a boil on her cheek, then dropped her hand to her side and wiped it against her pants.

“Guess you two should steer clear,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said stupidly.

“Laurey thinks we’ve got it, too,” the captain said. “We’re just not showing yet. Right, Laurey?”

“Right.”

“No sense taking risks until we’re sure,” Janssen said. “Rest of the food’s yours. If me and Steve get too hungry, we’ll head into town.”

The captain smiled at her with half his mouth. “If we all get out of this, it’ll be from you.”

I glanced away from a bright red blister on Steve’s neck, tossed Janssen a pill bottle from my kit. “Take two of those every three hours. Let me know if you start feeling weird.”

The captain and I sat down on the other side of the field. We didn’t talk much. The day warmed up a little. The captain sat with his chin on his knees, brow all creased up.

“Say we’ve got it,” he said. “What can we do about it?”

“Eat antibiotics until we’re crapping pure bacteria. Drink lots of water. Wait it out.”

“Let’s assume we’re not any luckier than everyone in Brighton.”

“Town’s got a hospital,” I said, scratching my neck. “A clinic, really. But if they got started on a cure, or figured anything out, it might have records.”

“We should send Janssen right now. She’ll do it.” His eyes focused on mine so hard I could actually see his pupils shrink. “Hey. You’re white as white paint.”

I pressed my finger against the itching knob of skin on the back of my neck. Pain seared up and down my spine so hard my head went foggy.

“I think I need to go talk to the others,” I said. “You better stay here.”

“Oh, Laurey.”

I fainted before I reached them. My sight and brain came back and Steve was leaning over me, hand out. I took it and leaned into him until my balance came back.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “There’s a hospital in town. I think we should go there.”

Steve drew back. “You think there’s a cure?”

“You see any cured people running around?” Janssen said.

“They might have started on one. They’ll at least have immunoboosters.” I met Janssen’s eyes. “You can stay here if you want.”

She snorted. “Get on the damn cart. I’m driving.”

From fifty yards off, the captain watched us start down the path to the city. Steve waved to him and the captain raised one hand over his head. Trees swallowed us up.

“Yesterday you were saying something about survivors,” Janssen said over the soft hum of the engine.

“Chances are a few people are immune, or just ran out before they could get infected.” I watched her brown ponytail bob along with the suspension of the cart. “Why?”

“Imagine you grew up in the boondocks. Probably never left the planet once, just all this nature crap around. Then, over the course of a week or two, everyone you know died. If there’s survivors, how you think they’ve been surviving since this thing hit? How’s Steve’s fat ass going to look to them?”

“They’re not going to eat us!” Steve said.

“They’re not going to be in a neighborly state of mind, either.”

It was a while before I stopped watched the sides of the roads enough to remember what was happening to me. In town, among the low houses and wide streets, bodies hid in the yards. A couple lay in the streets, not nearly enough to account for the town. I had Janssen slow down; we threaded in toward the city’s middle, past parked and crashed cars and carts, abandoned and still. We saw no dogs, no cats.

We smelled the hospital before we saw it. In a side yard, big old swathes of grass had been overturned. One pit still lay uncovered, the bodies piled, arms and legs dangling over each other. Janssen parked the cart out front.

Inside, the rot fought with the smog of alcohol and soaps and antibiotic sprays. All the beds were filled, like whoever’d been treating them had run out while the last of them were still moaning. I had Janssen and Steve start turning on computers while I hit the pharmacy. I swept every antibiotic and immunobooster I could into a plastic sack. Hundreds of small white bottles lined the shelves. I glanced at the door, then tossed all the Euphine they had into the sack.

“Found some notebooks,” Janssen said, nodding at a pile she’d started after sweeping the junk from an admin’s desk right on the floor.

“Good.” I ran a network search of every file created or modified in the last three months and dumped it onto my palm drive. While Janssen went off to look after Steve, who was barfing, I poked around the clinic’s small lab. Vial on vial of blood blanketed one counter. I didn’t even bother checking what they’d tried. It hadn’t worked. I wouldn’t know how to continue it anyway. I had two plans: turn our bloodstreams into drugstreams, and pray my genetic stock had been brewed in a different pot from the colonists’.

“What do you think?” Janssen said on the ride back to the field.

“I think as long as we’ve already got it, we may as well move into a house. It’s cold out here.”

“About the bug.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Have to do some reading first.”

The captain was waiting for us when we got back. I almost shouted as he walked right up to us and asked how it had gone. He jumped up on the cart, reaching for one of the sacks we’d brought back, and as his sleeve fell back, I saw the blisters circling his wrist.

* * *

“Patients present with dermal swelling and tenderness,” I read from my palm drive. The file had last been updated a little under a month ago. “Within 12-48 hours, symptoms progress to include increased dermal inflammation, high fever, and a persistent cough, and may include dizziness or mild visual hallucinations. Some patients report a sour taste to their saliva, resulting in a pronounced urge to spit.”

“What about vomiting?” Janssen said. “Back at the hospital Steve was vomiting.”

Steve shook his head. “That’s because it was gross there.”

“What’s next?” the captain said, leaning forward in his chair.

“Symptoms plateau for 24-96 hours, at which point the fever heightens. Afflicted show a pronounced sensitivity to light. Blood appears in the sputum.” I paused until the captain nudged me with his foot. “Patients may die of fever, fever-induced dehydration, or the liquefaction of the alveoli. In 100% of reported and observed cases, death resulted in 2-7 days of first symptoms.”

The captain shook his head. “Christ, how do you write that up without cursing God once?”

“So we’ve got a week?” Steve said.

“Less.” Janssen stared at me like I’d just condemned her, which I suppose I had.

“Take these,” I said, passing around a mix of pills. “Drink a lot of water. We’ll probably want to head back for some cough stuff at some point.”

Janssen stared at the pills in her palm. “Any of this going to help?”

“Truth, now,” the captain said, gaze on me.

“It’ll give us some more time.”

“Feds could show up, maybe.” A hot gleam hit the captain’s brown eyes. “There wasn’t any evacuation. They know what happened. Might be working on something as we speak.” He stood up. “Should radio up the ship. Mutinous pricks might not let us onboard, but we can have them set up a distress beacon.”

“In the meantime,” I said, digging into the sack and pawing past rattling bottles until I found the one, “I suggest you all take two of these.” I shook the bottle. “Doctor’s orders.”

“Euphine?” Janssen said, and for once I thought she was about to smile.

I popped one in my mouth, swallowed, popped the other. Bitter on the back of my tongue.

“Look,” I said, tapping a couple into her hand, “why not?”

“Why not.”

“I’m already out of my right mind anyway,” the captain said, taking a pair. I held out a couple for Steve.

“I don’t think so,” he said, hunching his thick shoulders.

Captain laughed through his nose. “Don’t tell me you want to go through this thing sober.”

“Isn’t that stuff addictive?” Steve blushed as soon as he said it. “What if it reacts bad with the other stuff?”

Janssen took the pills from me and pressed them into Steve’s hand. “Take the goddamn pills.”

He glanced at me, blinking. I shrugged. Steve blushed harder, then took a long drink of water and pushed the first one past his lips.

“Guess there’s no harm now,” he said.

“Good boy,” Janssen said, patting him on the cheek.

The captain laughed to himself and dug out his radio. “Smalley, Petey. Come in, traitors. Captain needs a favor.”

“Ah, this is Smalley,” Smalley said after a few seconds.

“Need you to start beaming an SOS. Wide signal. Give our coordinates at Brighton. Anyone listening will know what’s what.”

“Can do.” Smalley cleared his throat. “What’s going on out there?”

“We’re having a party,” the captain said. “Dr. Laurey’s breaking his oaths and spreading chemical goodwill to his grateful crew.”

“That’s good.”

“You’re not invited.”

“I’ll let Petey know,” Smalley said. “That it?”

“Smalley,” the captain said, smile fading. “You may not hear from us after a while. If we go two days after our last call, you blast off, okay?”

“Captain?”

“Promise me now.”

“I promise. Captain, what’s happening out there?”

“Like I said, we’re having a party.” He set down the radio and scratched his upper lip. “Say doc.”

I looked up. “Say what?”

“What’s your medical opinion got to say about liquor?”

The Euphine kicked in before we got back to the house with the neighbors’ whiskey, wine, and some kind of transparent local brew. Janssen tipped back the local stuff and I held out my hand and she laughed when I wiped the bottle’s rim with my sleeve. I shook my head, grinning. The captain checked the heat, found it still working, then cranked it up. He took off his coat and started wandering around with a bottle of red in his hand. Steve talked about growing up in inner Lopport while Janssen passed the bottle around. Furniture scraped down the end of the hall and the captain emerged, panting.

“Janssen,” he said, standing straight as a rod. “Arms inspection. On the double.”

She gave him a look, then slid off the couch and picked up the rifle at her feet. Me and Steve followed her to where the captain was pointing down the hall. At its far end, a row of framed family portraits stood on top of a desk.

Janssen frowned. “Sir, I don’t believe those targets are regulation.”

“That’s exactly why they must be shot.”

“Affirmative.” Janssen lodged the butt of her rifle against her right shoulder, ear just brushing the stock. She clicked off the safety. I steeled myself. She squeezed the trigger.

The rifle went off like a person saying “pop.” Down the hall, glass clattered; the frame spun off the desk, slamming into the wall. The captain doubled over laughing, fist pressed against his forehead. Janssen swung the end of the barrel, squeezed off a second shot, then plastered two more frames before what was left of that one hit the ground.

“Let me try,” Steve said, stepping forward.

Janssen eyed him. “Never fired one, have you.”

“Nope!”

“The bullets come out the end with the hole in it.” She handed him the rifle. He fiddled with it a moment, then clamped it to his cheek. Splinters of plastic and paint sprayed from the desk and the wall behind the one remaining picture. Steve frowned, blinking so hard his lashes brushed the scope Janssen hadn’t used. His finger twitched; the frame flew off the desk. He muttered to himself, then fired again, five quick shots over the empty desk.

“I think it’s broken,” he said, lowering the gun and frowning over it. Wordlessly, Janssen took it away and slung it over her shoulder. The captain and I had been laughing a while before Steve joined in. We stood there in the hall a while, winding down, glass and plastic glittering down the way. Steve’s shoulders started jerking rather than bouncing; he was coughing.

“Oh shit,” the captain said, then let a long breath out his nose. He pulled from the bottle and held it in his mouth before he swallowed. “Well, let’s take a ride.”

“You’re going to drive?” I said, following him out the front door. The day was gray and cold. I couldn’t see the sun, but it didn’t feel like it would last much longer. The day had evaporated, been eaten up while we weren’t watching.

“If we’re all killed, I’ll take full responsibility with the police.” The captain threw himself into the driver’s seat of the cart and flipped it on. I’d barely sat down when we swung off. Steve, half-crouched in his seat like a dog getting ready to lie down, tumbled over the side. I had to punch the captain on the shoulder to get him to slow down enough for Steve to hop back on. Gravel spat from the tires and the cart snapped forward, jerking back my head. Cold air roared past our faces. The captain took a turn without slowing down, wheels skidding, going mushy as we slid onto the shoulder. He leaned hard and reached out to touch the side of a car parked even further down the shoulder. I braced myself against the cart door, head starting to clear, stomach to twist. Back on the road, the captain pitched the engine higher, a hum that ran through my elbow where it touched the door and my ass on the seat. I swallowed. Fast; it was all so fast, I thought, as far as I could think at all. We’d landed, stolen, become infected, learned we were going to die. It had all streaked past like the grass by the road, like the empty space between the planets. We needed to slow down.

“We need to slow down,” I shouted into the wind. I punched the captain’s shoulder again. “You’re going to crash!”

The captain hunched down and reappeared with the pistol he kept under the seat. He planted his knees against the wheel, gripped the pistol with both hands, and squeezed a shot over a passing roof. A smatter of small gray birds burst into the sky. He fired again, shattering a window. Behind me, Steve laughed.

“You think that’s funny?” I said, twisting around.

“He just shot that window!”

The cart ripped over the asphalt, swerving around parked cars, juking around the bodies stretched across the street. Steve grinned, eyes watering in the wind. Boils stood up on his face and neck, red and so swollen they almost shone. I looked past him into the city. The cops were dead. The children were dead. I wanted to scream, but my breath was torn away by the wind; by the time I’d caught it the feeling had passed. I let myself go limp, rocked by the jolting cart. It was like I could reach right up and pull down the clouds, dig out the secret there all along.

* * *

I was hungover. Dehydrated. Skin so hot it could cook steaks. Euphine hadn’t kicked in yet. Whole room stunk like alcohol; broken bottles sprawled in the corner, the captain sprawled on the couch. Memories of the bodies at the hospital, of coming back and stealing a stereo and playing music and talking, time slipping by without a feel. Of Janssen sitting silent for twenty minutes, then standing, yanking Steve to his feet, dragging him deeper into the house before he could blush. Couldn’t remember falling asleep. I worried, briefly, if I’d said anything stupid before then. The worry burnt away, but I could find no trace of whatever mood we’d found the day before. From the couch, the captain coughed so hard he sat up straight, knees drawn to his chest.

“How you feeling, captain?”

“I told you to call me Ben.” He worked his jaw, then spat toward the pile of bottles. “I feel like I need medical attention.”

I tossed him the pill bottle. He groped around for a wine bottle and washed them down, chased it with a cap of cough syrup.

“Sorry,” I said. “Kind of fuzzy.”

“Yeah.” He jerked his chin toward the back of the house. “Janssen, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Thought I’d be jealous, but I’m kind of glad it was Steve.” He narrowed his eyes at me, then looked away. “Don’t suppose you found a cure yet.”

“Huh-uh.” I coughed into my hand, then spat into it too quiet for the captain to notice. No blood. I wiped it on the floor. The captain—Ben—wriggled down into the couch and closed his eyes, sighing long.

“I’ve always known what I wanted to do, you know. Why I got the ship. Lot of responsibility, making sure you jackasses aren’t killing yourselves all the time, but I like that, too. I like knowing what to do.”

I nodded, sipped some water. “The feds might come.”

“The feds aren’t coming, Nova.”

“They’ve got to come sometime,” I said. Suddenly my face went hotter. “Wait, I told you that?”

The captain laughed. “Your parents didn’t do you any favors.”

“It wasn’t their fault,” I said, then realized he was still talking about my name.

“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “So where do you think it came from?”

“Hospital log says the first guy had been camping in the woods alone.” I folded my arms over my stomach. “A hundred years ago, they started warming this place up. Eighty, they started seeding it—trees, birds, bugs, all that crap. Any native organisms have probably seen more environmental change in the last century than since they first appeared.”

“This is a plague, though. A really good one.”

“So? Everyone thinks it takes like a million years for a fly to turn into another kind of fly. Sometimes evolution’s like that, but when it has to it makes great big leaps. Way faster than you’d want to believe.”

The captain gave me a look. “Your drop-out, was it the voluntary kind?”

“I’m just saying, stress makes life do crazy things.”

Janssen and Steve reappeared, pale and flushed, coughing into their hands and smiling at each other. We took antibiotics and cough suppressants, drank water, found a neighbor with a good movie collection. Ben radioed the ship long enough to check in. We were getting worse; everyone had a fever, felt listless, run down even when the hangovers faded. That night as we watched a movie, Steve started babbling. I dosed him up with a fever-killer. I didn’t know if it helped. Janssen put him to bed, finished the movie with us, then went back to him.

Steve woke first the next day. It was morning, I guessed; sunlight cut through the windows, painfully clear. Steve stood over me, pale, shivering, eyes red-rimmed and bright with something more than fever. My mouth was so dry it was a minute before I could speak.

“What’s happening?”

“You’ve got to help her,” he said. Blisters stood up on his face and neck like cherries. He reached toward me, half-falling onto the couch. “She’s hurt, Laurey. Come on.”

I crawled to my feet and tailed him to the back room where Janssen lay naked and dead, a white sheet pulled up to her neck. I looked at Steve, then checked her pulse. Her skin was as cool as the room.

“She’s gone,” I said.

“You’ve got to help her.”

I sat in a chair and curled my knees to my chest. My head was floaty, gauzy. Panic, enlightenment, some place in between; that had swept us along since we’d been locked out of the ship, but all I felt now was a sick impatience, a hot but weak anger that the disease had run its course in Janssen but might have days left before it finished with me. I just sat there a while, ignoring Steve, the same way I always had.

“She wanted to be burnt up by the ship’s engines,” the captain said softly after Steve brought him into the room.

“No!” Steve dropped a hand to her sheeted shoulder. “Why would she want that?”

“You all filled out the same paperwork when you signed up. People die out here.” The captain stared down at her a moment, glassy-eyed, chest falling with his shallow breath. “We’re heading back to the ship. There’s no point in them staying any longer. Help me get her out to the cart.”

“Can’t you do anything?” Steve said to me. Tears threatened to drop down his face, but he didn’t have the juice.

“Captain’s right,” I said. “Smalley and Petey can still get out. We’ve got to think of them now.”

We wrapped Janssen in the sheet and laid her in the cart in the pale and warmthless sunlight. The captain drove at a walking pace through the road through the trees. The canopy clustered so thick we rode in daylight while the woods passed in twilight. I thought I could see shadows moving deep among the brown-black trunks, but when I blinked, they disappeared.

“Janssen’s dead,” the captain said into his radio, gazing up at the blank windows near the ship’s nose. “She wanted to be cremated by the ship. I think it’s time for you two to take off.”

“Janssen’s dead?” Smalley said back through the box.

“What did you think was happening out here? High tea?”

I leaned toward the radio in the captain’s hand. “Are you guys okay?”

“We’re fine,” Petey said.

“How are you?” Smalley said. “Can we do anything?”

“Start prepping the ship.” The captain clipped the radio to his belt and gestured me to give him a hand with Janssen. Her body was light, dried out like an old stick. We stretched her out in the charred grass beneath the Help Wanted’s vertical tail jet. A metallic click sounded somewhere up in the ship’s bowels, then a hum so deep I could barely hear it.

Steve tucked his hands under his armpits, gazing down. “Should we say something?”

The captain shrugged. “Elsie was with me eight years. I knew her probably better than anyone ever did. She knew what she meant to the ship.”

“She was always so far off,” Steve said, just audible over the spooling engines. “Right up to the last days.”

“Smalley, Petey,” the captain said, taking the radio from his belt. “I don’t know what I would have done in your shoes. But if you’d let us onboard, you’d be sick, too, and we wouldn’t be any less dead. Remember that when you start believing this is your fault.” He crouched down to pull the sheet back from Janssen’s face. The skin of his brown hand was bubbled with purplish bruises. “I tried never to get us in more trouble than we could handle. Guess the hunger got to me.”

“None of us knew,” Petey said through the radio.

The captain gazed between me and Steve. “I don’t see but the one thing left to do. You’re smart kids. Maybe you’ve got a smarter idea. Whatever you choose, good luck.” He slipped the radio onto his belt, unholstered his pistol, and raised it to his temple. The gun popped. The captain grunted, slumped to his knees, then collapsed on his back in the blackened grass beside Janssen. Steve took a half step forward, then stumbled backwards. I stooped for the radio and dizziness swelled through my head.

“Give us a minute to get back,” I said to the ship. “Then get out of here.”

I put my hand on Steve’s shoulder and led him to the cart. We drove to the edge of the landing field, then turned around so we could see the ship. Steve raised his arm. The hum of the engines deepened to a rumble and pitched up to a keen. Flame boiled from all the Help Wanted’s jets, washing over the grass, clouding everything beneath it in fire and dust and smoke. The ship rocked on its feet, then shivered up off the ground, heavy as a hillside, smoke mushrooming beneath it as it climbed above our heads and then the heads of the trees. It tipped back on its tail, hovering, then lifted off up into the sky like a great hand was pushing it from behind. It shrank to a gray arrowhead, then a winking point of light. At last, it was nothing at all.

“Gun’s probably melted,” I said, gazing at the smoke settling to the ground where the bodies had been a minute ago. “We’ll have to go into town for another.”

“No.”

I coughed and spat into the grass. My tongue tasted like copper. “You’d rather just wait around?”

Steve wiped his hand down his face. “I want to do something about it.”

“Steve.”

“Not for ourselves. We have to get rid of it. Wipe it out.”

“Almighty Christ. Yeah, just show me to the Bomb Store so we can nuke the whole planet. Viruses don’t just appear because you touched yourself at night.” I flung my hand out toward the woods. “It came from out there. What do you want to do about all that?”

“Something! I don’t know!” His fever-sparked eyes switched between mine. He coughed and stumbled into me, catching himself on my shoulder; he was light as a deep breath, but I almost went over too. He braced himself against me a second, breathing hard. “Look at what happened. Look at what it’s done to us. We’re not the only ones out there digging for scraps. We can’t let this happen to anyone else. Whatever else happens, we have to make sure we’re the last ones this thing ever kills.”

The air over the field had almost cleared. I couldn’t see much of anything where Janssen and the captain had lain. The gun was gone and so were they.

“We’re going to burn the town,” I said.

Steve’s chin jerked up. “Will that get rid of it?”

“It’ll get rid of all the reasons for people like us to come down here.”

“What about the feds? They’ll come, too, eventually.”

“We can’t stop them. We’ll just have to find a way to tell them what we’ve seen and hope they’ll take it from there.”

Steve sniffed, then spat. He turned to the path back through the trees. “It’s a big town.”

“Not that big. We’ll make sure the woods catch, too.”

“They’ve got this landing strip.” He grinned at me. “They’ll have H-cells somewhere.”

“And oxygen tanks at the hospital.” I struggled up into the cart. “Let’s go.”

I took us in toward Brighton, easy this time, remembering the captain’s mad race through the streets in the careless hours after we’d first known it was over. Mid-morning sunshine poured down on the path, bright but cool. My sickness seemed to belong to another person. We drove to the hospital where the bodies rested in the beds and the open graves and we wrestled oxygen tanks and bottles of rubbing alcohol onto wheelchairs and trucked them out to the parking lot. We left one tank in front of the entrance. We were sweating, shaking, coughing and spitting. Already I was exhausted. A steady breeze blew out of the northwest and we sat in the grass and let it suck the sweat from our skin. I shook out some Euphine, some fever-killers, washed them down with water.

Two hours burned up like dry grass before we could find the H-cells; they were at the drydock, like they should have been, but rather than being sealed in a vault or locked off in a storeroom within a storeroom, they were just sitting in a crate in the back room, thirteen yellow-gray bricks the size of my forearm. I’d seen them before on the Help Wanted, but I’d never been allowed to handle one, though they were supposed to be perfectly inert up to the temperatures created in a starship’s engines. I tried to pick one up and dropped it at once and Steve yelled but it dented the floor when it landed and that was all. I didn’t know if they would burn in any fire we could build, or if when they burst they’d go off like a bomb, and destroy us before we knew what had happened. I knew that, if our fire didn’t catch the first time, I wouldn’t have the strength to try a second.

Sunlight choked our eyes as we wheeled the cells to the cart and then spaced ten of them throughout the town, leaving one at the drydock and saving two for the start. That was our big plan: find everything we could that would burn or explode, get it out in the open, sitting on doorsteps and leaning against walls in every neighborhood, then set one big fire at the northwest edge of the woods, where the wind was blowing down, and ride like hell for the landing strip, throwing flaming bottles of rubbing alcohol as we fled. Neither of us were arsonists by trade, but we thought it would be enough.

We found homes for the oxygen tanks, spent twenty minutes stuffing rags into the mouths of bottles, raided homes until we’d found a half dozen lighters. We passed a handful of bodies on our way to the north end of town where the houses butted right up to the woods. They had names, all of them, in the registries in the inner planets. Somewhere in the guts of the same computers they had my name, too.

The forest floor was a mat of leaves and dead branches. We heaved the bricks of fuel out onto the yard of the farthest house and covered the cells with tinder till the pile rose to our chests. Fat trunks of trees shot up all around us. We walked to where we’d parked the cart some hundred feet away.

“How far do you think you can throw?” Steve said, grinning, sweat dribbling down his temples.

“I played baseball when I was a kid.” I leaned against the cart, panting. They’d mowed the grass before the ballgames and it had always smelled sweet and wet and loose blades had stuck to my small hands when I’d rubbed them through the damp stubble. I pushed off the cart and picked up a bottle. “We’ll both do it.”

I turned on the cart. Steve held a lighter to the rags in the bottles. They flared up, burning smokelessly, and we drew back and we threw.

Mine crashed short, mushrooming out in a whump of fire. Steve’s spun end for end and shattered on the piled branches. Gobs of fire burst up in a dozen different places. They held steady a long moment, then the gobs began to spread, burning out into the leaves and sticks until it was all one shimmering star of smoke and fire. The paint on the house had begun to curl by the time we’d climbed onto the cart.

Gravel ground under our tires. The bottles clanked in the back seat. Steve reached for one, lit it, flung it at a passing house. I snaked us through the streets and Steve handed down fire wherever we went. At the north end of town, sheets of gray smoke stretched into the sky. Tears and sweat slipped down my face. A vast hollow boom roared up near our first fire, rolling through the town, punching my ears so hard I had to jerk the wheel to stay on the road. Steve threw another bottle, then tapped me on the shoulder and gestured at the seat. One bottle left. I took us up to the house we’d robbed when we’d landed three days ago, driving over the curb and up on the yard and skidding the cart next to the front stoop. I made sure I had the radio, then retreated with Steve to the road. He lit the last bottle and hurled it at the cart and we ran for the path through the trees. Behind us, the cart’s fuel tank caught, washing us with heat and pelting us with cracked plastic and metal shards, forcing us to our knees.

Steve gripped my shoulder with a hand that felt like all bones. I turned and saw fires climbing roofs in a dozen different neighborhoods. Smoke smeared everything, carried to us by the winds. Ash and cinders fluttered past our cheeks. Dizziness swept up my spine, graying out my sight. I felt Steve’s hand on my arm, heaving me back on feet I couldn’t feel as we ran through the tunnel of trees toward the field where the ashes of Janssen and the captain mixed with the charred grass. Steve stumbled as soon as we reached the field, falling face-first and coughing and choking into the grass. I dropped to my knees beside him.

“They’ll try to resettle,” he strained. “Some day, someone will come back.”

“I’m going to radio the ship,” I said, gazing dully into the trees between us and the town. I could still smell smoke. “I’ll tell them everything. Let them pass it on to the feds.”

“When you tell them what happened,” Steve said, then cut himself short to cough, “what are you going to call it?”

“I’ll just call it a disease. What does it matter?”

“You stopped it. It should be called the Nova Laurey Syndrome.”

“I would have shot myself.” I looked down at him. His eyes were closed. Blood lined his lips. I would be the last. “I think I know why the captain hired you.”

I raised the radio to my mouth and called Smalley’s name, then Petey’s, then repeated them both until I forgot what I was saying. Through the web of trees, I thought I could see a flicker of orange. If my voice held out, I thought I would need twenty minutes: just give me twenty minutes before the fire found us in the field.

“Laurey?” Smalley’s voice said, faint through the radio and the thousands of miles of space between us. “Is that you?”

“I need you to start recording, Smalley.”

“What’s happening?” he said after a few-second delay. “Are you guys okay?”

“Turn on the recorder.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, tasting smoke, feeling something catch down in my lungs. I listened to Steve breathing beside me, ragged and fast. Just give him twenty minutes, too. He’d earned that much.

“Ready,” Smalley said.

I held the radio to my mouth. With the fingers of my free hand, I dug into the grass and held on as tight as I could.

“We went to Greenvale for the same reason anyone goes anywhere,” I said. I tugged free a handful of grass, let it scatter into the smoke and the wind.

Review: Dylan Dog: Dead of Night

2011-05-04T11:26:00.000-07:00

Review available here.

I had high hopes for Dylan Dog. Unreasonable ones, given the director and writers' previous credits include TMNT and the terrible, terrible A Sound of Thunder, but still. The other cinematic adaptation of Dylan Dog author Tiziano Sclavi's work is Cemetery Man, a movie that battles Dead Alive for my favorite zombie movies and would probably crack the top 20 of my all-time general favorites. Cemetery Man is a strange, thoughtful, melodramatic, playful, funny movie.

Dylan Dog is not.

It's kind of like True Blood minus the T&A plus Hellboy minus the Ron Perlman plus a crappy generic detective movie. The result is a movie that feels like it should be playing on a New Year's Eve monster marathon. Not at the 10 PM slot, either. Dylan Dog would start at 3:47 AM.

Sample Sunday: The Roar of the Spheres

2011-05-01T18:00:00.001-07:00

In the fine tradition of Sample Sunday, here's an excerpt from my near-Earth space opera The Roar of the Spheres. By chapter 9, the crew of the Frontier Assessment has gotten themselves into some trouble on Mars. With their brilliant lawyer Shelby framed and jailed, their plan to free the colonists of Titan is about to be knocked off the rails. Here, the future of thousands depends on busting one woman out of jail.

The alarm raged through the Creative Reform Services detention facility before we'd even reached Shelby, an up-and-down cry of panic and fear that sounded exactly like an old air raid siren. Like they were trying to evoke some primal memory of hiding under desks while nuclear fire stripped the world to ashes. Like they meant to scare us.

It was working.

The plan, like all good ones, had been simple: Pete and I would go in as Shelby's visitors while Baxter, whose artificial body couldn't pass the security scans no matter how cunningly it resembled the real thing to human eyes and touch, waited outside with a rented electric cart. Fay, tapped into CRS' security network, would unlock our path to the front doors while sealing off everything else. At most, we'd have a receptionist and a stray guard to karate chop on our way back to the street. Baxter's idling cart would then whisk us away to the spaceport's private gate, where a local pilot would rocket us to Fay, who'd be running interference the whole time, keeping CRS locked down and isolated while ensuring nobody tried to do anything insane like seal us in a dome or cut off the spaceport.

None of which sounded all that simple to me. It sounded like an awful lot of running through enemy territory with a limited number of exits, all of which could theoretically be blocked off. Fay assured me if we moved fast enough no one would be able to react in time to pin us down, and if it was wrong and they had their shit together and had a security force waiting for us at the spaceport ("And how would they even know you'd be headed there at all?" Fay asked), it could, as a last resort, respond with violent force. As the alarm keened up, freezing me in place as I shuddered like a dying engine, I was reminded, for the millionth time, how we don't always get what we want.

"That does not sound like a positive development," Baxter said through our earbuds, barely audible over the whooping alarm.

I sprinted deeper into the deserted reception room, as if expecting Shelby would materialize like an anti-mirage once I got close enough to see her. "What's going on?"

"Badness," Fay said.

"More badness." Pete pointed to a door sliding open in front of us. He roundhoused the first face that showed itself—a white-uniformed guard, fortunately, who collapsed in the doorway and tripped his partner onto the tile. With his face so close to my foot, I gave it a kick, then knelt down to punch him out. Pete stripped them of their stunners and lobbed one my way.

"To define 'badness,'" Fay said with a brightness that suggested more curiosity than concern, "if they knew about our plan in advance, they could have moved Shelby. She could be anywhere."

"They don't know what you can and can't know," I said. "If they moved her, they'd have risked tipping you off."

"If they thought I was that powerful, why bother resisting at all?"

"Because we can't all be as smart as you! Now tell me what the hell to do."

"Well," Fay said, "abort, return to Baxter, and get up here with me. Or try to get to Shelby's cell, which may or may not contain a Shelby. They shut me out with a backup network, but I can still help you get there."

The air raid siren switched off.

"Okay," I said, awkwardly loud in the fresh silence. "Which way?"

"Straight." We ran into the off-white hallway the two guards had come through, breaking left at Fay's direction as we reached a T-intersection. On all sides the doors stayed sealed, though by command of Fay or CRS I couldn't tell. "Convicts are through the next door to your right," Fay said. "No, the next door."

It wouldn't budge. Pete, who'd also stripped the kicked guards of their ID thumbsticks, inserted one into the maglock. Inside, the cellblock looked more like a shined-up Pueblo cliff town than a prison, with rooms recessed into the six-story walls reachable by a sturdy staircase set into each corner of the open rectangular space. Though the cells had the familiar bar-grille doors, the bed and toilets were concealed behind white walls. This mix of the punitive and the private—one room open to the eyes of all, the other hidden behind a wall; the airy space of the main floor, tiled in a geometric gray array; the narrow windows beaming bands of dusty red sunlight into the blacks and whites of the vast chamber—addled my senses with its schizophrenic contradictions. I didn't see the second pair of guards until Pete stepped into a side kick that arrested his meaty, goateed assailant mid-charge. The man fell to the gray tiles, wheezing and clutching his ribs.

The other guard, the smart one, drew his stunner and shot me.

My body went fuzzy and warm and swimmy, collapsing like the loose pile of organic material it was. I was peripherally aware of my side banging into the hard floor, then directly aware of nothing as my head followed suit. I came to tingly and numb. Two thoroughly beaten guards sprawled on the tile. Overhead, footsteps clamped on metal steps. Female prisoners filled the air with calls and questions and unintelligible hoots.

Someone moaned. It was me. "What's going on?" I slurred into my throat mike.

"I've got most of the place clamped down," Fay said, "but there's a lot of staff I can't account for, and their communications are regrettably functional. We're going to have an interesting time getting to the spaceport."

"'We'?" I coughed weakly. Tingling pins prickled my skin. "What about Shelby?"

"Inside her cell. Wait, no she isn't."

"What? Where is she?"

"Outside her cell, where Pete just let her."

My head hurt like five bitches in a bitch boat, but my fingers and toes had started to twitch. I tried wiggling them (crashed on my side, I couldn't see or really feel them yet), forcing my body back into mobility.

"We should let all the others out, too."

"But they're criminals!" Fay said.

"This is a cushy pad for embezzlers and petty thugs, not Sing Sing. The only crime they'd commit on the way out is stealing any loose office supplies."

"They could hurt innocent people. That's bad. I don't want to do bad."

"Fuck bad." I swung my stupid body to a sitting position. "It's about survival now."

Available for Kindle, Nook, and various other ebook formats through Smashwords.

The Roar of the Spheres Now Available on Smashwords

2011-05-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

That's right. My near-Earth space opera The Roar of the Spheres is now available in all formats via Smashwords. The first half's free to sample, so you have literally nothing to lose by checking it out. Except your mind.

Well, not really. I just wanted to say that once. Thanks for indulging me.

The White Tree Reviewed at Indie Book Blogger

2011-04-27T08:12:00.000-07:00

The verdict: Scott gives it four stars.

More importantly, he touches on several items I considered critical while working on The White Tree. Biggest of all is the friendship between Dante and Blays, Blays wasn't a big factor in my early plans; my focus, really, was on Dante, the expansion of his powers and the deepening trouble his ambitions bring them. But the moment Blays showed up on the page, the story changed.

Some authors talk about their characters coming alive, writing themselves, as if the writer is just a stenographer for these people no one else can see. My experience wasn't quite like that. I was still the one doing the writing. But Blays' persona was so clear to me and he was such a perfect companion for Dante (ready to call him on his BS, almost as good at getting into trouble as he is in getting out of it) that I hardly had to think at all. I just knew. I knew exactly what Blays would say, what he would do. Just thinking about them makes me want to start writing about them right now.

Scott picked up on something else that emerged between these two characters: "Dante and Blays are both willing to do what they have to do to achieve their goals regardless of the legality of their actions." Yeah. Indeed. Over the course of the book, they lie, cheat, steal, and kill. They do a lot of bad things. I wanted to challenge them, to regularly put them into murky moral situations where the answer's far from clear. I wanted to keep as far away from the Good Vs. Evil tendency of epic fantasy as possible. I wanted the questions Dante and Blays face in their world to be just as impossible as the ones we face in ours.

Lastly, he mentions the "rich mythology." That damned mythology! I wrote pages of notes on the mythology behind The White Tree--not only did I have to compose my own Zodiac, complete with its own subsets of signs, signifiers, meanings, and embedded legends, but Dante eventually discovers the myths have changed over time, meaning I had to track all that, too--which symbols have changed and how, how later writers misinterpreted the early legends, etc. etc. etc. Good lord. Just thinking about it makes my brain want to crawl out my ear and hide under the porch.

I try not to call a ton of attention to the historical contradictions within the world's mythology. For the most part, it's peripheral to the main story. Picking up on these little clues won't change your entire reading of the book. They won't teach you to sprout wings and flap to the oasis on the moon, either.

But it could change your perspective on their world's history just a little. With that understanding, the conflict between the two kingdoms and their religions might look a little sadder.

Review: Water for Elephants

2011-04-26T19:00:00.001-07:00

Available here.

Water for Elephants is boring. I think just about everything involving the circus or the Great Depression is boring (some of the works of John Steinbeck excluded), but Water for Elephants is boring even by the "Hey, we're so colorful and soulful" standards of circus and/or Depression stories. The main problem here is neither the character of lead Robert Pattinson nor love interest Reese Witherspoon are in any way interesting. They're stock characters with the personality of the upcoming sentence. This is a sentence. Seriously, I don't know who these two characters are. Pattinson knows stuff good about animals. Witherspoon rides stuff good about animals. They would like to see each other naked. They would like to bone each other. Both are oppressed by temper-tantrum-throwing ringmaster Christoph Waltz, but there's no why to their love. They just do.

I gave this one a C, which is in some ways the worst grade you can bestow. That means it was neither interestingly good nor interestingly bad. It just was. Bad, that is. Now I wonder if this is a crummy adaptation of a touching, wonderful bestseller or a faithful adaptation of an overrated sack of literary white rice.

No, I take that back. I like white rice. I would eat it by itself. A comparable book version of Water for Elephants would be unsalted bow-tie pasta.

Thea Atkinson's Blog Streak, Day 25: Let the Rain Fall

2011-04-25T07:15:00.000-07:00

What's up, party people. And non-party people, of whom I assume there must be a few. (Although maybe not, you perverts. I see what brings you here--"hall pass full frontal" indeed.) For the month of April, fellow author, Thea Atkinson is streaking through 30 blogs and flashing us a piece of fiction. I generously offered her a space today so she could expose a piece. My blog will be back to normal tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy and follow the links at the end to see who she flashed yesterday and who she will flash tomorrow. Feel free to leave a comment to let me know if you enjoyed the streak, and you are welcome to tweet it or share it on Facebook. You can also follow the chain through twitter with the hashtag #blogstreak

Let the Rain Fall

By Thea Atkinson

The scene was a sickening one, and in her early days, she would have been bothered by such gruesome images of war. Now, 40 years after she'd ridden her first beast to battle, she was hardened to all the death. Hardened like the blade she carried on her back -- not that she needed a blade to take a life.

A water witch needed nothing to aid her in killing.

She could draw the fluid from a man's body in three seconds, count the time with barely a breath between each before they collapsed into a pile of leathered skin with bones so brittle she knew they crumbled to sand inside the left over husk. The eyeballs turned to blackened raisins that fell from the sockets and plopped onto the earth.

When she was young, she thought they were the seeds of a man's soul, that some god would rejuvenate them. She expected to see another body sprout from where they had fallen.

They never did.

So she hardened herself to all those deaths she'd caused -- all those seeds left unspent in the ground. All for the safety of a runt of a man who had never bothered to learn her name.

"Witch," he called her. "Witch, I need you," he’d say when he wanted to vanquish an enemy. And there were many enemies.

I need you. I want you. I want you and need you to kill, and so she had without question for years. A girl always obeyed her father, after all.

She remembered her first battle. All of those images that she stored away from her spot in a hanging basket slung like a saddlebag from her father's war beast. She was young -- just seasons old, but a water witch had a long memory to go along with the gift -- a necessity if she was to draw water from a vessel. There would need to be a vivid account of pathways and exits. And so she could still see that first pore, that first tear duct, that sweat gland -- and deeper, that cell membrane that protected the precious water. She found that if she was significantly hungry, she could speak to those portals and pull fluid from them with an ease that almost hurt her.

Killing was ugly business for a soldier let alone a two-year-old. Her father assumed such ugliness was part of her nature.

"Will it," he told her. And she did. So strong was her power over fluid that men dropped to their knees in droves, the raisins from their sockets plomping onto the ground like raindrops on thirsty earth: seeds waiting for nourishment.

Storm clouds gathered as the last enemy fell and pelted those left standing--those behind her father--with hail, but no new men sprouted to replace those she'd taken. A hunger rumbled with a terrible ache in her belly and left it feeling like one black cavern that food could never fill -- not ever again after that.

She lived in fear that one of those seeds would trail like a pumpkin's stem into a man's arm that would sneak forward through the years to reach her finally and strike her down.

And then she wished for it.

And then she prayed for it.

So this scene, nearly 40 years after that first battle was especially gruesome. She sat her beast instead of being side-bagged on it. Her father, furious at his serfdom for a rebellion gone horribly wrong, yelling, weeping, spitting his revenge at their audacity.

"Will it," he told her.

She drew water from them -- each of them -- soldiers, peasants, men, women -- and yes, even children. She watched every living thing from plant to bird to man in this her father's serfdom become petrified in an instant. All that remained were stones of different sizes and sand of different piles, and a hundred thousand little raisins peppering the arid earth as if it was a spicy bannock for a meal never to be eaten.

And in that moment she knew some men should never come back. That, that was the secret the gods kept from her. Those seeds, those raisins, should never sprout for they’d had their season.

The storm clouds gathered above her. Her father grunted his anger; it wasn't enough, this revenge. They deserved worse, not this quick, painless death he'd ordered. He should have done more; she should have drawn the water slower, made them suffer.

She looked at him, felt the drops of water from the clouds plop onto her shoulder. The rain on her cheeks felt hot, then cold as it evaporated. The clouds sucked back into themselves, afraid of the power of the witch that could thirst the water from the very sky.

"I'm hungry," she said to him as she climbed down from her beast. The earth felt good on her bare feet. She'd never been allowed to have shoes.

"Eh?" Her father gave her a sharp look. She’d never deigned speak to him except to answer yes to his whims.

"I hunger."

Even as his mouth opened to deny her, he spilled from his beast, so many particles of sand running into his boots as they hit the ground, dumping into the sidesaddle she'd spent so many months in while they were at war. His ice green eyes shriveled and fell as tiny raisins to the earth.

She knelt to one knee and scooped them up, giving them a quick study, making sure they were indeed the seeds of his soul.

And then she popped them into her mouth, chewed. And for the first time in her forty years, she felt satisfied.
-30-

Thea's blog streak continues!:

April 24: Tania Tirraoro's

April 26: Jason Anderson's

They're Us But They're Not: On the AI in The Roar of the Spheres

2011-04-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of artificial intelligences running around in The Roar of the Spheres. They act a lot like humans. There are reasons for this: for one thing, it's fun. But realistically speaking, I think AI will end up being a lot like us.

The thing about intelligence is it always arises from a huge collection of stupid actors. I'm not talking about movies here. Schools of fish and flocks of birds don't move in those beautifully choreographed movements because somebody at the front is bellowing at them through a bullhorn. Neighborhoods and districts in cities, for the most part, don't arrange themselves because somebody's planning it. Maybe the most famous misinterpretation of intelligence is that of bee hives and ant colonies: the queen is not ordering her thousands of offspring around. She makes zero decisions about the colony's behavior. The decisions to forage, relocate, or war are all determined by the collective conclusion reached through thousands of beings laying down their individual pheromone trails.

Brains are similar. Brains are composed of neurons, each of which is capable of no action more sophisticated than saying ON or OFF, TRUE or FALSE, SALT or PEPPER. It's the interaction of billions of these stupid actors arranged in various networks that lead to sapience. It's kind of amazing.

Neurons are bits. They have the exact same properties as computers. If you want to create an AI, I don't think you look to high-level, individually powerful processors. I think you combine billions of very stupid, very simple processors that, when networked with each other, are capable of unintuitive outcomes.

That's how you build a brain. If you model a machine after our brains, you might create intelligence. If you model an intelligence after ours--with the same unpredictable, bottom-up networks--you're going to have beings capable of emotion and irrationality.

In other words, if we design AI in our own image, based on billions of stupid actors acting in concert, I don't think they'll be the logic-machines we often imagine, incapable of feelings, inhumanely rational. They might end up an awful lot like us.

Review: Scream 4

2011-04-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

Over at the Herald.

I would need to rewatch them to be sure, especially the third one, which as far as my memory's concerned may as well not exist, but right now I'm operating under the belief Scream might be the most solid horror franchise out there. Even Scream 4 isn't a waste of 1s and 0s. Of course, it's running at the advantage--if it had 7-12 movies like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, or Hellraiser, the balance would undoubtedly be different--but even comparing Scream's four entries to the first four of any other set, I think Scream has the edge, despite the fact its best doesn't match up to, say, the original Nightmare on Elm Street.

Like I say in the review, I think this is attributable to the fact writer Kevin Williamson's scripted three of them and director Wes Craven has handled all four. This lends a continuity to the series; you don't have some D-list guys swoop in to cash in with sequels that take the original mythology in bold, stupid new directions. They haven't exhausted their creativity yet, either.

Also contending, Best Horror Franchise: the Return of the Living Dead series. Though the second one sucked.

Interview at Indie Reads

2011-04-16T09:54:00.000-07:00

An interview with who? An interview with me. Go read it here.

Yes, A Game of Thrones Sucks, But the New York Times Has No Idea Why

2011-04-15T14:47:00.001-07:00

The New York Times' review of HBO's A Game of Thrones has stirred up a minor geeky shitstorm over Ginia Bellafante's statements, among them the ironically patronizing claim that it's "boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half." She believes, apparently, that women have little to no interest in Tolkienish epic fantasy, and that HBO amped up the sex in A Game of Thrones just to draw in the ladies.

This is pretty dumb, of course, or simply ignorant. A nice refutation can be found on Geek with Curves. The main point is this: tons of women read fantasy in all forms. If you still picture fantasy as a fandom of sweaty male shut-ins, your stereotypes are at least a generation behind the fact.

Frustratingly, I think Bellafante does reach some highly relevant conclusions about A Game of Thrones itself, criticizing it for "serv[ing] up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot."

My god! It sounds as if HBO's version is actually an incredibly faithful adaptation of George R.R. Martin's well-written but manipulative and mentally bankrupt book series! A series I threw down in disgust midway through the fourth novel when I just couldn't take it anymore.

The fact I'd read to the fourth novel proves Martin's series is highly readable and initially engaging. But after a while, I started to get impatient for the long, long, looooong setups to pay off (give me the fucking ice-monsters already!); for his enraging habit of ending every chapter on a cliffhanger and then, when we return to the cliffhung character 50-80 pages later, we've found all the action has already passed; for his Saharan lack of ideas besides "people with power should be good, but they usually aren't"; for the utter inability for the good guys to come out with a single victory (I like grit as much as the next guy, but throw me some hope now and then); for his creepy sex scenes of old men and teenage girls; for his ever-expanding roster of side characters that draw us further and further from the reasons we were reading in the first place...

So for Bellafante to nail down one of the most valid criticisms of A Song of Ice and Fire, only to have her observation lost beneath her hilariously bygone stereotypes? Man, that's frustrating. For all it insults women, it manages to insult another subset of fantasy fans: those of us who should be inclined to love Martin's work, but instead find it manipulative, foolish, and overrated.

Review: Arthur

2011-04-13T08:33:00.000-07:00

Blah blah available here.

With Arthur, I had the fairly rare experience of laughing a lot more than the rest of the audience. As a professional snootyman who gets paid to tell you what you like is stupid, I will, in most cases, spend significantly less time laughing during a comedy than my hooting, armpit-scratching fellow theater-goers. Either that or there are lots more not-me people in the crowd than people who are me, so, taken as a whole, it sounds like they're laughing more, but that theory suffers from the fatal flaw that it's not making fun of anyone.

Whatever. This time, I was laughing the hardest. Basically every line out of Russell Brand's mouth is a joke of some kind. I'm not sure about Arthur's rewatchability factor, and pretty much the entire Brand-Greta Gerwig romance storyline was the movie's weakest part, but I had a pretty great time.

Barry Michels and the Worst Sentence Ever Written

2011-04-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

This may come as a surprise to anyone who can't read, but writers have problems. Here's how one man treats them.

The TL;DR version: Barry Michels is a Jungian psychologist who treats Hollywood types in unusual ways. Phil Stutz, his mentor, uses this motto to treat his writers: "KEEP WRITING SHIT, STUPID." Michels, meanwhile, advised one of his patients to kneel for one minute before writing and entreat the universe to help him write the worst sentence in history.

I loved that. I thought that was so great I tried it myself. Just once, mind you, and once is not a habit. Once will not get you results. Still, it was fun.

These guys employ a lot of weird techniques. A lot of them sound like nonsense. But I think to some extent it doesn't matter what the techniques are. The very existence of an outwardly-imposed structure is going to help a lot of writers get over themselves and write. A blank page is infinite. But if you put some structure on it, some walls and roads and ladders, suddenly it's a whole lot easier to navigate. By eliminating possibilities, you put yourself that much closer to the solution.

But really, check out that article. It's strange and hilarious stuff.

And Now, the Greatest Gift Ever Given to Those Who Own a Nook

2011-04-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

That's right: I've been uploading my books to Barnes & Noble.

The White Tree

The Roar of the Spheres

The Zombies of Hobbiton: A Martian Love Story

Turns out B&N takes HTML-formatted books just like Amazon, so it's not that tricky to list your books at both. The only problem is each of them has their own peculiar quirks about what code they like to mangle or ignore--and the documentation is terrible. I've had to do a lot of trial-and-error to figure out what works, but on the upside, I've learned a lot of new CSS.

Review: Source Code

2011-04-05T08:05:00.001-07:00

Available here.

Source Code is the second movie from director Duncan Jones, he of the awesome Moon. As a followup, I found Source Code neither as potent or as weird as his debut, but you know what? It was pretty close to great. I would watch it again right now. It's a well-crafted, well-paced thriller. Jones has a natural instinct for quietly revealing something horribly disturbing without pushing things too far into manipulative or ridiculous territory. He seems to be a natural storyteller, too: he knows right when it's time to reveal a new plot detail, and never indulges in "I know something you don't!"-type shenanigans.

I'm really excited to see where his career goes from here. He's off to a hell of a start.

The Joys and Horrors of Self-Promotion

2011-04-04T10:17:00.000-07:00

First, the news: My novel The White Tree is currently featured at Spalding's Racket.

Next, a digression: Over the last six weeks, I've added a new dimension to my writing career: indie publishing. Self-publishing, if you want to be more direct. Some talented but behind-the-times authors are still calling it "vanity publishing," which.. well, I liked Hyperion an awful lot, Mr. Simmons. You write great AI. Let's leave it at that.

Back on course: When you're going it by yourself, you don't have anyone advertising your work for you. Unless you're one of those "guys with money" who can "hire publicists" and "eat dinner inside the restaurants instead of behind them." But most of us, if we want people to know about our books, we have to tell them ourselves.

There are numerous ways to approach this, which I should probably explore in another post re: their relative shame index. For instance, I find interviews to be pretty painless: I'm not talking about why readers should buy a specific book, so the chance of sounding like a deluded used-car salesman is dramatically decreased. But in cases like this, where you're basically saying "Hey, here's my book, here's why you might like to buy it"? I'm simultaneously excited by the opportunity and ashamed that I took it. I don't think you have to feel that way. But I do.

Self-promotion has a definite learning curve. Here's what I've learned so far: focus on the types of promotion you're comfortable doing, be it interviews, tweets, forum involvement, guest blogs, describing your book on blogs that provide space for such things, etc. And even if you think your book is especially funny, poignant, action-packed, whatever, maybe you, as the author, are not the one to be promoting it as such. It's one thing to reply to an interview question with "I try to write funny because funny things are funny." It's another to blurb your book somewhere with "A hilarious, can't-put-downable read, My Immortal Masterpiece That Will Outlast Mankind Itself will touch your heart in ways that are illegal in 72 countries."

I think I could have approached some of my blurb appearances a little better. But I'm sure my first agent queries were far from perfect, too, and I know my earlier stories would make me implode with shame. If there's one thing about the process of becoming a writer, it's that it teaches you to shrug it off, move forward, and vow to do better next time. To less failure ahoy!

The Zombies of Hobbiton: Currently Free on Smashwords

2011-03-31T15:24:00.001-07:00

That's right. Available in just about every electronic format under the big yellow sun, The Zombies of Hobbiton: A Martian Love Story is currently free at Smashwords.

It's a fast-paced horror-comedy novella of about 85 pages, and it won't be free forever. So go forth! Download! Tell your buddies! Leave reviews! Be fruitful and multiply! Etc.!

The Internet Is a Pack of Hungry Dogs, So It Is Probably Best If You Do Not Act Like a Bonehead

2011-03-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

Over at BigAl's Books and Pals, a fairly prominent book blog, Al posted a review of The Greek Seaman, an indie novel by a woman named Jacqueline Howett. Al enjoyed the story, but wound up giving the novel two stars, put off by its numerous typos, errors, and tangled sentences.

In response, Ms. Howett exploded like a grammatically-challenged Hindenburg.

I'm not gonna criticize her any further--there are already 300 comments doing just that, as well as some 50-odd one-star reviews added to her Amazon page following the viral, Twitter-fueled dust-up--but the ensuing dogpile reinforces one of the internet's most basic axioms: no matter how big a dog you think you are, the internet is a pack of millions. Do you know what a million bites to the ankle can do? A million bites to the ankle could take down an AT-AT. Turn that force on a normal person, they will be reduced to a fine red dew.

Don't give the pack a reason to start nipping. All you can do is go hide in your den until they go away.

Guest Post on Steven Drennon's Blog: How Short Stories Can Make You a Better Novelist

2011-03-29T15:41:00.001-07:00

Well, uh, that title pretty much covers it, actually. Check it out here.

New on Amazon: The Zombies of Hobbiton: A Martian Love Story, Or, A Semi-Exhaustive Study of the Problem with Novellas

2011-03-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

Drumroll: The Zombies of Hobbiton: Martian Love Story, an 85-page novella, is now available on Amazon.

At nearly 25,000 words, The Zombies of Hobbiton falls squarely into novella territory. This is another way of saying it's completely unsalable.

Big book publishers wouldn't touch a story of that length. Even the shortest genres, category romance and such, is expected to crack 60,000 words or so. A sci-fi or horror novel had better run at least 75K. I suppose it's possible a traditional publisher would sell a few novellas bundled together, or one inserted among an anthology, but frankly, to sell a story of that length, a story that may well take up 20-25% of the anthology's total page count, you either have to be extremely good or already well-established.

The same rule of thumb applies over at the genre magazines. Duotrope.com. Duotrope lists 200 paying horror markets and 227 paying sci-fi markets (there is some overlap here). Of these, two pro-paying magazines (that is, markets that pay at least $0.05/word) accept novellas up to 25K words: Fantasy & Science Fiction, at 25K, and Analog, at an impressive 40K. If you place a 25K story at one of these markets, you'll do pretty well for yourself: F&SF would shell out $1500 for your story (a little more if you're established), and Analog would pay $1250 ($1500 if you're a big name). F&SF buys first North American and foreign serial rights with an option on anthology rights. I'm not sure what Analog asks for, but it's probably similar, meaning you'd still have a bunch of rights left to sell on down the road.

However, F&SF receives somewhere in the ballpark of 2500+ submissions a year while Analog probably sees around 1000+. These are conservative extrapolations; I expect they receive closer to twice that many.

So if you exhaust both those options, you can turn to lower-paying genre markets. Crossed Genres is a pretty nice little zine, and while they hypothetically accept novellas, they're currently closed to such submissions. Orb Speculative Fiction takes novellas up to 25K words. If you're a resident of Australia or New Zealand. If accepted, you'll be paid $50. (Note: I'm very aware of the difficulties in paying authors high rates for their work, and am not criticizing Orb for their pay rates. Just exploring the novella market.) The Red Penny Papers is an interesting-looking zine that wants gothic, pulpy speculative fiction. They'll serialize works of up to 25K words, paying $0.005/word (i.e. 10K = $50), capping at $100. (Same disclaimer re: rates applies. I like small markets. Simply making a point.) GigaNotoSaurus, a market specifically for longer stories, takes novellas up to 25K and pays $100, and is newish but pretty well-respected.

In total, I see three other SF/F/H magazine markets that will run novellas, paying $25-40 apiece. Anthologies of various pay rates come and go and will sometimes take long stories.

From there, small presses are a fairly viable medium for novellas. A lot of them sell ebooks, but I'm aware of several that will sell actual print novellas. Small press novella markets still aren't plentiful--I see 10-12 on Duotrope, and strongly suspect there are significantly more out there--but they exist. Most offer a token advance and royalties. Small presses aren't normally capable of making you rich, but I have met a couple authors who make a living through them.

So maybe my characterization of novellas as a bastard-length medium that's utterly unsalable is a little hyperbolic. In truth, you've got three options:

1) Try to sell them to a magazine. Between all genres, Duotrope shows seven pro-paying markets for works of 25K words or more, with another ~15 paying at lower rates

2) Sell through a small press. This has the usual small press pros and cons: a stamp of legitimacy, formatting and distribution, and possibly a bigger platform than you can provide yourself vs. splitting revenues. (My experience with small presses is limited, but I've enjoyed it)

3) Self-publish through Amazon, B&N, etc.

Given that there is no real traditional route available, 2) is the default option if you want a press backing you. Writing this piece has put them on my radar to explore if/when I write my next novella.

When it comes to 1) and 3), they aren't mutually exclusive, of course. While some magazines may want permanent e-rights that could conflict with your ability to resell your novella through Amazon etc., many don't, and some of the ones that do are usually willing to take a story offline after 6-12 months. If I thought I had a chance in hell of placing The Zombies of Hobbiton at Analog or F&SF (I think it's too slapsticky for them, though I could be wrong), I might have tried them first.

But when I look at media to sell novellas through, I see limited options with serious tradeoffs. Some self-publishing advocates would argue this is no more than a microcosm of all current traditional publishing routes--but if nothing else, it's even worse for novellas, because you simply have almost nothing to lose. From where I sit, the best path is to publish them yourself and see where it leads.

A Glimpse of Things to Come: Is That a.. Zombie?

2011-03-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

Uh oh!

M-Brane SF Quarterly #2: Arrived! With Special Surprise Bonus

2011-03-24T13:44:00.000-07:00

Well, that was fast:

Now that's a good-lookin' book. That is a book you can make out with. I'm especially fond of the rocket-ship in the M-Brane logo. And like people say, there's something special about holding a physical book that's got your writing inside. But wait.. what about the back?

The poor image quality is my fault. If you can't read it, it says "A snippet from Ed's story is being used to sell this book, bitches." Now that's a good feeling.

New(ish) Story Alert: M-Brane SF Quarterly #2

2011-03-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

M-Brane SF Quarterly #2 released yesterday. Collecting three issues of M-Brane, the book features fifteen sci-fi stories, including my very own "When We Were Mutants."

I've read a third of the stories in it--they're a strong, diverse bunch. At $9.95 on Amazon, would you call that a fine bargain? Or the greatest bargain in the history of things that cost less than their true value?

A Brand New Cover for The Roar of the Spheres

2011-03-20T09:04:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back, I contacted the amazing M.S. Corley about putting together a piece of cover art for The Roar of the Spheres. Yesterday, I got the results:

I am in love with this. Being more verbal than visual, I hadn't really thought much about what The Roar of the Spheres' cover should look like until Mr. Corley asked me for a few ideas and descriptions. His finished product? Isn't particularly like any of the ideas I sent him.

It's much, much better.

Table of Contents for Fantastique Unfettered #2

2011-03-16T07:16:00.000-07:00

Pretty cool, right? And that big "NEW AETHER AGE FICTION!" on the cover? Why, that's me!

That feels pretty good, being advertised that way. It says Hey, there are fans of the Aether Age, and here's something new for them. I've been wanting to invent an SF/F subgenre for a while now. I didn't invent the Aether Age, but I did help make it real. And now it exists outside the first anthology, too.

Fantastique Unfettered #2 releases in April.

New Kindle Fiction: The Roar of the Spheres

2011-03-08T10:45:00.000-08:00

I've released a new book on Kindle: The Roar of the Spheres, currently available for $0.99. It's a sci-fi novel, a backyard space opera heavy with action and humor.

Heh! Pretty crummy cover, right? Did it myself, that's why. I've contacted a pro I know to work me up a better one, but I wanted to get The Roar of the Spheres up now for a couple reasons: first, it's currently in the second round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and if it makes the next round of cuts, I want it out there for anyone who wants to check out. Second, there may be a few brave souls out there ready to overlook the second-rate cover, fork over a buck, and give it a read. Ideally, one or two of them will toss up a review by the time I have my new cover ready to go. Voila--all ready to market.

I don't know if this is a better or worse strategy than waiting until everything is absolutely perfect to get it out there. The last thing an indie author* needs is to look unprofessional. At the same time, most newcomers take months to build up their presence. The Roar of the Spheres isn't going to get much attention good or bad today; that cover will be replaced before more than a handful of people have seen it.

But in the meantime, it's working its way through Amazon's system. It's out there if someone wants to read it. I stand by the body of the book itself. Pretty soon, I'll be able to give it the snappy suit to match.

*For the record, I don't self-define as a purely indie author--I'm still writing short stories and selling them to magazines, and unless I get Amanda Hockingsishly rich, I will continue to pursue traditional publishers with my next novel. But in the meantime, anyone who declines to self-publish work they believe in just because of the rapidly eroding stigma against self-published books--I think they're slamming a door on an unknown and sometimes career-launching new world.

Review: The Adjustment Bureau

2011-03-07T08:50:00.000-08:00

Available here.

So The Adjustment Bureau is a Philip K. Dick adaption. A loose Philip K. Dick adaption. It's so loose, in fact, the only recognizable Dickish element is the basic plot, where protagonist Matt Damon ends up realizing what he thought about the nature of reality is false. Other than that, well, it's just another generic sci-fi semi-thriller.

Like I say in the review, I don't mind when adaptations depart from the source material. But if you're gonna diverge, you have to fill in the gaps with material of your own. With The Adjustment Bureau, in an attempt to capture people with heart, the focus is squarely on the love story. Fine. Awesome. We all love love. But the details of the Bureau and its rules are flat, unimaginative; the reasons Damon and would-be lover Emily Blunt are kept apart come down to fairly trite rules of life. There's nothing really there. The end result is something far blander than Dick ever wrote.

The UK's Ongoing Love Affair with The Battle for Moscow, Idaho & Other Stories

2011-03-03T11:30:00.001-08:00

For reasons beyond my ken, The Battle for Moscow, Idaho & Other Stories is selling like gangbustered hotcakes over on Amazon UK. For Kindle, it's the #8th-ranked Anthology; in Science Fiction, it's #14 among all anthologies, just below a volume of Philip K. Dick's stories and just above a Star Trek novel.

It didn't take many sales to push it that high, but you know what, that's fucking badass: a Philip Dick and Star Trek sandwich with me as the meat. Didn't see that one coming. Here's to the splendidly refined taste of the United Kingdom!

Review: Hall Pass

2011-03-02T07:31:00.000-08:00

Available, as usual, here.

Like I say in the review, I should have guessed Hall Pass was a Farrelly Brothers movie: a bit of genuine sentiment buried under loads of prop shit. Also I had the same gut reaction I normally do to their work: "Well, I kinda respect what they're doing here, but I just can't get behind the scene were he drinks the bucket of bull semen."

Hall Pass did inspire me, however, to begin the Full-Frontal Male Nudity Watch. Cocks have popped up in a lot of comedies lately: Walk Hard, The Hangover, now Hall Pass, among others. Hall Pass features three wangs, including two in the same scene. Groundbreaking recent-comedy history made before your very eyes as you frown and chuckle uncomfortably.

I am very much looking forward to all the upcoming alien invasion movies. Just nine days until I get to see my new hometown blown to meaty cinders in Battle: Los Angeles!

New Sale: "On the Reproductive Habits of Elves"

2011-02-25T08:34:00.001-08:00

Last night I sold "On the Reproductive Habits of Elves" to Sorcerous Signals, a fantasy magazine. The story will appear in May.

Sorcerous Signals is a smaller magazine, but I like their contributor-payment model. There's a token upfront payment. Nothing special. But at the end of each story, there's a PayPal donate button, and if enough donations are received to recoup the expenses of the magazine (just about every magazine but a few of the pros is run out of the editors' pockets), 75% of the extra contributions are divvied up among the writers (and, I think, the artist).

Is it likely I'll end up seeing more money from this? Probably not. The ratio of readers : readers who donate can't be very high anywhere, and I expect the vast bulk of donations would run in the $1-5 range. But I think it's a really, really smart thing to try. If a story ends up getting a lot of attention, there's at least the opportunity for the magazine and the writer to be compensated. This is the sort of thing more markets should be trying. Ads and subscription fees have their place, but if you want to attract writers, you have to find a way to pay them. As a writer, I sent this story to Sorcerous Signals because they're trying to make that happen. I'll probably walk away from this with no more than enough to buy a meal. But the fact they're taking a shot, that's what won me over.

There's almost no resistance to this particular concept, either--like a story? Well, you don't have to try to hunt down the author's email and contact them about sending them a check, which would feel kind of weird if you stop to think about it. Just click on this button and type in a dollar amount. Thank you very much, kind sir or lady-sir.

"On the Reproductive Habits of Elves," by the way, was spurred by an idea I had while watching The Lord of the Rings: why can elves live so long but have so few children? What biological arrangement would lead to that outcome? A while later, I thought of a way to explore that conundrum dramatically, sat down at the keyboard, and voila. Find out the answer in a couple months.

Taking Shots: The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

2011-02-24T15:49:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I entered The Roar of the Spheres in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Today, I learned I'd moved on to the second round, along with 1000 other books in the general fiction category.

I don't know how this contest looks to industry professionals. One logical perspective is it's 10,000 people fighting for two seats at the dinner table. There's not a lot of dignity in that. Of course, the competition to find an agent and a publisher isn't much different, but at least it's not so transparent.

I don't care anymore. If there's an opportunity out there, I'm going to take a shot at it. I don't care if it risks looking unprofessional to some people. The ABNA, self-publishing to Kindle, whatever--if it gives me a chance to make money from my fiction, I'm going to do it. I'm trying to build a career. That's all I care about.

As a tangent, I checked out a couple threads about the ABNA over at Kindleboards. Several authors expressed doubts about it, outright questioning the value of Penguin's $15,000 advance against the worth of their ebook rights. Here's some quick math: if you sell 10 copies of your $0.99 book a day, 3650 in a year, you've made just over $1250 in royalties from Amazon.

How many indie authors are selling 3650 copies of a single novel every year? How many years do you expect this success to carry on through for this single title? It had better be at least 12. Factoring in some risk-assessment, I think you'd only turn down a $15,000 advance if you have strong reason to believe you can maintain that level of self-published sales for 25 years.

In some circles, self-epublishing is taking on a serious gold-rush mindset. But for every Amanda Hocking, there are 100,000 authors lucky to sell a single copy per week.

No doubt e-rights are becoming a huge deal, huger by the day. But $15,000 and a book published by a giant corporate house is a pretty great deal compared to what tens of thousands of self-published authors are going to end up earning through their ebooks. At the very least, it's a high and concrete platform from which to promote your other works. You want to turn that down over fears the stone you've polished might turn out to be a diamond? To me, that sounds like a good way to stall out right where you are, to end up the same place ten years down the road as you are today.

Zombie Story in the Works

2011-02-21T13:04:00.001-08:00

Oh yeah. It's time. Got a decent little twist for it, too. And I'm thinking long: like, novella-long. 15-30,000 words long. Stuff you're a fool to write because there's nowhere to sell it.

But that's not really the case anymore, is it? Wish me luck.

Review: Before Sunrise

2011-02-18T21:12:00.000-08:00

Available here.

Damn good movie. Before Sunrise serves up dialogue and performances that could have been stolen from your own life. Most impressively of all, for such a formless, free-floating movie, there's a clear narrative drive swimming beneath the surface: where's this going? Will there be a tomorrow?

I'm not kidding about that thing about how it'll affect couples, either. By about halfway in, my girlfriend and I were reminiscing about how we first met, about our first date. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are so convincing it's hard not to be transported back to that first amazing day.

Unless you're single. But I'm sure Real Dolls are more affordable by the day.

Now Up for Kindle: The White Tree

2011-02-18T10:25:00.000-08:00

So I've put a couple story collections up for Kindle already. Here's the first time I've listed a book: The White Tree.

The White Tree is a big fat fantasy book. It's funny and bloody and action-heavy. To summarize 150,000 words of novel, a young sorcerer named Dante and his even younger bodyguard Blays are enlisted to help stop a secret war against their homeland--but the deeper they get, the harder it is for them to know which side is right.

More details and a sample are available at Amazon. It's a stand-alone work, but I've got ideas sketched out for two more--and if enough people pick up The White Tree, I may just have to write its sequels.

Review: The Eagle

2011-02-15T09:28:00.001-08:00

Available here.

My take on The Eagle benefited from the perspective of time. When I left the theater, I was thinking, "Well, that was pretty entertaining, wasn't it? The guys in the paint and all. And yeah, the ending was a little pat, and I was squinting at how hard they tried to conceal Jamie Bell's motivations from Channing Tatum, but did you see those rivers? They looked prehistoric. And the Romans fought like Romans. Maybe not a ripping good yarn, but at least a fraying one."

The next day I thought, "Well, it's probably not going to stand out too much a year from now."

The day after that, when I prepared to sit down for my review, I thought, "Hey, it had some pretty fat dramatic flaws, right? A fun movie, but not a terribly skillful one."

Sometimes I have to write about a movie the same day I see it. I suppose there's something valuable in that, too--my reactions are more raw, my praise more generous. (If I dislike something, on the other hand, I tend to know right away.) But just a couple days' perspective is all it takes to go from "That was pretty good!" to "Well, no need to see that again!"

New Collection Up at Amazon

2011-02-14T08:13:00.001-08:00

Now available for the "Oh my God how can I not buy this at this very instant" price of $0.99, The Battle for Moscow, Idaho & Other Stories.

It's six stories about 24,000 words long (roughly 90 pages). Four of them were previously published. Four are 4000-6000 words, one's a flash piece of 600 words, and the other's a Twitter-length story of 140 characters.

I changed the look of When We Were Mutants a bit, too. I don't expect to start selling crazy copies just because I've got a second collection up, but I'll be interested to see if it makes any difference at all; there's some evidence out there that it takes a critical mass of available work build a readership.

Probably, the way to do that isn't with collections of short stories, which don't even sell when Michael Chabon writes them. Hmm, but what's this fantasy novel manuscript doing sitting on my desktop? Maybe with a little revision...

A Recommitment to Reading Things of Higher Import than the Comments on the Simpsons Recaps at the A.V. Club

2011-02-13T10:21:00.000-08:00

The trap of doing a lot of writing is that, to make time for it, it's a logical conclusion to start reading less. This isn't the most brilliant strategy. It's like trying to fuel your car by building a bunch of new cars.

So I've been trying to read more short stories lately. Aided by my birthday Kindle, in the last couple weeks I've read M-Brane SF #24. I've gotten my first exposure to Charles Stross in "Overtime." I read The Aether Age. Mostly through Twitter links, I've picked up a few scattered stories from sites like Lightspeed. Oh, and after getting a subscription for Christmas, I received my first issue of Asimov's; so far I've read John Kessel's "Clean," which I liked, and Neal Barrett, Jr.'s "Where," which I didn't--too underexplained, too little happening. (Though Barrett's distinctive enough that I know I've encountered his work elsewhere and thought it was great.)

I'm aided in my quest to resume reading by Rise Reviews, a new site dedicated to coverage of stories from magazines and anthologies that don't qualify as an SFWA professionally-paying market (i.e., they pay less than 5 cents/word). A strong review led me to Nadia Bulkin's "Lucky You" in Ideomancer.

I'm glad I checked it out--it's a cool, eminently readable piece about an immortal living through the modern age, the apocalypse, the quiet afterward, and the slow accumulation of change. I'm somewhat ambivalent about its fantastic underpinnings, but it worked. I liked it. I liked it well enough to click over to Bulkin's bibliography, which I hope to follow up on as soon as I finish up my weekly deadlines (and get settled into a new freelance gig I just picked up--who knew, there are more opportunities in big cities).

A lot of short stories, I'm not too hot on them, or I admire the author's craftsmanship but am not inspired to search out their other work. Rise Reviews pointed me in the right direction. For me, at least, they've already justified their existence: there's good fiction out there beyond the pro zines. Sometimes, you just need a little help to find it.

Review: Sanctum

2011-02-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

Available here.

I was pretty neutral going in to Sanctum; I like James Cameron, who was executive producer on it or something, but aside from the potentially cool business in the trailer about "Never give up. Ever!!" and then sucking oxygen from a cranny in the ceiling, it looked quite bland. That impression turned out to be correct.

Bonus: someone already left a silly comment.

Who's That Being Interviewed? Why, It's Me!

2011-02-08T09:37:00.000-08:00

Largely about The Aether Age, partly about me as a writer. The story was written for the Tri-City Herald, and, for reasons that may include a glacial news cycle, Northwest pride, or possibly because they may all be McClatchy papers, also ran in the Tacoma News-Tribune and Bellingham Herald.

I work as a freelance movie critic for the Tri-City Herald, and I have to say I'm somewhat uncomfortable being interviewed on an unrelated aspect of my career by a business that employs me in another field. Not that I think there's actually anything unethical in this case; the Herald's strong local coverage is one of the reasons they've continued to do so well in the current newspaper era, and they run pieces on local artists all the time.

But it's interesting in that, at some point along the continuum of authorial fame/success, the weird thing would be if they didn't run a story on me. If I wrote a bestseller, or built a strong midlist career, there would be no question of a conflict of interest: that's serious local news.

On the other end, in a hypothetical where I wrote columns for a paper, was also trying to launch a fiction career, but had no sales yet, it would be pretty dubious if they ran a piece on how I'd like to someday sell short stories, right? So there's a continuum from "This guy has nothing to show for himself, why on Earth would be okay to run a story on that" to "This guy's a major author, of course it's of interest to the community." Where along that continuum does my career in fiction fall?

I have no actual doubts the paper would've done the piece if they had any real reservations about that (and of course they noted the potential conflict at the end of the piece). Integrity is the currency of (non-tabloid) newspapers, and once you start trading that away, you devalue your business and institution. I just think ethical situations like this are the most fascinating because there's always room for doubt, however small.

I suppose my policy is to keep my head down and work hard, but grab all opportunities that pop up. The Aether Age has some pretty great stories in it. Better yet, the individual visions of its sixteen authors, taken as a whole, build a universe much, much broader than what's painted in any one story. I'm happy to lend it a little notice.

Review: No Strings Attached

2011-01-24T20:08:00.000-08:00

Available here.

I gave No Strings Attached a B. On some level, the very format of me professionally grading movies is inherently stupid--as if I'm the teacher and these movies are my little students trying their hardest to pass my indisputable standards--but I like grades as a reader and a critic. As a reader, they help me place a review in context; as the critic, they help me define my overall feelings toward a movie.

To get its B, No Strings Attached probably benefited from low expectations. An.. Ashton Kutcher rom-com. Oh. All right, I will go see that and tell other people what to think of it. I'm sure this will be a fine use of everyone's time.

But then it turned out to be fairly funny. And while the fuckbuddy-turned-romance relatioship between Kutcher and Natalie Portman was nothing that special or groundbreaking, there were a lot of sideplots and supporting characters that gave that central relationship leeway to not be terribly interesting. Like Kutcher's dad, former sitcom star Kevin Kline. And their friends' burgeoning little relationship. And Kutcher's TV job. That stuff, all good.

So when I think, just a day after writing the review, that maybe No Strings Attached was more of a B-, or even a C+ (the grade of deeply flawed but often entertaining stuff), and maybe I was overrating it because I expected it to be a pan of broiled bullshit, eventually I can only shrug. I had a good time. A much better one than I anticipated. A time that I would peg as a B: I could have been watching something better, but I enjoyed myself while I was there.

Review: Better Off Dead

2011-01-22T17:26:00.001-08:00

Available here.

When it comes to stuff I plan to review, I add movies to my Netflix queue for a bunch of reasons. Some of them are movies I've seen before and know will make for a good writeup. Some get recommended by my friends or by Netflix itself. Others I toss on there because some anonymous internet person made them sound interesting.

I heard about Better Off Dead as a movie where a teenager repeatedly tries to kill himself. Sounds awesome; you could mine a lot of black comedy out of that concept, and maybe expose some dark truths about adolescence most people won't touch with a ten foot pole that's being held by an illegal alien. But when I sat down to watch Better Off Dead, the suicide attempts weren't only not the focus of the movie, they barely registered. They were just quick gags.

On one level, I was disappointed I wasn't watching the movie I'd imagined. But Better Off Dead quickly established its own thing as a churning, riotous gag factory. Soon enough, I didn't care it wasn't what I'd signed up for. That's the mark of a lasting movie.