Jupiter Ascending

Just watched Jupiter Ascending this weekend, and had to comment, because really why all the negativity?  The Wachowskis describe their film as being the Wizard of Oz in  space.  I would say while channeling Charles Fort and Cordwainer Smith (the former for the idea that we're property, the latter for the whole Gothic Lords of the Instrumentality, underpeople and stroon).  Its also a rag to riches story, and therefore shares a lot of tropes with the Cinderella fairy tale.

So I'm finding it hard to understand how the reviewers were baffled by the story?

This is not to say that Jupiter Ascending is perfect.  It has a number of flaws, especially for an old fogie like me: explosions too loud, action scenes too long, not enough witty dialogue.  But it's a magnificent visual feast with eye poppingly gorgeous scenes of spaceships and underpeople.  Yes it's Candy floss, but Candy floss turned up to eleven on the scale of awesome flavoured Candy floss.

It also seems to have been received better by women and non-Americans, and I have to wonder if the current zeitgeist in America is moving further away from the tastes of the rest of the world?  If so what would that mean?  I have no idea.

Moving on, my wrist has been hurting me.  So on Sunday I took time off and sat and read all day.  I had several good books to choose from, but my partner wanted me to read the latest Charlie Stross Laundry series novel The Rhesus Chart, so that we could discuss it.  I really enjoyed the book, it kept me glued to my seat and turning pages.  So on that front ten out of ten.

However, I feel the book could have done with another editing pass, because there were several repetitions of jokes that while funny, get rather tired when used repeated; namely the play on Deeply Scary Sorcerer as the real meaning for the job title of Detached Special Secretary.  This is repeated in each book when Angleton is mentioned, and in the case of The Rhesus Chart more than once.  The repetition was clunky.

In addition, I felt that one of the two main protagonists was given the idiot ball.  I got the fact that there could only be one master vampire, but I didn't feel (given the history of the two vampire protagonists) that this come through.  It might be because we were told, rather than really shown what drives vampires to be the only one.  So I wasn't convinced that one of the protagonists would really feel the need to get his hands dirty, rather than use his resources to go underground and ride out the storm.

Also the events leading up to the ending felt rather forced.  Some of the action is told in a rather detached style, as an add-on commentary to what has happened.  It's a technique Stross uses quite often, but this time I found it broke the internal structure of the narrative by jumping back and forth in time within the same chapter.

However, The Rhesus Chart is well worth reading, and it's the best in the Laundry series as the story has consequences that I imagine will come home to roost in the next book.

Last week I managed to edit 6,684 words on Strike Dog, adding to the running total to bring it up to 101,777 words, which makes it now the longest of my three novels.  This also means I'm just a tad sort of half way through editing the novel, having edited a total of 47,774 words so far.  There has been a change in the tempo of my writing during this re-write, but I'm not sure that this is a good thing or bad.  Perhaps neither, but it's a thing for sure.

So that's it for another week.  See you all on the bounce.

Another Late WIP Update 16th Apr 2015

Oh my, running late because I again forgot to post yesterday.  

Been a bit lost in diving back into my writing.  Currently editing my third novel, working title Ghost Dog , which is currently running at 98,752 words, with the first 41,648 words processed in what I'm calling the first revision.  It's mostly correcting the little things like punctuation, sentence length, while marking passages that suck badly for further editing the next time round.  

My plan being just to knock the text into rough shape, while re-reading the  story to make sure it works; as in it the plot makes sense.

On other things to come, I'm working on my Dysprosium review.  Delayed in part because of pictures from my beloved, who still hasn't sent them to me yet.  Hopefully tomorrow I'll post the first of three posts.

Reading wise I've finished Equoid by Charlie Stross, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but it has a very British sensibility about it.  My pitch line for it is My Little Pony meets Cthulhu with a shout out to Cold Comfort Farm.  

Therefore it may not be to everyone's taste, but as I like my humour black, unsweetened, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.  Also, it has the decided plus point of not being overly long, which in today's market is very refreshing.

We also went into town (as in the centre of London), and visited both Orcs Nest and Forbidden Planet.  

The former is my dealer of choice for my gaming needs, the latter is where I buy most of my novels.  A long time ago, when I use to live in Brighton, I worked for the local Forbidden Planet franchise holder as a book buyer, which would entail me making trips up to London to visit the warehouse to select the books to be sent to Brighton.  

Some nice memories, and it has left with me with a certain fondness for shopping with them.

We bought half a dozen novels while we were there: The Rhesus Chart by Charlie Stross, Feed by Mira Grant aka Seanan McGuire, Storm Front (Book 1 of The Dresden files) by Jim Butcher, The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell, Monster Hunter Nemesis by Larry Correia, and Alternate Realities (a compilation of three short novels – Port Eternity, Wave Without a Shore & Voyager in the Night) by C. J. Cherryh.  It may take some time to read them all, especially given how hard I've found it of late to read fiction.

So that's it for this week's update.

Maplecroft

It's always a real pleasure to read a book by an author one has not read before, and be blown away by the story.  Cherie Priest's Maplecroft hits all the right notes with its re-framing of the Lizzie Borden murder case as a Cthulhu mythos tales of Deep Ones in the town of Fall River.  I started it last week and was entranced, and finished it in two sessions.  I really enjoyed the mix of history, and the creepy atmosphere of the story.  A joy to read.  I shall be looking out for more novels from her next time I'm in Forbidden Planet.

Well this week we managed to watch the last season of True Blood.  We've been fans from the start, but I confess I've only read the first of the Charlaine Harris books that inspired the show.  From reading that I've been holding back on getting the rest of the books, because I've enjoyed the TV series so much.  The final season wrapped up almost all of the plots, apart from the Were-panther's, and there was much sadness and joy.

We also re-watched the Wachowski's adaptation of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta.  A film that divides people.  I must admit, the first time I watched it, Hugo Weaving's performance wearing the mask was a bit disturbing.  But the thing is that the film has lots of powerful scenes and performances, and the music is profoundly moving.  I shall have to sit down and reread the graphic novel now.

Work wise I spent three days working on Bad Dog, using Scrivener to compile a PDF that I read, which allowed me to see the text afresh, and pick up errors or things I wanted to change.  I've now sent the current 81,869 word draft off to my editor for a report on the things that remain problematical.  As much an exercise in communication – as in seeing whether or not we understand each other, or more like have I understood her comments and done the right things?

Firefall - Blindsight & Echopraxia

As I mentioned last week I started reading Peter Watts Firefall, the omnibus edition of Blindsight and Echopraxia.  Well I sat and finished read Blindsight last Sunday and what can I say?  

How about wow?  

If you haven't read it, and you like hard SF novels about first contact scenarios, then I suggest it will be worth your time and effort to do so.

A Google search will bring up a ton of reviews, which I feel the need to comment on.

Blindsight is a novel that discusses complex issues, and therefore if you are not the sort of person that likes to be challenged by rational scientific topic you may find the work not to your taste.  No amount of evidence to the contrary will likely change your mind.

In someways this is the product of our own nature, and how one understands consciousness versus intelligence.  

An argument can be made that consciousness deals with aesthetics and emotional responses, whereas intelligence deals with process.  However, the evidence is scarce, hampered by a lack of a general theory of consciousness, with the best research into whether it's nature or nurture that drives human behaviours, only showing correlation rather than causation with either.

As regard the free will debate, I agree in principle that we live in a deterministic universe, but with the caveat that calculating the choice a person, or people in polynomial time within our frame of reference problematical.  

As such, while we may not have free will, we live and act in a way that might as well be called free will as described by the two stage model.  I bring this up, because otherwise one would be hard pushed to explain behavioural changes made through cognitive behavioural approaches otherwise.  I apologize for simplifying what is quite a complex argument into one line in the process.

As pitch line: Blindsight by Peter Watts is like Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C Clarke, but with more despondency and despair at mankind's deficiencies.

And I finished reading Echopraxia today.  It's the sequel to Blindsight, and deals with what was hinted as happening back on Earth at the end of the first book.  Spoiler alert.  It's not going to end well for homo sapiens sapiens.  

For that matter it's not going to end well for any of the other cognitive sub-species either; the vampires and bicameral hive minds.

One thing I will say now is that both books require close reading of the text.  Skim read and you'll miss the clues the author plants.  

Reading this book reminds me of discussions about reading levels for information pamphlets when I use to work in the NHS.  Our research showed that we needed to lower the reading age of our pamphlets, so as to make our subject as accessible as possible to the widest number of readers.  

I'm not going to comment on reading levels, other than to say that people who like to read have higher than average reading comprehension, and leave it at that.

The point I'm making is that Peter Watts makes no concessions to readers, he assumes you will keep up with what he is writing about.  I enjoyed rising to meet the challenge.  Some readers may find it makes the story less accessible.

My pitch line for Echopraxia would be, it's like Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke, but with even more despondency and despair at the transformation of the world by the Overmind.  

One final thought came to mind.  At the end of the story I was really touched by a line of dialogue from Valerie, who is a vampire, who says quote, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could all just get along?"  In the context of what a vampire is, I found this a very moving statement.

One day I hope I will get the chance to meet Peter and talk about consciousness.  Until then I will have to console myself by reading his books.

As for my work this week I see I've managed to write 1,668 words, but this translated into five finished chapters.  So on reflection this has been very much a week of edit what I've written before.  So the evidence suggests that I'm still working my way through the morass of plot and structure hurdles, resulting from the process of converting the first draft of what was a graphic novel, into a first draft of a novel.

In addition I wrote 1,600 words for reviews for Henry at Miniature Wargames & Battlegames  magazine.  So all-in-all not a bad week, even if it's not the most productive week of writing I've had.

NB: Edit to add opinion.

Thoughts

What I say and mean is not what you read and understand.

I say this not to gnomic or profound in any way, but to clarify a point about why I write this blog, and post reviews of sorts.  I'm not a critic, in the sense of someone who is trying to address a particular work and write commentary on it.  Though I have been know to criticize games, when writing for magazines.  

However, on this blog what I do is review in passing the things I have been reading and watching, and talk about my own work.

So any author who I have featured here I've done so as a fellow author.  I write because your work has touched me in someway.  I do not intentionally write critiques.

Currently I'm reading Peter Watts Firefall, which is an omnibus edition of Blindsight and Echopraxia.  It's a weighty tome that could be used as an offensive weapon or a door stop.  I'm loving it.  It's so good that I feel like shooting myself and putting myself out of the misery of knowing I will never be able to write something as good as this.

That is a taster, I will be talking more about this book when I've finished reading it.

Currently we are watching Xena Warrior Princess, which is cheesy fun filled goodness.  Season one started off a bit rough, as in the cheesy fun wasn't piled on high enough to carry one through the rough as shit stories, but after episode eight, and certainly by the mid-season cliff-hanger the series found its legs.  

Season two has mostly been good, with only a couple of what I would call cringingly bad episodes.

We've stopped watching at this point to catch up with Arrow.  The first episode of season two on the disc being a recap clipisode, which if we had bothered to check the sleeve info I would have skipped.  it wasn't bad, but there again I don't think it was aimed at me.  Rather it was aimed at viewers with a low knowledge base of DCs universe.

Saturday I was at a writers group event where Sandra Sawicka, a foreign rights assistant for the Marjcq literary agency spoke at some length about her job.  Other than that it was good to catch up with Sean, a fellow writer, and chat about stuff, like the LonCon 3, and made me realize how low I've been feeling has been down to post convention withdrawal symptoms.

Finally, this weeks writing dissected.  

Not a great tally. I managed to add 818 words to my current draft of The Bureau, my only excuse being how low I've been feeling.  In addition I did manage to write 1,096 words of stuff that needed to be written to support my Bad Dog novel; as in ideas for future blog posts etc.

Funerals and Things

I've been to two funerals this week.  One for my partner's adopted father John Leach, aka Janos Lehar,  a composer who was also well known for playing the cimbalom.  There is a good chance you have heard him play, listen here.  Pretty much anytime a cimbalom is heard in a recording the chances are it is John Leach playing, for example the Alan Parsons Project album Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

The second was the funeral of a long time friend Ken Brown.  Who was the best friend of Andy Robertson, another friend of mine who died a month ago.  Far too many deaths of people I know over the last month.  So it all got a bit emotional for me during the service, especially when singing Amazing Grace and Jerusalem.  A lot of old faces came out of the woodwork to see Ken off, including David Pringle the former editor of Interzone.  All in all, as far as funerals go, it was a lovely day, with a fabulous wake in the pub afterward as Ken wanted.

Another upside, other than supporting his daughter and giving him a send off, was meeting Andy Robertson's daughters Alice and Claire.  I knew their mother Sylvia, who died when they were babies, which was the last time I saw them.  It was therefore both a surprise and a shock to meet them again all these years later.  Their mother would have been so proud to have seen them grown up. 

As I said last week, I read a Cthulhu story, and so inspired I started a short story of my own, only to find Peter Watts had beaten me to the idea of a sequel to The Thing when I was doing some research.  Still, my story takes a different approach to the events, being more mythos based, rather than being just some poor misunderstood alien trying to communicate with the humans.  I'll say no more at this point.  Consider yourselves teased.

I've also submitted a short story to my writers group, which will see which way the wind blows.  I'm not sure they want a genre writer like me in the group, as they seem more focused on fantasy and what are described as slipstream stories.  That or I'm just a terrible writer and they don't like what I've written.  Either way, I'm coming to think I may be too old fashioned, and out of touch with modern reader sensibilities in the SF market.

Litany of Earth

This week I read a very nice short story here.  It's by a writer that was unknown to me, Ruthanna Emrys, called The Litany of Earth, which builds its story around a Deep One survivor's account from H P Lovecraft's the Shadow over Innsmouth.  I really enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone who likes reading Cthulhu mythos stories.  I shall be keeping an eye out for when she has her first collection, or brings out a novel.

This week I've been writing short stories.  Just because really.  More as an exercise in getting me back into my work routine, which has been disrupted by outside factors.  I'm all to aware that I'm an inexperienced writer, because of my inability to keep writing on the bad days.  I took two old stories I'd written as game fiction and filed the serial number off, as in separate them from other people's IP, and I did the first draft of a Cthuhlu mythos story as well.  Inspired by reading the above story.  So, while this week has not had a word count worth recording, I do have the drafts of three short stories down.

The Apocalypse Codex

I started reading The Apocalypse Codex, another volume in the Laundry series, by Charlie Stross that I ended up finishing in one day, which should tell you how much I both enjoyed it, and how much I was drawn in to the story.  

Our hero, Bob Howard, is again sucked into the machinations of the Laundry and manages to come out of the shit smelling of roses.  Charlie has a great way with phrasing things, and a light touch that just makes this a fun book to read.  I stand in awe.  Great characters, good dialogue and a compelling story.

We also started watching the second season of The Professionals this week, which despite being dated in many ways from the way it's shot, the pacing and the time it's set in, remains interesting viewing for many reasons.  It's also great for period research into what was around in the late seventies and early eighties; no mobile phones, and no pagers are used until the third season.  

All grist to the mill for me as I work on The Bureau.  Needless to say it fails the Bechdel test big time.

Writing wise this week has been good for me with a total of 8,612 words produced.  So I now have 32,167 words done, and I have sent the revised first eight chapters to my alpha reader that nicely forms Act one.  In my opinion, quality of writing aside, this is from a structural perspective the best first opening act I've written to date.

More important than the number of words I wrote this week, was the amount of editing and revising that Scrivener allowed me to make during the weeks work that has allowed me to transform the mess I called a plot into something that works.  

I love the way that Scrivener allows me to switch stuff around and make the job of writing a novel more straight-forward than just using a word processor and some other means of managing the research and character files. 

The Fuller Memorandum

What a difference a day makes.  I've been without an internet connection all weekend with service restored this morning at 11.00.  All down to a fault on the voice line that BT owns.  

So I've been sorting out a zillion emails, catching up with what the internet thinks and sorting out problems with one of my credit card companies login that now require cookies for their security procedure.  

As someone who has set all cookies to be deleted when I quite the programme this has caused a certain amount of frustration as I was locked out of my account.  It seems that the previous change of password changes didn't take, or something.  I put in a complaint that using cookies as away of maintaining security was a dumb idea.  Correct me if I'm wrong.

Writing wise last week was not super productive as I ended up spending too much time thinking through plot points and having to write specific scenes to make everything work, which I always find hard.  

On the positive side my alpha reader thinks the two chapters I wrote were great.  So total number of words for the week was 5,305, total for the month 22,760, and running total for the novel stands at 45,477.  So I'm about at the halfway point. Yay me!

Fortunately, the lack of internet access wasn't an issue for me on Saturday as I was out at an Absolute Writers forum meet-up at a pub in London (my partner on the other hand was going up the wall trying to sort it out).  

I don't post a lot to the forum for several reasons.  First is that I'm not a prolific poster on any of the forums I visit.  Second, I've realised that visiting forums and reading load of posts is a time sink.  Third, American forums have a hard time with British sense of humour, especially one from a former British nurse who tends towards posting black and ironic comments in particular.

Anyway I had a nice time talking to various writers and some of their partner's.  So big shout out to all the attendees on Saturday, if you are reading this?

I was also most flattered to be asked when was I going to start submitting my work for publication by Julie, a writer I know, and as a result I'm planning on sitting in on a writing group session at some point in the near future to see if my face fits, and if I like them.

Still watching Stargate SG1 and now on season seven.  

That's the one where Daniel Jackson returns as a series regular, but given the number of guest episodes he featured in during season six it never really felt like he left.  Neither season six, or seven are as punchy as season five.  They have gone back to having filler episodes about characters that don't add anything to the plot.  

I think they missed the chance to up their game at several points.  There again what do I know?

Reading wise the loss of the internet meant that I sat down and blew through Charlie Stross's The Fuller Memorandum on Sunday.  It was that good it made me weep in despair and I wanted to shout out, "I hate you Charlie Stross for making me feel so inadequate as a writer, hiiiisssss, boooooo, suck."  The man can write.  One day I want to grow up to be as good a writer as him.

So that's it for another week.  See you next month.  ;-)

Stargate SG1

Well it's the end of week two on my project and I managed to type a useful 8,803 words this week, which brings the running total up to 15,150 words in total.  

So not a bad place to be at the end of two weeks of writing, especially considering that Friday was a bad day where I wrote nothing because I was too tired to stay awake.  One of those days when my rheumatoid arthritis got the better of me.

Yesterday I stated reading Charlie Stross's Atrocity Archive and a rollicking good read it is too.  I, being typical me, read the second book in the series first, but even though the novels have a cast of characters that carry over from one to the other; I think I can safely say you can read them out of order, on the basis that I did and nothing untoweird came out of Planck space and turned me into goo.

I'm also reading Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind, which is less than easy going due to the amount of mathematics strewn about the pages, and a tendency to literalism to illustrate a point e.g.: three pages full of zeros and ones to illustrate a u Turing machine code in binary.  

I think it may take some considerable time for me to finish this book as it makes for slow reading.

We are still watching Stargate SG1 and are now well into the second season of this long standing show.  Some episode are a little bland, or the tropes have become too familiar, but there again this show started in 1997, which is sixteen years as the crow flies.  

So I'm pretty disposed to liking this show as it has lots of good memories attached to it, and reminded me why I spent ten years playing in live action role playing game inspired by it.