Mari Ness's Blog, page 19

The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian

It's Thursday, so, Tor.com post on The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian, a book that features an adorable cat.

And in other news, it is finally, genuinely, cool, if not cold, but cool enough this morning that a cat crawled under the blanket to put a cold nose on me which was less pleasant for me than it was for the cat. The other cat stayed curled up on the pillow over my head, my new implement for warding off the nightly cries of the sleepless rooster, though even a pillow and a cat cannot completely muffle that cry.

SpongeBob Squarepants and the Military

Washington Post tells the story of a murdered veteran, her twin sister, and her Spongebob Squarepants tombstone.

Years back, I used to live by Southern Memorial Park which is an ordinary enough graveyard except for the huge elephant and the two lions, whose backs are visible as you drive down 18th Avenue. It's one of the two "Showman's Rest" graveyards in Florida (the other is in the Tampa area), dedicated to circus folk. Eye catching, yes, not exactly the traditional angels and statues, no, but a nice touch of whimsy and joy in the middle of death. Military graveyards are a bit different, of course, but I think of looking over at Southern Memorial Park, and smiling, and the way that after Hurricane Andrew people trekked through toppled trees and buildings and powerlines just to make sure that the elephant was ok (it was damaged but still standing, and soon repaired), and I can't help thinking, bring back the giant Spongebob Squarepants.

False Colours

It's Tuesday, so must be time for another Georgette Heyer reread! This time, False Colours, which I've never been that fond of, since it features a number of characters heading into a deliberately convoluted plot which they try to make more convoluted for reasons that are never quite clear despite a few attempts to explain them. Anyway.

In unrelated news in THEORY the summer heat, which returned over the past few days, really, truly, and really is breaking again either tonight or tomorrow. I hope so, because I am not sure how much more of it I can endure.

Tor.com stuff: The High King and In the Greenwood

Two separate tidbits as we head into the weekend:

1. I chat about Lloyd Alexander's The High King.

2. And because I've been wanting to say something like this for awhile now, you can now preorder "In the Greenwood" from a number of retailers, including Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, Google Books and so on.

However.

Honesty compels me to admit that you can also preorder this story and get it for free as part of the 2013 Best of Tor.com anthology, at Amazon. The anthology will be available on November 5 -- a full month earlier. Also, the anthology contains several other excellent short stories, so, given the free price, this seems like the best bargain.

Also, the story will be available for free at Tor.com, presumably on December 4. Which also means that you'll be seeing at least two more upcoming announcements about this little story. I hope you'll feel the story is worth all the announcements!

Salinger

So my brother and I just finished watching Salinger, the 2013 documentary about J.D. Salinger. As I watched, I felt a growing irritation.

Oh, not with Salinger. Sure, based on the limited information in this documentary and from other sources he appears to have been a complete jerk to friends and editors and had a serious taste for very, very much younger women whom he then proceeded to treat very very badly. So, yeah, not my favorite guy.

But no, my chief irritation was with the damn documentary, which, finding it had about 20, maybe 30 minutes of actual information, footage, and so on, decides to stretch this into 120 minutes. One hundred and twenty very very long minutes. My brother fell asleep.


When you have to stretch your material like that, you get:

1. A lengthy segment where a fan of Salinger's brags about going up to Salinger's New Hampshire home, leaving notes all over the the town and finally sticking notes into Salinger's tree, getting to talk to Salinger before this and becoming stunned, stunned, stunned that Salinger a) doesn't want to talk to him and b) doesn't want to give him life advice. Fan is then terribly terribly hurt and writes Salinger another damn note to stick into a tree which goes on and on about how Salinger really isn't a nice and friendly and generous person. Salinger reads the note and "looks upset." The fan, years later, is still shocked that this didn't go well.

2....followed pretty much immediately by various celebrities and writers assuring us that no, no, Salinger wasn't really a recluse who wanted his privacy, he just milked the whole "I'm a recluse!" because it fed into his fame and fortune, and a later segment where Philip Seymour Hoffman telling us, again, at length, that it's really strange to go from being a normal person to a celebrity.

3. Extended footage of World War II which for the most part doesn't include Salinger, including the film's most excited moment: a few filmed seconds of Salinger apparently talking to some French people. It's the only footage of Salinger in the film (the documentary does have some photos) so I can sorta see the excitement.

4. Another person telling us to cheer up: I mean, the Civil War brought us Mark Twain and Walt Whitman so apparently we had to have World War II to give us Salinger. THANK YOU DEAD PEOPLE.

5. A nice gossipy section about William Shaun, later supplemented by another but fortunately shorter segment where we learn that William Shaun cheated on his wife. Go, New Yorker, go!

6. Numerous writers telling us that THE NEW YORKER IS IT MAN AND SO MUCH BETTER THAN ANYTHING ELSE OUT THERE.

7. Not particularly veiled suggestions that The New Yorker's fiction editors in the 1950s had no clue what they were doing.

8. Numerous writers and actors, all men, assuring us that Salinger was like, awesome, dude; and a grand total of three women writers: one who gives us her opinion on Salinger's life, one who was the last to interview Salinger, and one who slept with him. That's nice.

9. A long segment blaming Catcher in the Rye for inspiring or helping to inspire three separate murderers -- Mark David Chapman (John Lennon), John Hinckley (Ronald Reagan) and Robert John Bardo (Rebecca Schaeffer). But wait! I hear you say. Didn't Ronald Reagan survive the assassination attempt, thus making that, by definition, not a murder? Why, yes. And wasn't Hinckley mostly focused on Jodie Foster, not J.D. Salinger? Why, again, yes. And wasn't Bardo by all accounts including his own obsessed with Rebecca Schaeffer, not J.D. Salinger, and was only carrying The Catcher in the Rye by pure coincidence? Why, again, yes. But, before you leap to the wrong conclusion let's get a writer on to assure us that if his writing inspired someone to murder not once but three times it would be VERY TROUBLING. As is attempting to suggest that Catcher in the Rye set off a murder spree, but let us go on.

10. Several DRAMATIC MOMENTS where we are meant to blame all of Salinger's issues on World War II, and I'd like to, really, I would. It's not that I doubt that Salinger's time in the U.S. Army was deeply traumatic: he arrived on D-Day and saw the liberation of concentration camps, covered in some detail in this film as if to say, "HEY, IF YOU THINK CATCHER IN THE RYE IS SHOCKING, LOOK AT THIS." He was hardly the only writer to have similar traumas -- Roald Dahl comes to mind, and since I'm rereading him at the moment, Lloyd Alexander, and we could continue with a lengthy list. I'm just saying that, as with Roald Dahl, I don't think World War II was the only issue. The film, not going for subtlety, instead just decides to keep showing us, over and over, the haunted HI I AM A WORLD WAR II SOLDIER IMAGE CONSTANTLY OVERSHADOWING EVERYTHING YOU WRITE images. Sigh.

All of this is to cover up, and not well, the film's essential problem: none of the people closest to Salinger, including his third wife and his son, agreed to be part of this film. His daughter appears only in archival footage from television interviews. This leaves us with exactly three people with any intimate knowledge of him: the woman who worked as his nanny and occasional housekeeper back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who mostly remembers his children and his wife; Joyce Maynard, who had an affair with him back in the 1970s; and a girl he met at the age of 14, who lost her virginity to him in Montreal a few years later and then never saw him again. Five other people in the film at least met Salinger, three just casually or for disastrous interviews.

The other 140 people interviewed for this film never met Salinger. Sure, a few of them have useful or interesting things to say about World War II and concentration camps and what sort of editor William Shaun is. But the others? We really needed to hear Martin Sheen's opinion on Salinger? John Cusack's?

Oh, yes, we did. Because, after all, the film had to fill 120 minutes.

Look, Salinger avoided publicity, no question. But much of his correspondence is part of the public record. His daughter wrote a lengthy memoir. We have his books. We have the public records of his divorce. Enough to fill a 120 minute film? Probably not. But 85 minutes? Why not?

The Nonesuch

And the Georgette Heyer reread continues with The Nonesuch.

Couple of follow up thoughts about Sleepy Hollow

I meant to note that I can so envision the writers' room for this show. It goes something like this:

Writer One: Ok, I have NO idea how to end this scene.

Writer Two: MACHINE GUNS!

Writer One: Got it.

Writer Three: I'm confused. Why exactly is George Washington already chasing down Evil Hessians even though the Revolutionary War hasn't technically started yet and --

Writer Two: FIRE! Lots of FIRE!

Writer One: Ok, so, any thoughts on what the ghosts want?

Writer Two: MACHINE GUNS!

Writer One: Got it.

Writer Three: So, how do we get out of THIS SCENE?

Writer Two: MACHINE GUNS!

Writer One: Or, maybe, fire.

Writer Three: Damn it, we need a bit of exposition here!

Writer One: Ok then, time for a ghost OR a conveniently loquacious German soldier. You decide.

Writer Two: I'll ready the machine guns.

Narrative lessons for every writer. I'm just waiting for the ghost dinosaurs to show up and start munching down on the police force as they hunt for machine guns, because, let's face it, that would be AWESOME.

And, um, NO, I'm certainly not procrastinating on other stuff right now. Why would you even think that?

Random yet critically important question about Sleepy Hollow

Ok, I think we can all agree that Ichabod Crane is totally rocking that 18th century coat and those boots so I can kinda see why he hasn't gotten out of them for four episodes now.

But can't anyone at that precinct at least get him a couple of new shirts? Underwear? Socks? Just a suggestion.

In other Sleepy Hollow news I have decided that the show takes place in a very alternate universe where the entire American Revolution was completely different, but somehow, thanks to the magic of marketing and product placement, the OnStar system is still working and ready to help you whenever you have troubles on the road or just need to reduce people to tears with the epic tale of your doomed love story. You're welcome.

Sunday ramblings

As some of you know, fbhjr and malterre are celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary this weekend.

What I did not know, until this weekend, that a number of my writing friends and acquaintances were off to celebrate another wedding this weekend – held in the very same spot that fbhjr and malterre used twenty years ago. After I blinked a lot and realized that no, people weren't just having me on, I thought, now that is a good sign.

Meanwhile, I headed out to the Winter Garden Music Fest last night – the town's little three day "let's get some bands and other groups in here and hope that this encourages everyone to try out the local bars (yes, we are up to TWO of them now, although technically, one of them wants to tell you that it isn't a bar) and the local restaurants." Alas, all the interesting (from my point of view) music was on during the day, when it was really too hot; by the evening, the remaining bands were doing standard rock and roll stuff, with a couple of original songs thrown in here and there and a group sing of "Folsom Prison Blues." (Complete with toddlers happily dancing and wiggling to "I SHOT A MAN IN RENO - JUST TO SEE HIM DIE!) The evening was also when the crowds started to gather. But not oppressively, and a breeze blew through, and it didn't rain, all distinct positives. Also, pumpkin chai, which is a reason for living.

That did lead to one unexpectedly sad consequence, however: since the other human in the house - I hesitate to type this, but you, oh readers, deserve the truth -- actually went into his room and closed the door even though he was watching football an activity that by definition leaves a human with hands ready and able to pet a cat, and -- gasp -- left the Little One out in the living room all alone. (The Grey One, apparently unable to handle to angst, took off to the closet.) It was, I am assured, one of those tragedies that can only be handled through the judicious application of more lap time and, of course, tuna.

The Gifts

If for some reason you aren't subscribing to Daily Science Fiction (it's free!) and thus missed my little three part story, The Gifts, that went out to subscribers last week, all three parts are now up on the web:

The Gifts, part one

The Gifts, part two

The Gifts, part three

This was not originally intended as a three part story, or even as a story at all. I was working on a poem when something started to nag at me -- a something that turned into part one, which needed a bit more exploration, which turned into part three, and then needed something else, part two: three separate tiny stories that form a larger one.

Having said that, I'm not sure how well the story worked spread out over three days, so I decided to wait until all three parts were up on the web before adding the links here, to give everyone the option of reading the story in one large clump instead of three bits.

In any case, "The Gifts" is loosely based on the fairy tale "The Girl Without Hands," one of the more brutal tales collected by the Grimm brothers, even after they softened it a trifle. I've always wondered about a few things in the story, which helped lead to this.

If you enjoyed it, or even if you didn't enjoy this one, but liked previous DSF stories of mine, I'll just note that another one is coming up in a few months - and that one has a dragon in it. (Because, dragons.) Keep an eye out.