Anthony Ryan's Blog, page 42

Blood Song: New Author Review

Big time thanks to author T. L. Gray for her review of Blood Song, which can be read on her blog: www.tlgray.blogspot.com. Also on Amazon and Goodreads. Spoiler phobes should note there are some minor plot reveals, but on the whole it’s probably the most well written summary of the book I’ve read to date, including my own.

 

 

Top 10 Movie Shoot-Outs

I’ve always been a sucker for a good action movie, and it’s a shame the genre has declined somewhat in recent years. I guess swearing, guns and blood-squibs don’t cut it in the focus groups anymore. Anyway, as a tribute to a diminished genre, I offer my, in no particular order, list of Top Ten Movie Shoot-Outs:

Hard Boiled (1992, Dir. john Woo) - Tea-shop Carnage

Ballet With Guns has become something of cliché these days, but Hong Kong action maestro John Woo fully justifies the term with the opening scene to his most lauded work. The bullet and body count soars as Chow Yun Fat’s maverick cop faces off against arms-traffickers in a tea-shop. Fast, frenetic action counterpoised with perfectly judged use of slo-mo. This is how it’s done.

The Untouchables (1987, Dir. Brian De Palma) - Chicago Central Staircase

Brian De Palma borrows shamelessly from Battleship Potemkin to provide the focus for dramatic tension as a baby in a pram trips down a stair case in a cross fire of slo-mo gunfire. A tour de force set piece with Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness taking down Al Capone’s henchmen aided by Andy Garcia’s crack-shot cop. De Palma tried to repeat the formula with escalator-set gun battle at the end of Carlito’s Way. It was good, but not Untouchables good.

Open Range (2003, Dir. Kevin Costner) - Last Twenty Minutes

Kevin Costner’s western is distinguished by two things, its use of authentic frontier dialogue and a brilliantly staged twenty minute gun-battle. Costner’s war-jaded cow-hand and Robert Duvall’s trail-boss take on Michael Gambon’s thuggish ranchers in a slickly-edited climax that subverts the High Noon template: this time the townsfolk actually join in.

The Long Riders (1980, Dir. Walter Hill) – Town Ambush

Walter Hill’s depiction of the career of the James – Younger outlaw gang is perhaps a little too kind to its protagonists. Despite all the Robin Hood-esque mythologizing, the historical record paints a picture of low-down dirty varmints to a man. But they were to receive well-earned comeuppance in the town of Northfield, Minnesota on September 7th, 1876, when local lawmen and townsfolk set about them with gusto, here envisaged as a blood-spattered spectacle of slo-mo bullet impacts, blazing six-shooters and wheeling horsemen. Walter Hill’s finest hour, though Southern Comfort runs a close second.

The Wild Bunch (1969, Dir. Sam Peckinpah) - Hacienda Rampage

Machine guns and misogyny abound in the bloody climax to Sam Pekinpah’s epic eulogising the demise of the gunslinger. William Holden and his grizzled comrades blaze their way through a hacienda full of Mexican revolutionaries, Holden gunning down a woman in the process with the word “Bitch!” Charming, but at least it’s in character. A classic of action cinema, if you can stomach the misogyny and the frankly rather tedious preceding two hours.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976, Dir. John Carpenter) – First Attack

The good one – not the 2005 remake. John Carpenter’s urban reworking of Fort Apache sees assorted crims and cops banding together to battle hordes of gang members in a near-abandoned LA police station. The tense first act, enhanced by Carpenter’s heart-beat paced electronic score, pays off in tremendous style as the cast (still mostly unknown) beat back the first wave of attacking yute in a blaze of shotgun fire. One the best examples of the movie editor’s art ever seen.

Matewan (1987, Dir. John Sayles) – Miner Ambush

The only realist entry on the list sees a thoroughly nasty group of Pinkerton strike breakers assailed by justifiably pissed-off mining folk in John Sayles’ true-life inspired tale of industrial strife in 1920s Virginia. The tightly edited, but convincingly edgy, final shoot-out, known to history as the “Matewan Massacre”, is a masterclass in how to film realistic action.

Kick Ass (2010, Dir. Matthew Vaughan) – Hit Girl Penthouse Incursion

Matthew Vaughan’s adaptation of Mark Miller’s comic book tale of real people attempting a super hero lifestyle is an odd mix of the realistic – you’ll probably just get yourself killed – and the fantastic – and eleven year old girl can slaughter a roomful of drug dealers with a Naginata. Nevertheless, it’s also riotously entertaining, never more so than when Chloe Moretz’s Hit Girl two-guns her way through the penthouse lair of Mark Strong’s psycho crime boss to the music of Ennio Morricone and Joan Jett.

The Matrix (1999, Dir. The Wachowski Bros) – Lobby Fight

The Wachowski Brothers’ heady mix of philosophy and sci-fi with virtual reality twist allowed for a certain visual excess in the action sequences, most notably in this perfectly choreographed, SWAT team swatting extravaganza. Keanu Reeves and Carrie Anne Moss (Neo and Trinity, surely the best-looking action heroes in movie history) put weeks of martial arts and weapons training to good use in an adrenalized display of acrobatics with guns, an event I’d really like to see make it into the Olympics.

State of Grace (1990, Phil Janou) - Bar Room Show-Down

In the climax to James Cagney’s classic gangster movie Public Enemy, we see him walk across a rain drenched street and into a bar having just stolen two revolvers from a pawn shop. There is two seconds of silence then a thunderous explosion of gunfire. The camera stays fixed on the bar exterior. Silence returns then Cagney emerges, stumbles to the kerb, lays down and dies in the rain. It’s a brilliant moment in cinema and deftly subverted in Phil Janou’s State of Grace as undercover cop Sean Penn walks into a bar in Hell’s Kitchen to settle accounts with Ed Harris’s gang of miscreants Westies. No fixed exteriors here as Penn and co blast away entirely in slow motion amid a welter of blood and exploding whiskey bottles.

The Number 10,000

Just recently I’ve become preoccupied with the number 10,000. It’s a nice big round number, isn’t it? Not huge, not small, just about within range of the human mind’s ability to visualise, the number of people you can get into the average football stadium in fact.

The number 10,000 also has a tendency to crop up in history (terrible Roland Emmerich films notwithstanding). The size of Xenephon’s army during his famous march across Persia in 399 BC? 10,000 men. The length of the Vietnam war (from a US perspective)? 10,000 days.

It’s also the number of neurons each individual neuron in your brain is connected to, and roughly the complement of a modern army division or even a Roman legion (including auxiliaries and support elements). It also has a name, the Myriad, and when expressed in Roman numerals it comes out as a pleasingly contemplative MMMMMMMMMM.

Another reason for this present fascination is that I’m currently reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, a study of the various elements that make for a human success story. It transpires from numerous psychological studies that developing the muscle memory and experience needed to become truly proficient at a given task requires a lot of practice. How much you ask? About 10,000 hours. In my previous post about the Secret to E-Book Self-Publishing Success I estimated that it had taken me about 100,000 words before I felt myself reasonably proficient at writing prose. However, after reading Gladwell’s chapter on the importance of practice, I did a rough calculation of the actual amount of time those 100,000 words represented: I’ve been writing fairly regularly since the age of fourteen, despite some lapses, and my usual writing stint, up until recently, lasted about one to two hours. So, adding it all up to the point where I’d started on the first draft of Blood Song, accounting for occasional periods of inactivity, take away the number I first thought of… carry the two… The  answer? About 10,000 hours. How about that?

The number 10,000 is also of considerable significance in the publishing industry. The average advance for a single book? $10,000 (maybe a little less these days). The average number of copies an individual title will sell before it goes out of print? 10,000.

But perhaps the most salient reason for my current preoccupation with this  seemingly magical number is the fact that, as of this morning, l sold over 10,000 copies of Blood Song (10,042 to be exact).

I know cynics may look on the above post as just a contrived way of boasting about selling 10,000 books, and they’d be absolutely right.

Heartfelt thanks to everyone who bought a book, left a review or told their friends. I literally couldn’t have done it without you, or those 10,000 hours.

Anthony Ryan Day

Huge thanks to book blogger and Goodreads friend Melinda Le Baron for hosting Anthony Ryan Day on her blog:

http://www.mlbiblio.blogspot.co.uk/

She’s written extensive reviews of all the Slab City Blues stories and Blood Song so why not check them out and see if you agree. They do contain some plot details so you may want to to wait until you’ve read the books first.

You should also take a look at her Rafael Sabatini post – my next read for sure.

Anthony Ryan Day… surely a canditate for the first global public holiday. Write your congressman, MP, dictator or tribal chief now.

An Announcement

I’m very happy to announce that I recently agreed to sign a contract with Berkley Publishing Group in the US for publication of the Raven’s Shadow trilogy. Berkley is a US imprint of Penguin Books which includes the Ace and Roc Sci-Fi/Fantasy lines, so it will be an honour to have my work appear on the same imprint as Stephen Donaldson, Joe Haldeman, Ursula LeGuin and William Gibson (among many others).

It will take some time for the print edition of Blood-Song to appear so rest assured the current ebook version will remain available, at the same price, probably into 2013.

I’m aware of the ongoing debate about traditional versus indie publishing and fully appreciate why some authors have chosen to stick with the independent route. However, having thought about it long and hard, I decided this was the best choice for me. If I’m ever going to get to the point where I can start writing full time I need my work to reach a wider audience, including foreign language markets and bookstores, neither of which are open to me at present.

Many readers will no doubt be wondering what this means for Tower Lord. The fact is, at this stage I just don’t know. I still intend to finish it this year, but giving any indication as to a publication date would be pure speculation at this point. I’ll post any news here in due course.

Now, off to celebrate with a marathon session on Sniper Elite V2 (buy it, it’s really good).

Tower Lord Milestone #3

Passed 100,000 words of the first draft today. I must admit my daily word-count of late has not been as high as I would like, but I am writing every day and remain happy with the quality and the way the story is shaping up. And, in anticipation of an oft-asked question, no I don’t have a release date yet.

As Chuck Heston once told Pope Rex Harrison in answer to the question: “When will you make an end?” – “When I’m done.”

(And I’m not saying my work is on a par with the Sistene Chapel or anything… that’s for other people to say.)

The Secret to E-book Self-Publishing Success

As it’s been about five months since I published Blood Song in which time I’ve sold over 2000 books (admittedly most of them this month). So I thought it might be time to reveal the secret of self-publishing an e-book that sells. Don’t waste your time and money on how-to books or webinars, for I have the answer right here for free. Ready? OK, here goes:

Write a good book.

That’s it. There’s no mystery, no short-cuts and no substitute. If you want to write a book that sells, make it a good one. The advent of e-books has certainly opened the flood-gates to an enormous amount of unreadable dross, but it’s also brought about a new meritocracy in publishing. Put simply, if it’s good it will sell. If it’s not, it won’t and no amount of publicity will magically turn it into the bestseller you want it to be.

If you’re going to do this thing, accept the fact that you exist in a meritocracy, a real one. Not the pretend meritocracies of the corporate world where success is largely a matter of fooling gullible management into believing how great you are (read Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test if you don’t believe me). In a real meritocracy all that matters is ability. Not popularity, not inter-personal skills, not a facility for spewing jargon and buzz-words. Just being good at what you do, and being good at something requires work.

Writing is hard and it takes a long time to do it well. I estimate it took me about 100,000 words before I got to a point where I wasn’t embarrassed to show people my work, and another 100,000 before I felt confident enough to publish it. So if you want to do this, get writing. Write every day, whenever you can. And, if you’ve never written before, accept the fact that you’ll probably write crap for the first 100,000 words or more. But having written 100,000 words you will definitely be a better writer than when you started. Writing is a craft and you can learn it, but learning requires doing, and no one is going to do it for you.

Worry about the mechanics of publishing when you’ve written something worth publishing. As you can learn to write you can learn to format a word file correctly, you can learn the basics of graphic design to produce your own covers, you can learn to write a blurb, you can learn to set up a blog or a website. But do it after you’ve actually written a book that’s worth someone’s time and money. And most of all, be honest with yourself. Deep down, you will know if the book you’ve written is ready for publication. Listen to that voice and don’t publish before you’re ready. Canvas second opinions from people you know will give you an honest critique and listen to what they tell you. If it’s not ready, don’t publish it. I’m eternally grateful for the fact that e-books came along after I’d gotten most of the dross out of my system, otherwise I might well have been tempted to publish it, with potentially ruinous results. Most pro-writers will have an anecdote about the terrible novel they stupidly sent out to publishers and subsequently burned so no one else would ever see it. You may have spent years on a novel only to find it’s just not very good – I did, more than once. Does that mean all that time was wasted? No, because I learned from it, I got better.

As writers we exist in a true meritocracy now. Publication is now open to all, but success is dependent on ability. It’s just about writing good books.

An Odd Moment

A notveryhumblebrag, and a singularly odd moment when I checked my rankings today:

Maybe I’m dreaming.

PS. re. the growing number of queries about Tower Lord – please rest assured I’m working on it (and looking forward to the day when finally I can sleep).

Stuff I Like: Tom and Jerry

Like most of my generation I spent a large portion of my childhood watching cartoons. In an age before Playstation and Xbox (who am I kidding? This was before the Atari 2600), one sure-fire way of keeping sugared-up kids quite for a few blessed minutes was to park them in front of a cartoon, preferably several cartoons. The 2D creations of Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Disney and Hanna Barberra were a kind of third parent, a story-telling parent of endless voices, bright colours and (most importantly) consequence free violence. And by far my favourite surrogate parents were a mischievous mouse called Jerry and his uptight feline would-be nemesis Tom.

One of the underrated aspects of childhood is its facility for uncritical enjoyment. As a child I couldn’t have cared less for the underlying socio-economic and racial injustices prevalent in the America of the 1930s and 40s, later so glaringly obvious to jaded adult eyes. I didn’t pause to question the fact that the only human authority figure to intrude upon the endless war betwixt mouse and cat always seemed to be solely occupied by household chores in a strangely luxurious house, nor ponder why she sounded so much like the maid (i.e. slave) who pandered to Scarlett O’Hara’s every whim in Gone With the Wind (my mother made me sit through it, OK?). It was a mouse and a cat inflicting an often insane level of violence upon one another in a never-ending battle of wills. What’s not to love?

Sound is an important element to the success of Tom and Jerry, from the klaxon scream provoked by a thumb in a mouse-trap to the multi-layered full orchestra score. However, the cat and the mouse are, with a view exceptions, essentially silent comedians, descendents of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, but capable of much greater excess. Shorn of real-world constraints, animation is a medium which allows full reign to physical comedy and pays great dividends when married to sublime characterisation.

Tom and Jerry featured the painstaking hand-drawn animation and exquisite background paintings typical of the cinema distributed cartoons of the 1940s. Sadly these were only financially viable in a post-depression economy and the story of mass-market animation would be one of ever diminishing visual quality marked by an over-reliance on loops and unimaginative characterisation, only really redressed with the introduction of digital techniques in the 1990s.

The sheer anarchic extremity of Tom and Jerry is perhaps the most salient reason for its failure to be successfully reinvented for a modern audience. Reboots and movies have come an gone over the years, all of them failing to recapture the magic of the original; the magic of excess. In an age when TV companies face mountains of complaints when a news reader inadvertently drops the F-bomb or Janet Jackson shows a nipple, the temporary dismemberment, mallet swallowing and disregard for basic firearms safety evident in Tom and Jerry, can have no place – as famously lampooned in the Simpsons episode where Marge launches a campaign to ban Itchy and Scratchy.

On those rare occasions when I catch a glimpse of children’s television these days I see a lot to admire (Horrible Histories for example – if your kids aren’t watching that they should be and you’re a bad parent), but the overall impression of the animated content is one of message laden, toy-selling mediocrity. There’s little in the way of real fun to it, and certainly no anarchy. Which I think is a shame, after all, a little mallet swallowing never did me any harm.

Writing News – Tower Lord Milestone #2

The 9 chapters comprising Part I of Tower Lord are now complete in the first draft. Total word count now stands at 59,000+. The daily total has slowed somewhat due to a stinking cold, but I am working through it. Watch this space for further updates.