Harry Connolly's Blog, page 48
November 11, 2014
Randomness for 11/11
1) An entire Tumblr dedicated to the question of whether MilSF author Myke Cole lays eggs.
2) Stan Lee responds to people who ask him when he’s going to retire. Video.
3) Dewitos: Doritos-flavored Mountain Dew.
4) Seventeen-year-old wins science competition by building an efficient algae biofuel lab in her bedroom. I hope this kid becomes a billionaire.
5) Do you get your hair cut at a barber? How to talk your barber about the haircut you want. Includes a helpful video.
7) The novel then steps back in time to explain how Rico went from being just another one of Heinlein’s incurious teenaged dullards to an enthusiastic war criminal. In the process, it paints an interesting picture of the world Rico lives in, as well as of the contents of Heinlein’s id. James Nicoll reviews Starship Troopers.
November 4, 2014
Bad idea number 3,229: comparing authors’ book sales
Mary Robinette Kowal (who seems like a nice person but I know so little about her that she could be a Nazi eugenics researcher and I’d have no idea) posted a Debut Author Lesson that includes this:
I just got an email from my editor that Shades of Milk and Honey is going into its 7th printing.
Seventh.
Between all the US editions so far, we’ve netted 23,793 copies. That’s not counting the UK or foreign language editions.
Seven printings, but under 24K copies. For comparison, Child of Fire sold over 29k copies over the same length of time plus six months. Again, that would be lower than Pat “Maybe I’ll help Nathan Fillion buy the rights to FIREFLY” Rothfuss’s new book sells in a week, but more than many other authors might sell.
Also, we’re not talking identical formats. Ms. Kowal’s novel came out in hardback first, and those editions are more lucrative than mass market paperback. And maybe her sales numbers don’t include ebooks (my paper ed. sales numbers are ~17K). She doesn’t say and I’m not going to ask.
Why?
Because as she says, it doesn’t matter. You can’t really compare the sales figures, because they’re in different genres, different formats, with different expectations. There are probably a lot of UF books that would be considered a success at 29K ebook & mmpb sales, but Del Rey really invested in the CoF, the sequels sold significantly worse than the first, and Del Rey had high expectations.
So congratulations to all writers who are succeeding by their own standards, and supportive fistbumps to all those writers who haven’t succeeded but keep trying.
November 3, 2014
NaNoWriMo exists so you can fail
I wasn’t going to blog about NaNoWriMo (which should be called InNoWriMo) again this year, but I’m a writer and it turns out to be one of the job requirements. My main blog (if you’re reading this on LJ or DW) has a search function so you can check out actual advice from earlier years, if you’re curious. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s a plan to write 50K of a novel in the month of November: (Inter)National Novel Writing Month)
In earlier years, I’ve said that I think November is a terrible month for NaNoWriMo. In the U.S., Thanksgiving falls right at the end of the month, and Giftmas planning comes right after. If you’re barely keeping to your daily goals, those big holiday events along with friend/family obligations, can be a deal-breaker.
As CC Finlay pointed out on Twitter, that’s part of the challenge. You’re supposed to make your goal despite increased demands on your time.
To me, though, it seems like an attempt to make writers give up at the last minute, like mapping out a marathon that ends on a long, steep hill, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was a fine thing. The thing is, you can work like crazy on a book, fail to meet some arbitrary word count goal, and still succeed beyond your wildest because the draft is pretty good.
It’s good to strive and fail. It’s good to strive and fail at something that is only of peripheral importance (such as the number of words written in a month) if it leaves you with a solid draft.
Sure, there will be plenty of people claiming to “win” NaNoWriMo because they hit the 50K mark. Hell some will declare victory in the first week. Those people don’t matter. All that matters is what you create. And you can’t really call it a failure if the end of November comes and you’ve only written 40K, or 20K, or even 10k words. Just do what you can do, aim for the word count goal if that seems like an opportunity to stretch, and have fun.
Also:
There I was, the first Libertarian President of bark bark damn it mom the dog stays outside this is my speech-to-text time #NaNoWriMoOpeners
— bandit (@UtilityLimb) November 1, 2011
October 29, 2014
The Dr. Strange Movie
Yesterday, Marvel announced their upcoming Phase 3 movies, and the earliest new character is going to be Dr. Strange. They’ve even announced that they offered the role to Benedict Cumberbatch.
For those who aren’t familiar with the character, he’s basically the superhero wizard of the Marvel Universe. Origin in brief: Arrogant surgeon injures his hands in car accident. In seeking a cure so he can go back to being his old self, he stumbles upon a world of magic spells, extra-dimensional demons, and fetishized orientalism. He becomes apprenticed to a sorcerer, then takes the role of the Sorcerer Supreme (the magical protector of his reality).
Basically, he faces magical bad guys, extradimensional weirdness, and fights with magic items and spells. And back in the Steve Ditko days, we got art like this:
Note to Disney: get that shit in the movies.
However, it seems that the MCU will continue to run away from the idea of actual magic. In the upcoming movie, Strange’s spells let him “tap into the supernatural, which involves everything from quantum mechanics to string theory, all of which you can manipulate with your hands and your thoughts.” Which makes no sense, really, but if you’re afraid of driving off any segment of your audience, you change Thor into an alien (and turn his story lines into sword and planet adventures) and base Dr. Strange’s spells on “string theory.”
Which… whatever. It’s just a different kind of hand-waving, and I seriously doubt it will satisfy hardcore “Harry Potter recruits for Satan!” types. The truth is, I’m hoping this movie works. Dr. Strange has always been better in the concept than the execution–although I wish Marvel would hire Chris Bird to write the book. His ideas are more interesting than the usual stuff Marvel runs with.
How I think it should be done:
Skip the origin. Just to show it’s possible.
At least three Ditko-esque acid trip landscapes.
Keep Cleo, but without the creepy student/teacher romance.
Keep Wong, but make him more than a kung fu manservant. Better roles for POC > fewer
Lose the costume.
Get a better costume. The big cape is cool, but change the look.
Keep magic spells
Lose rhymes required to chant them.
Lose the magician swears. “By the Vishanti!” Seriously.
Villain: Mordo, with Dormammu lurking in the background.
As for the casting of Cumberbatch (if they’re correct) I don’t really have an opinion about him. I’ve seen him on Sherlock and Star Trek, and was underwhelmed both times. Maybe his performance in THE IMITATION GAME will surprise me, since I thought ST was boring and wanted to walk out of the room when Sherlock was on. We’ll see.
October 28, 2014
“In our next episode…” Using horror to explore real tragedy
A recent school shooting in Marysville, WA is all over the news this week. If I owned a car, I could say it happened only an hour north of where I live in Seattle (if you could drive on I-5 instead of creep along on it like a parking lot). Marysville isn’t a place I’ve ever visited, and before this tragedy all I could have said about it is that it’s somewhere nearby.
My point is that none of this feels personal to me… at least, it’s no more personal than a shooting in Georgia, Connecticut, or Colorado. That’s why, when I read the NYT article describing the Marysville shooter–which I won’t link to because of their paywall–which is echoed in this article, my first thought is This sounds like a terrible episode of a supernatural horror show.
Because at the moment, the killings are inexplicable. The shooter was widely regarded as a popular, successful, and engaged kid. He played on the football team. He was homecoming prince. He was widely liked. As for his victims, they were his friends and family, not people who bullied him.
Bullying and resentment are the default narratives for school shootings now, ever since the media settled on a Jocks v Outcasts frame for the Columbine shootings (never mind that it turned out to be wrong). When a new shooting happens, the first questions people ask are: Is the shooter mentally ill? What petty social slights were they trying to rectify? Did they have a troubled home life?
In the Marysville incident, none of these seem to hold. From the outside, he seems like he was a popular kid with a loving home life who attacked people who liked him. Police have been trying to find a clue to his behavior since last Friday, and whatever they’ve found, they haven’t released it. It’s possible they won’t find anything.
Which immediately makes me think of a horror storyline, where inexplicable violence is attributed to demonic possession or some shit, and the whole thing comes down to Basically Decent People Who Would Never Do Such A Thing.
I mean, consider this io9 post about the upcoming CHILL third edition. The game is organized around a secret society that battles the supernatural, and for this edition they’re regrouping and reorganizing around a capable new leader, as detailed in the article. Pluses for making this new leader a woman, a Muslim, and a soldier in the Syrian Free Army, but minuses for suggesting that al-Assad’s cruel regime is somehow the result of supernatural evil. Sure, the article suggests that maybe creatures are drawn to human evil, but leaving it up in the air isn’t good enough.
Because I’m tired of stories that portray perfectly normal human “evil” as if there must be some sort of non-human explanation. Yes, as a narrative device, the supernatural helps us address difficult or inexplicable aspects of our own lives, but it’s not there to explain them or to reduce culpability. That’s shitty fiction.
As for the real world, I want to offer my sincere condolences to everyone affected by this tragedy.
October 26, 2014
The Underground Man by Ross Macdonald
The Underground Man by Ross Macdonald
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Lew Archer is moving into the seventies, trying to keep up with changing times, and so are his characters.
After reading several crime/mystery novels, it was refreshing to read one that opened with real momentum, and that felt honestly earned. Archer is searching for a kidnapped boy in the midst of a California wildfire. The authorities have too much going on to offer much help, and Archer has to do the fictional PI’s work of digging through every character’s lives to work out the truth of the current crime and the obligatory crime-of-a-previous-generation.
The prose is a little purple, but it’s a pleasant hue. As a fan of private investigator novels, I like a bit of purple prose. Macdonald isn’t entirely convincing in his description of his younger character and people’s drug use, and frankly, I thought it spun on a little long, but it was still one of the best mysteries I’ve read this year.
Pick up a copy for yourself.
October 24, 2014
Chelsea Mansions by Barry Maitland
Chelsea Mansions by Barry Maitland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Do guys who were born and raised in Montreal really say “Fancy a cup of tea?”
Maybe they do. I wouldn’t know. It just seems a very English thing to say, from a guy who grew up in Quebec. But maybe I’m wrong.
2.5 stars for this, because it was well-structured but also sort of inert. There was no momentum, little urgency, and not much at stake. It’s one of those mysteries where everything anyone says–and everything anyone reveals as part of their personal history–turns out to be part of the solution to the mystery.
Which is fine. As a craft issue, it’s an admirable way to create a mystery, but without truly engaging characterization or a sense of momentum, it feels very rote. I realize I’m jumping into a long-running series, but it was hard to feel much interest in the characters’ dilemmas.
Did I mention that everything tied into the final mystery? Well, one thing didn’t. One of the two stars of the series catches the Marburg virus and goes into the hospital for much of the book. There’s no real reason to do this except to leave the junior partner, a woman, in charge of the investigation for a while. And of course she makes an error that gets her whole unit disbanded.
Meh. I wasn’t feeling it.
Oh! I forgot to mention that there’s a whole lot of talk about some old cases involving a deadly criminal by the name “Spider Roach.”
Now, maybe that is the greatest villain since Prof. Moriarity, but nothing about “Spider Roach” sounds promising to me.
Get your own copy of Chelsea Mansions: A Brock and Kolla Mystery (Brock and Kolla Mysteries)
October 21, 2014
Randomness for 10/21
1) World’s Worst Playgrounds h/t @cstross
2) Maps of modern cities drawn in JRR Tolkien’s style.
3) How to “gird your loins,” in illustrated form..
4) Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover art with DC Comics characters.
6) An internet glossary, from The Toast.
7) The Zero Stooges (aka The Three Stooges Minus Stooges). Video.
“With Smaug slain, Laketown was dry in four years.”
How reintroducing wolves into Yosemite Park changed the course of rivers.
I’m filing this under “Extremely interesting” since it implies a lot about the effects of dragon slaying and other putatively heroic behaviors.
