Niall Teasdale's Blog, page 24

Seriously Kawaii

When Kit needs to get serious, she needs to change her attire.

As requested.

VAT Update

I’ve just heard from the HMRC and I’m clear. I don’t need to be VAT registered at this time. This is because most of my income comes from Amazon in the US, if my EU-based income ever gets to a sufficient level, I’ll need to figure things out again. It’s something I need to watch, but not a current threat.

So, if you find yourself making a lot of money on something you would never have thought VAT applied to… think again and make sure your accountant considers it.

That’s if you’re in the EU. If you’re in America, well, I know you guys all have heart attacks in early April anyway, so I know you feel my pain.

Ahhh… That’s one load lifted, on to the next…

PS. The Ghost in the Doll word count is now 43800 words, and Kit is still cute.

The Forgotten Kawaii

Totally forgot to post this, so… posting it.

I thought about having her suck on the lollipop, but I didn’t anyone suffering permanent damage.

That WTF Moment

It’s Saturday night and I am socially maladjusted so, obviously, I’m hunting for something to watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime. I have just reached the desperation point of typing in random keywords in an attempt to find anything new and worth the bother and my latest search was going to be “artificial intelligence.” (Yes, I know what I’m going to get and I refuse to watch that one. No. Not ever.) But this is where the story became weird…

I typed in ‘a’ and ‘r’ and then I was presented with a few possibles. Arrow is number four in the list, but before it Amazon managed to find four videos which fitted the ‘ar’ search term better. Four, two minute videos of young ladies in bikinis shooting an AR-15 rifle. I watched one, because… science. It’s a video. Of a girl. Wearing a bikini. Unloading a semi-automatic rifle into a target. For two minutes. I… was speechless.

I did not really know this was a thing. Girls and guns… sure. I kind of make money out of girls and guns (and swords, and magic). But… yeah.

Anyway, that’s not what bothered me so much as the fact that it’s on Amazon Prime! I’ve seen some pretty weird things turning up there recently, but YouTube videos of girls firing assault weaponry? (Not even on full-auto!)

So, basically… WTF?!

PS. The full search did turn up the Haley Joel Osment movie first… sigh.

PPS. The Ghost in the Doll word count is now 10505!

PPPS. Maybe another Kit picture on Monday.

It Has Emerged

Probably a better title for when I release the book, but…

Someone suggested I should post more frequently, even if it’s just something about what stage the writing’s in. Maybe some word counts… Almost certainly not going to do that, because it might be depressing for one thing. And I’m not going to promise to post regularly because… Well, my brain doesn’t work like that. I am lousy at the social media thing because I just plain don’t think of it as a thing to do. Possibly an age thing: I’ve been doing stuff internet related since before it was a thing, but I don’t have the mindset for what it’s become. But…

Since I seem to be in the mood currently (this’ll be 3 posts in 2 days! go me!), here’s the progress update. (And, yes I have updated the What I’m Working On page.)

Emergence is code-complete. That means it’s got all its words in it and it’s moved to the ‘awaiting editing’ phase.

I’m currently working on the plotting for The Ghost in the Doll, a title which will make far more sense when you start reading it, honestly. Yes, it’s also obviously a play on both The Ghost in the Machine and The Ghost in the Shell (which, of course is a reference to The Ghost in the Machine in itself, meta-references FTW!), but there are in-universe elements which will be revealed. First hints in Emergence.

But before I start writing GitD, Frostburn will get its first edit run. As I recall, there’s a missing scene I need to write, so that’s going to take a little longer than usual, but I expect to get started on GitD by the end of this week, barring unforeseen meteorite strikes or robot invasions.

In case you’re wondering, I don’t currently have the slightest clue what’s going to come after GitD. I should probably do something seriously different, but we’ll see where my mind is wheeling in a month.

Why I Hate John Oliver Right Now

Okay, I hate to be mean to a fellow Brit, but…

YouTube has been throwing clips of his Last Week Tonight show on HBO at me for a while now, and I finally decided to watch one. And then it was 3 a.m. I actually learned stuff, but this is not a good way to spend time. No, it’s not John. It’s not. When are you going to cover addiction to your online videos? Huh? Huh?

Weekly Kawaii

Okay… ‘Weekly’ is probably a total lie, but it’s the thought that counts. It’s Monday, and we all deserve a little cute on a Monday. Kit has actually been declared to be ‘paru-kawaii,’ but you’re going to have to wait for Emergence to come out to find out what the Hell I’m talking about.

Anyway… Kit picture:

(Obligatory dumb male comment…) And who wouldn’t want Kit nursing us back to health? AmIright? Huh? Huh? (Or “wink, wink, say no more” for the older British folk among us.)

The Ghost in the Machina

I’ve been watching a lot of cyberpunk/AI/etc stuff recently. Well, I’ve been watching a huge amount of The Ghost in the Shell, but I also finally got around to watching Ex Machina too, and going back a bit there’s The Machine and a few giant-robot Anime… I’m soaking up the cyber.

So… here’s the inflammatory question: Can anyone explain to me what’s so good about Ex Machina?

I spent a good couple of hours knowing more or less exactly what was coming. There were no surprises. The special effects were very good, I’ll give it that, but Ex Machina explored nothing, gave no new insights, gave nothing new to the genre… I don’t get all the really amazing reviews, I simply don’t. I checked out Rotten Tomatoes for a round-up and found one critic saying pretty much what I just did; all the rest seemed to think it was some sort of genre classic. I won’t go into the gaping plot hole, because it would spoil the ending if you haven’t seen it.

So, nothing new there. The Machine is in some ways very similar, but I thought it was more visually appealing and more accessible. It didn’t get the exposure Ex Machina did, which is a shame, in my opinion.

And so to GitS. Let just face facts here: I am a big fan of Ghost in the Shell. Not actually of the original movie, but of the Standalone Complex series. I like the movie, though I could have lived without the sequel, but being able to play out and develop storylines across several hours instead of 90 minutes often works better. Even so, GitS:SAC suffers a little from what the movie does (and a lot of Asian movies do, actually): exposition.

If you read a book on wiring, one of the things that you’ll pick up is that you should research your material. “Write what you know” is an over-used axiom, but researching things which can actually be researched is a good thing. There is, however, an addendum: your readers don’t need to know about all that research you did. GitS suffers a lot from long-winded, frankly boring sections of conversation where the writers demonstrate how damn clever they are through their characters. GitS:SAC suffers from it to, generally in the scenes where various characters quote authors at each other (hilariously sent up, maybe not intentionally, at the end of Saints Row IV). Last night a friend of mine summed this up very nicely with regard to the recent battle between Batman v Superman and Civil War by saying that one of the differences was that it took 20 minutes to establish Bruce Wayne’s problem with Superman, and 15 seconds of amazing character acting to set up the same dilemma for Tony Stark. (Thinking about it, it’s a bad example since it took an entire movie, Age of Ultron, to setup for the great character acting, but the point stands.) Movie’s are a visual medium, and they need to be treated as such. Exposition is really bad in movies.

That said, I’ve been through two GitS movies, both series of GitS:SAC plus Solid State Society, and the five new Arise films (and will someone put Pyrophoric Cult out in the UK, please!) and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of them. They’re all way more thought-provoking than Ex Machina.

Cliffhangers in the Age of Netflix

Three posts in a day, I must be on something. I think it’s insomnia and compensatory coffee, but I’m not sure. Sorry for this, I’m ranting again. But at least it’s more genre-related.

Anyway, the cliffhanger. Cliffhanger endings are beloved of comic book fans and the writers of those serials they ran back in the dark ages like Flash Gordon and King of the Rocket Men. Well, beloved of writers and there’s a rather more mixed reaction from fans, but this kind of ‘our hero is about to die, find out what happens next week’ ending is sort of expected. I put the epilogues in the Ultrahuman books as a sort of homage to this. That’s a homage. I tend to prefer not to write actual cliffhanger endings to books because, let’s be frank, it drives me crazy when someone does it to me.

We see this in modern television and some film series. (I can trace this back to my annoyance with the ending of The Empire Strikes Back for sure.) Now, I grew up with Doctor Who which rarely did a single episode story back then. It used to run 25 minutes and a typical story was 4 or 6 episodes, airing at tea time on a Saturday. You’d have cliffhangers all the way through until the last episode, but you only had to wait a week for the next episode. The modern series rarely does a 2-parter, but does usually have a season arc. That’s fairly kind compared to six weeks of biting your nails. What modern Doctor Who does not do, but an enormous number of modern US TV series does, is the season finale cliffhanger.

I want to find the idiot who came up with this idea and make him watch 365 continues days of reality TV. I know why they do it. I understand. You’ve built an audience and you’ve probably watched the figures trailing downward through the season (seems to happen to the best shows), and you want them to come back for season two. So you put a hook at the end to make them come back to find out the resolution and hope that they’re hooked again and you keep them through the season. If I recall US scheduling right, this might even seem reasonable there because there’s a couple of months between seasons. In the UK, we waited at least half a year to find out what happens next. That doesn’t work. We’ve forgotten what the ending was by the time the new season rolls around so the only thing keeping us coming back is that we were fans or there’s nothing else to watch. And the same is true on Netflix.

I have both Amazon Prime and Netflix because there are shows I want to watch exclusive to one or the other. Sleepy Hollow showed up on Amazon and I quite enjoyed the first season, right up until the end. No second season available, I couldn’t find out what happened, even though I’d just binged on the thing. Frustration. The second season has been on Amazon for a while now and I haven’t watched it. Why? Because I stopped caring months ago. I started watching Grimm on live TV and was annoyed at the end of season one. Then 3 or 4 seasons turned up on Netflix and I binge-watched them… right up to the second to last episode. The last was the wedding and I knew there was going to be a cliffhanger I was not going to resolve. Grimm has probably lost my attention now because by the time the next season is available, the episode I didn’t watch will not be.

The season end cliffhanger just doesn’t work in the era on binge-watching and boxed sets. We’ve been shown we can have instant gratification, and then it’s ripped away from us. Netflix themselves seem to have recognised this. Daredevil, the first season anyway, resolves its main storyline at the end and season two brings in a new antagonist. Jessica Jones, which I still haven’t got to the end of, seems to be going the same way. Even their thoroughly amusing Puss in Boots series avoided straining your patience. Netflix realise that their model doesn’t need cliffhangers. If you watched season one, they push season two at you for weeks ahead of the first show and it goes right to the head of your ‘continue watching’ list with a ‘new episodes’ tag. If you were hooked, they’ll probably grab you again.

Last night, I discovered that Netflix had the first two seasons of iZombie. I’d seen trailers for this on DC’s YouTube channel and thought it looked like fun. It is. (If you haven’t tried it, give it a go. It’s got zombies, drama, and my kind of sense of humour. If you tried it and hated it… Can’t please everyone.) Later this evening, probably over dinner, I’ll watch the first season finale and if it’s a cliffhanger I may decide to scream, but at least I can go straight on to season two. But then I don’t know when season three will turn up… Please, please, won’t someone bring an end to the horror of the end of season cliffhanger!

Anyway, that’s why I don’t hang my readers off a cliff at the end of my books, even with my production rate. Lucifer is the only show I’ve seen on Amazon which handles this well. The end of season one was… cliffhangerish, but it was a little more like my Ultrahumans epilogues, a tease for what’s going to come next rather than a real cliffhanger. That’s a start.

Have a great day. Without cliffhangers.

PS. I’d personally recommend Lucifer. Strong start, a little rocky after that, but it rapidly improves again. However, if you’re a fan of the original comics, take my recommendation with a pinch of salt. Comic and series are not the same, and I know how that annoys some people. Hell, Gotham annoys me for all the backstory retcons and I still haven’t figured out why.

PPS. Just watched the iZombie season finale. Bloody cliffhanger. Oh well, it’s amusing enough I’ll probably cope at the end of season two. *sigh*

 

An Aside: Kit With a Bump

Over on Facebook, someone suggested that my ultra-secret ending for Emergence might be that I was going to have Kit get pregnant. (People on FB don’t read comments about not speculating, it seems, but they have gone for jokes and it’s FB.)

I said “Well, there goes the plot for the next book.” Ha ha.

Then I thought, “What would that look like? Gotta do it.”

So, pregnant Kit. About 6 months if AIs have a 9 month gestation. The father is Vali, of course. I’ve never really subscribed to the whole “pregnancy makes a woman beautiful” thing, but apparently if you’re just a virtual image, you still look too damn cute.

And it’s a shame it isn’t April 1st.