Michael Offutt's Blog, page 149

A review of Distraction by J.L. Campbell

SPOILER ALERT: READ NO FURTHER IF YOU HATE HEARING PLOT DETAILS. Oh what can I say about "Distraction" that won't make me come across as judgmental because of the subject matter? First off, I want to say that J.L. Campbell (or Joy as some may know her), is a great writer. She has paid meticulous attention to providing what I think is a genuine representation of Jamaican culture in this book. And "Distraction" is a physically beautiful novel, providing Jamaican proverbs at the top of each chapter and a corresponding translation as the accent may be difficult for non-native peoples to understand. Additionally, the book has wonderful prose and in my reading, I don't think I spotted a single error. Also, each chapter is graced with a silhouette of palm trees. How can one not be pleased with palm trees?

"Distraction" is a book that follows the lives of three very interesting but destructive women. Their names are Kyra, Justine, and Dionne. And when I say "destructive" what I mean is this: they are liars, cheats, and victims who make choices that are a little difficult to get through without squirming. I had an impulse to invite them into a room, sit them down, and then stand before them on a soap box to make them accountable for all the things that they are doing while others chanted "preach on brotha!" in the background.
Kyra has trouble with an abusive man named Warren. He's a deadbeat that insists on sucking her dry of all monetary resources, on basically raping her, of trying to sabotage everything in her life, and on top of all that, he's a criminal. He's a pretty dispicable character in just having those qualities. I kind of question why Joy also decided to make him bi-sexual and then use that as a tool to paint another man, Milton, in a really unsavory light (Warren and Milton have been doing it, but more on that in just a bit). And of course, the fact that Milton is hiding a same sex attraction from his wife leads to his impotency in bed (well he's not attracted to girls) and to the willingness to destroy his family's financial security by giving Warren TONS of money for his silence. All this says to me is that in backwards Jamaica, two guys kissing is a fate worse than death. And if this is true, I guess I won't be visiting Jamaica anytime soon DESPITE my love of palm trees and my respect for Usain Bolt.
So Milton's wife is of course, one of the three women named Justine. And by the way, she's an adulterer. So it's not like her lies are any better than Milton's. And then we have Dionne who's also a liar, having an affair with a guy that's basically a stalker by the name of Alex. But she must be attracted to stalkers because her husband has serious trust issues, answering her phone, calling her to make sure he knows where she is, etc. But I guess he has reasons for having trust issues...his wife really is sleeping around. I hate the fact that Clayton is basically clueless. You'd think that at least one man in this book wouldn't be a complete douchebag. But that doesn't happen. Oh and Alex, he's a rapist on top of being a stalker...so yeah.
Did I like "Distraction"? Yes, I did like it. But these characters are not good people. Are they real? Probably. I think there's a huge dose of reality in these books and toward the end, a statement that people still believe WRONGLY that AIDS is a deadly disease. AIDS is not fatal anymore. That may be a news flash for some people, but we have drugs now that do perfectly well in controlling this disease. I have a friend with AIDS, and he's a successful college professor in a happy relationship and has no problems in living a great life. I guess this bigot is representative of Jamaica. Buju Banton, the anti-gay Jamaican dance hall,
 ragga, and reggae singer, whose song “Boom Bye Bye” advocates killing gay men with
 submachine guns and by pouring acid on them. If I had to guess, he probably uses
"The Bible" to justify his hate speech. I can't say that I'd be surprised by that either.If "Distraction" is a slice of life of what it is to be Jamaican then all I can say is, "Jamaica needs a better public education system." I would recommend this book to anyone that might be attracted to stories where characters make destructive decisions. For example, if you liked "Closer" with Natalie Portman and Jude Law, then you'll probably like "Distraction." For the record, after I got done with "Closer" I secretly wished that all those characters had gotten crushed under a bus.
I give four stars out of five simply because there were parts of this book that clearly irritated me about the characters. But aside from that, it's a great, page-turning if not emotionally frustrating read. And if you like hot but sensual sex scenes, Joy accomplishes that better than just about anyone I've read. her amazing skills made me feel like I was there in the character's skin, enjoying the naughtiness of every single action.

Buy it on AMAZON for $3.99 HERE.

Why is fear such big business?

I couldn't ignore the fact that October is here. The month of Halloween is always awash with scary movies (just for the record, I plan on seeing Frankenweenie tonight). But I have a question: why is fear such big business?
Here in Utah, Halloween is huge. People go all out, and it's easily the most decorated and celebrated holiday outside of Christmas. They have corn mazes and haunted houses galore. There's even a paranormal investigative team that will take you to haunted locations for a fee so you can experience "real" ghosts.

And you can't dispute the profitability of what I'm starting to call really bad movies. These are "found footage" type movies. You know the kind..."Blair Witch Project" created a demand when they made a movie for $50,000 and turned it into $150,000,000. People took notice of that in the movies looking for a way to make huge bucks off of essentially nothing. Why does this work? Because people like to be scared.

Scientifically, fear has a reason. We experience fear as a survival mechanism. In other words, something threatens us and then we connect with an adrenaline rush and hopefully, survive the experience. But I'm  kind of baffled as to why we seek this kind of thing out (myself included). Why do I pay to see a scary movie knowing that I'll probably watch it through my fingers?

Check out this account of a person that paid $50.00 to be scared in a haunted house ( copied from io9 ):

Each TV was on, and showing video footage of me walking down the hallway. On the floor of said hallway: condoms, just crap loads of condoms. They were wet. I followed the TVs into the biggest mind fuck room of all. I pulled back a curtain and someone screamed "STAND ON THE X!"

I spied the 'X' and stood there. Behind the curtain was a room covered in condoms and shoes. There's a dirty mattress on the floor, and a dead naked woman lay on her back. In the corner a skinny man stood with his back to me. He turned around, and revealed that he was really not wearing any clothes at all. None. Full dong. Out. It's something. He started walking right towards me. My brain started rattling, I could actually hear my own insides rattling around inside my skull at the sheer confusion of the condom parade naked basement man. He started walking towards me, and horror set in as I realized: He has my shoe.

The Naked Man got closer and pointed to the bed. "Nope!" I said, turning around.

Naked Man said, "get on the bed." I sat on it. He grabbed my feet and pulled them up, so I'm now laying on the bed. He sat at the foot of the bed, holding my shoe while staring down at me. It was dead silent. Then the Dead Naked Girl woke up, and flipped over on top of me. She started screaming, "HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME!" I screamed back, "IM SORRY, IM SORRY, IM SORRY, IM SORRY, IM SORRY!" The naked man was rubbing his face on my exposed foot the whole time. Finally, after an eternity of nakedness, the Naked Man thrust my shoe onto my chest and yelled "GET OUT." And I got the f*ck out.

Why the hell would someone put themselves through this? But this haunted house is really popular according to the article. Do you like to experience fear? How much would you pay to be scared as long as you knew that it was "safe" or that you could have a "safe word" that you could use if it got to be too much? And do you think that fear evolves over time? I've noticed that what scared my mother when she was still a young woman would scare no one today. These days, people seem to want in your face sexuality or the impending threat of being sexually violated as a means to channel fear.

And why do you suppose fear is such a big business?

All you have to do is look at the incredible monetary haul of Resident Evil and Paranormal Activity.

Here's the trailer for Sinister (a horror movie that's getting rave reviews). I think I may be too chicken to go and see it, but I may try really hard! Have a great weekend. I'll be taking Monday off from blogging (it's Columbus Day).

I don't think I like time travel without Michael J. Fox

Here's a spoiler alert for any of you that are going to see Looper. I left confused at the ending, and I blame it on poorly designed time travel tropes.

I'll keep Marty McFly and the Back to the
Future paradoxes over those ones
that drove me insane by watching Looper.This weekend, I saw the film. It had one of the most horrific scenes in it that left me haunted for a couple of days afterward. Basically, I kept thinking of the horrible implications of torturing a young person and watching those wounds instantly appear on the older (but same person) who existed in the same timeline.

But aside from that, the ending left me really confused. JGL's character commits suicide at the end of the movie to PREVENT his older self from performing an act that sets the future on a course that he does not like. But I don't get how this solves anything? By killing himself, his older self doesn't exist thereby creating the reason for him taking this action in the first place.

Plus, the whole "kill yourself to change time" trope has been done a lot. Dr. Who's "Angels take Manhattan" did the same thing. Star Trek did it in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and in "Year of Hell." It happened in Terminator 2.

So on another level, the trope was incredibly unoriginal.

I don't think I like time travel without Michael J. Fox. At least then it was funny and Michael was charming.
This remake handled time travel really
well, even if it was underwhelming
(and short) as a film.One show that I think handled time travel really well was the Time Machine. In it, Guy Pierce invents a time machine in order to go back into time to save his beloved wife from an untimely death. Well he does so, but she dies a few minutes later from something else. To understand why, he travels into the future and discovers that in creating a time machine, he created a paradox. The moment that he saved his wife, the motivation for the creation of the time machine evaporated and hence, wouldn't be invented.

Why couldn't Looper embrace this? Why couldn't Looper have seen that JGL needed to stop Bruce Willis in a way that didn't kill himself. And why the hell wouldn't Bruce Willis have JGL's epiphany suddenly pop into his mind so that he would know that what he was about to do would set the future on a course that his younger self did not like?

Anyway, overall I think I liked Joseph Gordon Levitt and that's about all I can say that's positive about this movie. I think before any writer tackles time travel and expects me to swallow it, they need to think really really long on it, or I'm most likely going to be frustrated, confused, and just simply prone to not liking it.

Abandoning your book

I don't like the quote, "A book is never finished, it's abandoned." I don't like it, because it's true. I think that if I never sat down at a keyboard and tried to type out a manuscript, I might have been blissfully ignorant of this. But, as most of you know, this isn't my fate. And it's probably not yours either.
Writing brings out in me a horrible obsessive compulsive disorder. And I know that this sounds familiar to all of you. You go back over your manuscript once, twice, three times, a fourth time, an eight time, and a twentieth time.
With each pass, you think, "It's perfect" and then on page 2 you notice an error you somehow missed all the nineteen other times. It's maddening.
And even really good editors don't catch all the mistakes. And your prose could always be tightened, reworded, it seems endlessly.
"It was a dark and stormy night."
"Dark clouds and lightning streaks reduced the night to highlights and shadows."
"A storm rolled in and the night wept under its caress."
And on and on and on and on and on.
You could say the same frickin' thing a million different ways.
And thus, you could rewrite every sentence in your book a million different ways. And one of those might be slightly more perfect than the one that you chose.
This is what happens to me sometimes. So eventually, I abandon my work. But I never stop feeling insecure about it. And of course, the reviewers pick it up and point out things as if they were obvious to anyone with an IQ of 80 with an almost condescending "I'd never have this in my own manuscript" tone to their commentary.
So yeah, I'm insecure about abandoning my books and moving on to other stories. But it needs to be done. If you don't let go, you could spend endless years writing and rewriting and editing things. I think I need to be more like my friend Michelle Davidson Argyle. I need to just be happy when I send the manuscript flying out the door and resist the urge to try and revisit it. Oh writer OCD, how I loathe thee *shakes fist at the screen.
Have a great Wednesday.

The Walking Dead Season 3 Webisodes are here!

Gotta love The Walking Dead Season 3 Webisodes. So what do you think?I CAN'T WAIT UNTIL OCTOBER 14TH!!!!

Cover Reveal for The Magic Wakes by Charity Bradford

I'm proud to be able to present this beautiful cover by sci-fi author, Charity Bradford. I have to say, it's absolutely stunning. The elements that I especially like is the city in the background (which I know is extremely important) and Talia's eyes. The color is very special to the character (and that's all I'm going to say about that). I won't reveal more as Charity has allowed me to read some of it before it got picked up by a publisher.

I honestly can say that this novel is one that I'm looking forward to getting my hands on next year. Her writing is amazing.

It comes out FEBRUARY 19TH, 2013.

THE BLURB:

Talia has a secret, one that will save her world and yet rip it apart. Only she can decide if the price is worth it.

Scientist Talia Zaryn has always had visions of an alien invasion and of her own death. She’s kept it a secret, hoping they are nothing more than childish nightmares. But when her face in the mirror matches that of her dreams, she fears the dreams are prophetic. Talia must prove that life exists beyond their planet, Sendek; perhaps then people will prepare to fight.

Talia's work at the Space Exploration Foundation leaves no time for personal relationships, but Major Landry Sutton isn’t looking for a friend. He is looking for a traitor. His ability to sense emotions convinces him Talia is that traitor until a touch sizzles between them. In an instant their minds are connected and they can communicate telepathically. Just as the two begin to trust each other, the invading force arrives.

Talia and Landry must uncover the secrets of Sendek’s past if they hope to defeat these terrifying creatures. And Talia is the key—if only she can learn to trust the magic coursing through her veins.

--
Charity Bradford
The Magic Wakes--Coming Winter 2013 from WiDo Publishing
Website-charitybradford.com
Blog-My Writing Journey
Facebook Page

And don't forget to mark it "To Read" on Charity's Goodreads page HERE.

Samuel L. Jackson and the best Obama ad ever

I saw this yesterday and laughed. Y'all know I'm a democrat, but this ad from Samuel L. Jackson is hilarious and clever. Wake the F*CK UP! No offense intended toward the Republicans. I just think this ad is funny, and if you haven't seen it, you might want to press play.Have a great weekend :)

Would you ever want a bagel head?

The National Geographic channel explores interesting subjects on "Taboo." And as a caveat to that, "taboo" is basically what "Americans find as taboo" because (let's face it) America is filled with conservative meat and potatoes folks. For example, people are only now just getting comfortable with homosexuality, thanks to shows like Modern Family, Glee, Will and Grace, Happy Endings, and the democrats finally adding marriage equality to their party platform. Americans still have many taboos. However, I did wonder if body modification is one of them. It's easy to find people that have piercings. I guess "taboo" applies to the kind of body modification we are talking about, right?

Well, earlier this month, National Geographic took a look at a body modification that's enjoying increasing popularity in Japan. In a procedure that makes me cringe, people willingly have saline solution injected into their foreheads. One guy that had this done asked, "Is water dripping down my face?" But the person administering the saline said that was probably on the inside of his skin. So hmm, would you ever want a bagel head?

I have to admit, this kind of thing is creepy to me. But I would not judge someone negatively if they wanted to try it. I strive to keep as open a mind as I can. But I have to ask...how do you feel about body modification? Do you have any characters in your books that are into body modification? And if you do use body modification in your fiction, do you show it in a good light? Or would you choose to use it to make your villain disgusting?This last question, that of using "body modification" to make a villain disgusting, is an unfortunate stereotype in many films. The one that most readily comes to mind is the villain in the movie "300." But there are others for sure, think "The Cell" or "Silence of the Lambs." Xerxes on 300 had very visible body modification. The heroic spartans, however,
did nothing to their beautiful and basically perfect bodies. What does this say about
society's view? Maybe that's the reason it was featured on "Taboo", because "most"
people (at least in America) consider this "freakish." And 300 is an American film.The only time in fiction that I can recall a hero having extensive body modification is in the case of Wolverine, and what happened to him ended up being kind of cool even though the idea of it is horrific. An adamantium exo-skeleton is something you could build an entire series on, right?

The Big Smoke Cover Reveal from Cally Jackson

Today, I'm one of many bloggers doing a cover reveal for "The Big Smoke" by "down unda" author Cally Jackson.

Here's the blurb for it:

Ceara’s desperate for love; Seb’s desperate to get laid. Ceara adores reading novels; Seb hasn’t finished a book in years. Two strangers, both moving from small country towns to Brisbane – the big smoke. As they prepare to attend the same university, their paths seem set to collide, but they keep missing each other. Maybe fate is keeping them apart, or maybe it’s just chance.

When the semester starts, things get complicated. Ceara’s best friend withdraws from her, Seb’s closest mate turns into a sleazebag, and the relentless demands of university make their stress levels soar. Before their first semester is over, both Seb and Ceara will be forced to question who they are and what they want from their lives. Will they have the courage to find the answers, or will they crumble under the pressure? And when they finally meet, will it be love at first sight or a collision of headstrong personalities?

If the book intrigues you, or if the book sounds like something you would like to read, please check out its Goodreads page HERE. 
Network with Cally at the following places:
BLOG TWITTER: @callyjackson
So what do you think of the cover? Have a great Wednesday.

Will the Walking Dead Season Three webisodes reveal Sophia's ghastly death?

Fight the dead, fear the living on October 14th!Last year at about this time, AMC put up some webisodes to usher in Season 2 of "The Walking Dead." The six part mini episodes done in the flavor of the six webisodes AMC did for "Breaking Bad" (if you haven't seen them, watch them because Twaught Hammer is hilarious) revealed the origin story of "Bicycle Girl."

So i started thinking, what could they do for webisodes this time around? Will there be a six mini-episode that has an answer for this burning question:
My vote is to explore what happened with Sophia in season two. Show us how she became a zombie and follow that through to when Otis captured her and stuck her in the barn with all the other zombies. As a caveat, I kinda/sorta know what happened, but I just want to see it for myself. Especially since this DIDN'T happen in the comic books, and it was a huge and very sad reveal last year.
The Walking Dead season 3 episodes (whatever they may be) are slated to debut on October 1st. And then, we get the return of The Walking Dead on October 14th. For your viewing pleasure, I give you "Twaught Hammer." If you are fans of Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) you'll love this.

Have a great Tuesday. Tomorrow, I'm participating in The Big Smoke cover reveal!