Alexander Jablokov's Blog, page 15

Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy

That's actually a listing of presidents following Nixon in a history lesson in 1975's post-apocalyptic teen sex comedy, A Boy and His Dog, based on the Harlan Ellison story (and featuring a talking telepathic dog that could be the reincarnation of Ellison himself). Probably not worth seeking out, though I enjoyed it at the time.

But it could be an account of the last couple of weeks of news. My teenage son asked me if some spectacular new piece of information had surfaced about the assassinati...

Tom Perrotta's "The Leftovers", and the question of genre

Last night one of the book groups I belong to discussed Tom Perrotta's most recent novel, The Leftovers. One of the things I wanted to talk about how you can tell a science fiction writer did not write this book.

Now, I did stay away from a point like "it's too well written". But it is really wonderful to read, sharply observed but not show-offy, and focused on really daily events. Which is part of the point, because the book takes place a couple of years after a large number of people disappe...

City life: what's a "parklet"?

There was a story in the Boston Globe this morning about an experiment with "parkets": parking spots along a street converted into tiny parks. Surprise news in the story: no one is using this unexpected urban amenity.

Take a look at this picture and see if you might be able to figure out why no one would come and sit down here:

Does my butt look like an arrow to you?Who in the world is supposed to ever sit here? Even assuming the location makes some kind of sense, the space looks completely uni...

Vonnegut's new play: the peril of looting a dead writer's desk drawer

Last night I went with my friend Marilyn to a new play being premiered by the SpeakEasy Theater: Kurt Vonnegut's Make Up Your Mind (for marketing purposes, his name is in the actual title of the play, even though he also listed as author). Vonnegut had certainly shown his ability to write plays in the past, like Happy Birthday, Wanda June, though I have no idea whether it was any good.

According to the Playbill at the performance, Vonnegut's Make Up Your Mind is self-referential, because he le...

12 Years a Slave, and the Capitol building

Last night, my daughter Faith and I went to see the movie 12 Years a Slave. It is a movie specifically about the experience of slavery before the Civil War. Though at least one character makes a remark on how this will all have to change someday, no one mentions the President, any bill in Congress, or any news of any kind. There are no scenes that follow the lives of non-slave characters. The focus is on the day-to-day experience of slavery.

That's what makes the movie powerful and almost into...

What I'm working on now

As I mentioned a while ago, I have pulled some old works out of the drawer to work on. Some are stories my writers workshop gave me useful comments on, some have not been seen by anyone.

I've already sold one, to Asimov's, and another one has been revised and submitted elsewhere, so some progress has been made.

Now I am wrestling with a novella I tried to write a couple of years ago. I wrote a lot of words and never even got close to the crucial parts of the story. It's a story about free will...

Why do people believe crime is getting worse?

For the past 20 years, the rate of both violent and nonviolent crime has been declining incredibly. And the decline has not stopped. As I've mentioned before, the cause of this is obscure--broken windows policing, Roe v. Wade, decreases in childhood lead exposure, increases in obesity...who knows? But the facts are incontrovertible.

So why do so many people think crime has not only not dropped, but has actually risen? According the the Gallup poll at the link

Currently, 68% say there is more cr...

Severe editing done!

Last week I whined about having to cut my YA novel down from its obese 110K words down to (actually) 75K.

I flew on business several times last week, and did a lot of marking up of printed manuscript en route. Then, staring early this Saturday, I commenced implementing the edits. It was surprisingly easy to cut maybe 25K words out, making me realize I had been a bit self-indulgent in my text. The other 10K was a bit harder, but still not the torture I anticipated.

And I did have it wrong. Marth...

The terror of severe editing

Starting is always the hardest part.

My agent likes my book (title now in flux), but says it is too long for its market. And I mean far too long. It is about the same length as my previous books, which seems to be my natural length, around 100-110K words. YA should be more like 80K.

And she's right, both for this market, and in general. Most books should be way shorter than they are. I say that myself, frequently. So why have I been so reluctant to savagely cut my own work? Because all of my wo...

Jane Austen and Film Noir

I recently read Jane Austen's Emma for a book group I belong to. A few days later, I watched an interesting minor noir, Too Late for Tears. And I got to thinking about the connections between Jane Austen and film noir.

Short answer for the impatient: film noir is what happens when a Jane Austen heroine discovers that the man she's married has way less money than she thought.

In Too Late f...

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