Meanwhile…

Reading

I’ve nabbed a gargantuan tome of short stories by T.C. Boyle, on Gay’s recommendation.

(Speaking of Gay, she’s got a pair of new stories up that you should check out, here and here.)

I do occasionally venture into that world of non-genre, contemporary fiction. A quick perusal of my bookshelves will find Rick Bass’s The Watch, Mark Richard’s The Ice at the Bottom of the World, and Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green. As I recall, each had at least a couple of stories I found excellent, though it’s been some time since I read any of them.

There’s also Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, which I loved. It’s sort of an absurdest espionage story involving elevator inspectors that delivers some sharp social commentary. Great stuff. I really need to look into getting some of his other books.

A month or so ago TwoMorrows had a sale on their Modern Masters books, and I nabbed a couple (actually, looks like they have a sale going now, too, though not quite as good as the one I got). Volume 9 featuring Mike Wieringo, and Volume 10 featuring Kevin Maguire.

Mike was artist on an excellent run of Fantastic Four (along with writer Mark Waid) and an great visual storyteller. These Modern Masters books present a lot of the raw pages he drew, and even without the dialogue I have no trouble at all following the story. His art is full of fun, contagious energy. I identify a lot with Mike, the kinds of stories he likes, the moods he enjoys evoking, his unwarranted insecurities concerning his art. His sudden death a couple years ago pretty well crushed me. One of these days I’ll get a copy of his creator-owned Tellos. I don’t know why I keep putting it off. Maybe because I’ll feel awful, knowing that he won’t be able to produce more?

Maguire was artist for the (in)famous Justice League International era of DCs premier superhero team back in the late ’80s, early ’90s. For those unfamiliar with the period, this was shortly after DCs big Crisis reboot of the Universe. Their big heroes (namely Superman and Wonder Woman) were all sort of tied up being modernized, so the company put together a new Justice League of lesser-known characters. There are few heroes I love more than the 2nd stringers, they guys who should never win but manage to anyway, and Maguire’s expressive art really made you love them. He’s one of those artists who doesn’t work as often as I’d like, and it’s a treat every time he pops up. His recent Batgirl arc of Batman Confidential was a hoot.

I finally read V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. I particularly liked the film version and the book didn’t change my opinion. They both work in their own ways. The film solved a few problems the book had and updates it for modern audiences, but it delivers a different philosophy, so I see how people might be a little irritated by it. People like to say the movie is an attack on the Bush administration, but I think that says more about Bush than the film. Plus I don’t get people saying Evey was a prostitute; she tries to be, for like one panel on page 2. What would people say about my entire summer of 2001?

Watching

I recently obtained a Playstation 3 and holy crap does Blu-Ray look good. We nabbed Superman and Goodfellas for cheap and they look amazing.

(FYI, if you ever want to see my cry like a baby, you’ll put on Superman and queue the scene where Superman saves Lois from the helicopter crash. Goddammit it gets me every time.)

(Evidently, Smallpox Blanket-Giving Day was taken already? I dunno.)

Hope everyone is (or will be) having a good Thanksgiving weekend. Ours should be fun – the wife and I will be hosting her family this year, and visiting my family (including a cousin who’s on leave from Afghanistan) on Saturday, then probably hanging out with some friends on Sunday. These friends have recently produced offspring which I’m told is “cute” and “life altering and/or affirming.” I shall put the new heir to the test! If she doesn’t bring me my food fast enough or change the television channel properly it won’t speak well of the reproductive process. And I don’t want to hear some “she’s only a few months old” nonsense!

Anyway, since you are just laying around in a turkey coma, you should go read this story by KC. It is excellent!

And also this one, by JR Hume, because it’s probably the best piece of flash I’ve read in a while.

I also found this article to be interesting. I have my own thoughts on sexism in genre fiction (which I think is often unfairly singled out for being sexist despite it simply being a reflection of our society as a whole). I may gather them up over this long weekend and post about it next week.

Lest you think I was murdered at the horror festival last weekend, I do indeed still function!

I finished reading Mainspring, by Jay Lake. It’s pretty okay. It’s a fast read, and I enjoyed it well enough, but I felt like there wasn’t quite enough there for me to really sink my teeth into. The setting holds a lot of promise but the story didn’t end up exploring the parts of it that I was most intrigued to see. The villain, insofar as there was one, wasn’t particularly developed, either.

Anyway, if I can find it I’ve got a list of books I’ve been meaning to read. Onward!

Work should be returning more or less to normalcy next week, so I’m hoping to get back to writing. I have several stories that have been bugging me to be written, including one that is an expansion of the universe I created in “With the Band.”

In other news, my wife has fallen victim to the Twilight craze. I let her know that was like punching Shakespeare in the balls, but my anguish has gone ignored.

And just because it’s been a bright spot in my otherwise dreary week, I present the latest issue of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Phonogram.

My day job has gone into crazy overtime busy season, so I’m getting pretty much nothing done (other than my twitter stories, of course). I am, however, finding time to read and what not. A little, anyway.

Reading

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young. This is the recent comic book adaptation of the classic Baum book, and it is absolutely gorgeous. I’ve never read the originals, but I understand this is pretty faithful to the novels. It’s a lot of fun, and I recommend nabbing the hardcover so you have a version to read to your kids. Work is already under way on Marvelous Land of Oz, the next book in the series.

Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville. I mentioned some time back that I read Iron Council, which is actually the third book in the series that begins with Perdido Street Station. As much as I loved Iron Council, I think this may have been a tiny bit better. So good. I can’t recommend Mieville’s books enough. If you enjoy fantasy or steampunk, you will certainly enjoy these books.

I just started in on the behemoth Illuminatus! Trilogy, by the Roberts Shea and Anton Wilson. At the rate I read, I will report back sometime in 2013.

Watching

I finished up the last season of Veronica Mars this past weekend, sort of on accident. I didn’t realize I’d reached the end until popping the last disc to discover it contained only speacial features. There are only twenty episodes in the third season, so I must surmise the network didn’t let them finish properly. Two episodes would have easily been enough to let them wrap up a few hanging plot threads. While it’s a shame it ended on such a whimper, I enjoyed the show immensely. The first season is easily one of the best seasons of television ever made, and the second is nearly as strong. The last season was decent, certainly better than most of what gets put on the air. Any fan of mystery and noir will find a lot to like.

Paris, Texas, which is quite good. Moving character drama with powerful performances all around, and some great visuals. At first when I saw the bleak, desert landscape, I immediately thought, “Paris is in northeast Texas, and this is clearly west Texas!” But the film didn’t fall into that usual Hollywood fumble. You can kind of tell that the script wasn’t actually finished when they started filming, but the way the main character develops smooths out the rougher edges of the story and the viewer can fill in the gaps pretty easily. The asshole in me wonders why you would ever turn a camera on anyone other than Nastassja Kinski.

I’ve always wanted to watch director Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire as well, so maybe that’ll go on the queue sometime soon.

From Hell. I probably should have seen this years ago, being both a comic book geek and Alan Moore fan. I’d never really heard much good about it, though, so it just kind of slipped my mind. I’ve also never read the book, so I have no attachment to the source material. It was better than I expected, even if it didn’t blow me away. It looked great, and the story is a fun and interesting alternate history murder mystery procedural conspiracy tale. It fell short in the actually making me scared or suspenseful department, though, which is unfortunate.

That’s about it for now. Anyone reading or watching anything interesting?

I have some ideas to finally spruce this place up with some art. If I can find the time to actually do it, keep an eye out for that. I’m hoping to do it without destroying the site. Anyway…

Thought I’d share a few things I’m reading (or just read):

Iron Council, by China Mieville - Jens raved about Mieville not too long ago, and I’m forced to agree. This is a fantasy steampunk with absolutely stunning prose. Apparently it’s book three in a series about this setting (which is not our earth), but I didn’t even realize that until it was pointed out to me, as the books aren’t really connected. There are all sorts of remarkable facets of the book and its take on fantasy – I may try to organize my thoughts for a few separate blog posts. But let me highly recommend this novel. It will change the way you think of fantasy. I’ve just started in on Perdido Street Station, which is the first book of the series.

The Nightly News, by Jonathan Hickman – I mentioned Hickman’s Pax Romana in this space a while back, an effort that I thought was laudable but ultimately a failure (simply because there wasn’t enough of it). This doesn’t suffer from that so much – in fact, I’d say this story about a home-grown cult of anti-media terrorists fits the comic book medium perfectly. It packs quite a bit of punch, and Hickman’s annotations at the end of the book are as interesting as the story. As an artist, Hickman’s style isn’t easy to describe. He’s a lot more of a graphic artist than a traditional penciler, and for better or worse he leaves behind the old style layouts of most comics.

Queen and Country, Definitive Edition volume 1, by Greg Rucka and various artists - Who doesn’t like a good spy story? And this one is great. It’s not super spy business, so don’t look for battles between skiers down the side of a mountain or invisible cars. It’s gritty, realistic spy drama and action. It makes me want to write my own spy stories. I like the Steve Rolston art on the early material best, at least in this collection.

Update! On a somewhat related note that not-so-coincidentally comes roughly 3 hours after this post, I finally saw Inglourious Basterds and it rocked. It was a lot more of a spy movie that I thought, and a great one.

That is all.

I have a new short story up over at The Future Fire, “The Overdue Protocols.” Check it out!

This one was inspired by the Beverly Cleary book mentioned in the story (though if I recall correctly it was initially launched from a writing exercise). I hope I captured at least a little of the spirit of Cleary’s novel. Let me know what you think!

This is also my first illustrated story, which is fun.

I just noticed that my steampunkish story “Four Liars” is live over at the premier issue of 10Flash. Check it out and let me know what you think, over there or here.

There are some other awesome writers featured there as well, including Jordan, Gay, and Erin, so you should find something you like. I need to check them all out myself.

I just wanted to drop a recommendation to head over to Kris Straub’s Ichor Falls. If you are a fan of horror he’s doing some pretty interesting writing over there (albeit all too infrequently). I actually wrote an Ichor Falls-inspired exercise here some time ago, back when Ichor Falls was just a webcomic experiment that Kris was playing around with.

In particular I like this piece, which is very possibly one of the creepiest stories I’ve ever read. It’s also a good example of incorporating contemporary internet culture into fiction without it coming off as patronizing or insulting.

Crazy! I’m still trying to catch up. Sometimes it seems like a vacation just means doing twice as much work and being twice as stressed the week after you get back.

Star Trek rocked. I had the pleasure of seeing it in the Arclight Dome in Hollywood, surely one of the best theaters on the planet. I thought it was a pretty pretty movie full of pretty pretty people, and a blast to experience. Then I saw it again a few days later on my birthday and enjoyed it even more. I could go on about it, but I feel like all the discussion probably happened while I was away. Suffice to say I loved it.

(Oh, yes, I aged a year in a mere day on the 14th. Talk about time dilation. Birthdays ceased to have much meaning for me after they allowed me to start drinking legally, so I don’t really think about it anymore.)

My chosen traveling reading material was solid. Torso was quite good (though my copy kind of fell apart while I was reading it, which is irritating). Loyola Chin and the San Pelligran Order was also quite enjoyable, though I liked American Born Chinese more. Strangers in Paradise I only got through some of, and I’m still on the fence about. If I have any recommendations there, it’s to skip the first volume (the first three issues). They’re a little more, I dunno, cartoony than I was expecting, and not really to my taste. But between those initial issues and the next volume, Moore really refined his style and the mood of the book. I’m digging it so far. We’ll see if it interests me enough to continue past the third trade.

One of the highlights of my trip was visiting the Echo Park Time Travel Mart in LA. The Time Travel Mart is part of a network of children’s writing centers. I nabbed one of the little chapbooks full of stories written by the kids there about how much they hate writing. It seemed appropriate.

There are various other such themed stores around the country, if there’s one nearby you should check it out (I’m aching to swing by the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. next time I’m in New York). If I’d known about the one in San Francisco I would have gone there and gotten some pirate booty while we were in town.

Greetings from the distant past (last Tuesday)!

My latest flash piece, “The Squeeze,” should be live on Every Day Fiction right about now. Check it out if you haven’t already! Comment! Vote! Tell your friends (and enemies – I have nothing against evil support).

It’s an odd story, one that you’ll probably either totally get and think is hilarious, or not get at all and think I’m insane. I’m not sure which demographic I envy more. So it’ll be interesting to see the reaction.